Isaac

David R. Slavitt

After that grotesque（奇怪的） business up on the mountain,

Abraham comes down and goes to Beersheba,

but what about Isaac?

No, not a word about him.

A mistake?

There cannot be mistakes in the Torah!

The hole is there to let the rabbis fill it,

to see through that emptiness the light of truth.

In study houses, then, those earnest old men

told one another stories, made up midrashim

to answer the question that loomed. Maybe he went

out into the desert? Maybe out there he met

Ishmael, and the half brothers compared

their sad stories. And maybe reconciled?

Or at least came to that delicate equipoise

of civility relatives need to be together.

Another rabbi says that it's too much,

that there's no need and therefore no warrant to go

quite that far into the desert shimmer.

Be sensible. Think! Where could he have gone?

We need an answer. What would a young man do?

Say he spends a year or maybe more

at some yeshiva!

Where would there be a yeshiva?

Torah is eternal: although it had not

yet been written, it had always been written.

Its sacred fire always burned, like the bush

God allowed Moses to see that does not

consume itself and therefore burns even now.

So if there was Torah, there were yeshivas,

high in the sky, or perhaps just around the corner,

though not yet visible. Maybe he studied there.

But who, then, could his teachers have been?

Us!

And what would we have been doing until that moment?

Waiting for Isaac, of course.

As we are still waiting.