I’ve just come home from the synagogue where my friend and colleague Rabbi Amanda Golby spoke beautifully on her father’s tenth Yahrzeit about the word Hinneni, ‘Here am I’. She talked of our responsibility towards those who’ve loved us to live with as much presence and sensitivity to those around us as we can.
As it happens, I spent a couple of sleepless midnight hours pondering that hinneni. It’s a concatenation of two simple words, ani, ‘I’, and hinneh, usually translated as ‘behold’. But the combination doesn’t mean ‘Look, this is me’, a Biblical version of ‘I’m doing it my way and I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks’.
On the contrary, as Rashi explains, hinneni is an expression of humility, of readiness to listen. It means ‘I’m there for you’, whether that ‘you’ is God, one’s partner, child, or life itself. The ani, the ‘I’, has become a suffix, transposed into the ‘ni’ at the end of hinneh to produce that hinne-ni. It symbolises how the ‘I’ of the ego has become the ‘I’ of awareness. I am not just present, but presence, listening to life’s ‘Hinneh’, to life’s ‘Behold’, life’s ‘Open your heart and be still’. It’s the hinneni of the bird-watcher: quiet, attentive, not wanting to frighten away the singer of that music.
I’m writing just like everybody else, as a person who’s both succeeded and failed. Sometimes I’ve really ‘been there’ for others; sometimes I’ve not. For certain I’ve merited the painful rebukes: ‘You weren’t there when I needed you’, and ‘Your ears were there, but where was your heart?’
Abraham says ‘Hinneni’ three times. Rabbinic tradition sees perfection in each of those responses. I’m not sure. There’s no doubt about his initial reply when God calls; he takes his son Isaac as instructed and walks three silent days until he ‘sees the place’ for the sacrifice. There’s no unclarity either about the third time, when the angel cries out ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ urgently commanding him to withhold the knife.
But what about Abraham’s response, when, as they climb Mount Moriah together, Isaac turns to him and says, ‘My father’, and he answers ‘Hinneni beni – Here am I, my son’? Is he really there for his child?
Maybe that’s the real truth of ‘the sacrifice of Isaac’. No, Abraham definitely doesn’t kill his son. But he does sacrifices him in other ways: by putting his relationship with God first, and not just on this occasion.
Abraham walks before God; he’s a wonderful partner to the Almighty. But it’s hard to say the same about his relationship with his wife Sarah, or with Isaac, or Hagar, the surrogate mother to his other son Ishmael. After the episode on Mount Moriah, he and Isaac never meet again. When Sarah dies, Abraham isn’t there.
I’m not trying to fault Abraham, only to note that we all struggle with multiple and conflicting calls on our consciousness. I think of my friend whose son was killed in the Lebanon. He’s a true Zionist, of the left, a peace-maker. But he wishes deeply he’d said less of an hinneni to his country, and more to his beloved child. How could he feel otherwise?
Mercifully most of our struggles are not matters of life and death. But they do go to the core of life’s quality, both for ourselves and for our family, friends, colleagues, and even the world of nature around us.
How much hinneni do I say to my desk? How much to my wife? Did I notice that person in the corner, crying? Did I actually see those trees? How much of my own life, and other peoples’ lives, have I missed?
In the end, it’s a question of trying to perceive life’s often silent, unstated Hineh! Behold! with an attentive and compassionate heart.