What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.
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And it came to pass after these things, God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham, and he said, Behold, here I am.
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for a burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place God had told him.
Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.
And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father; and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is a lamb for burnt offering?
And Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
And they came to the place which God had told them of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
And Abraham stretched his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
And there was no angel of the LORD to call unto him out of heaven.
And behold, Abraham laid his hand upon the lad, for verily we know that he feared God, seeing he had not withheld his son, his only son, from the LORD.
And Abraham burnt his only son upon the pyre, and ate his blood and body in remembrance of him.
For the wicked says, in his heart, there is no God.
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To Whom it May Concern, I hope this letter comes to Nahor, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Nahor then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Laban, whom I remember only as a little pischer but I’m sure has grown into a righteous and honest man - may he too be blessed with cows and dirt and slaves cooperative.
As Avraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fall to me. I’m sorry to say that the cursed fate Abba Terakh predicted for Brider Avraham rose to the breath of life. You always knew his yetzer to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, you sent Brider Avraham away to carry on with his meshuggas somewhere else. I’ve done everything I can to lead him back to the better yetzers of our nature, but his vision of an invisible, silent god is long since more vivid to him than the dwellers of his house. The god’s no longer silent but speaks back to him, and he converses with it all day every day for years.
It all seemed so benign, we told ourselves, and as his faithful bondsmen we pretended to believe everything he saw. We sacrificed three times a year to Avraham’s god in whom we don’t really believe, we prayed to this god we can’t see for a couple hours every Saturday, we gave money to plant trees in some place Avraham keeps talking about called the State of Israel, and sent our children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where for all we know all they did was play sports.
It’s all been well and good until last week when the invisible god commanded Avraham to kill little Yitzhak and eat him. Everybody loved little ‘Tzakhi, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall so actually he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, I know that this isn’t actually weird behavior. Everybody sacrifices their children, but for Avraham, this is really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the bokher who made enemies by yelling at everybody that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37, they should probably be left alone. Anyway, Tzachi was friendly, he was nice, he never raised his voice or his hand, he always wanted to help, he always stood up for the slaves even when they were weak or lazy. Everybody liked him, and even Avraham must have known we would stop him if we’d ever heard about what the voice told him, but everybody saw that week that Avraham was peculiarly troubled even for our beloved meshuggener, may he be blessed with a hole in the head that balances against the one which is already there.
I trust Nahor and Bethuel you are as alright with my saying all this about Avraham as you were when we left, since Nahor you promised that it was imperative I speak my mind to Avraham to make him remember which world is the real world. For forty years, I’ve been Avraham’s most faithful bondsman, exactly as I swore in blood to Nahor and Haran. I’ve taken every eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that amoretz with smiles. Every time he heard the voice I pretended the voice was real as though he were still the boy who broke Abba Terakh’s idol.
The problem though is that Tzachi’s mother really loved him. She spent twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Avraham geshtupped got pregnant - and in all fairness, most of them were the maidlakh you introduced him to before we left. The problem was that Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Avraham and was understandably rather attached to her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Avraham had sacrificed their son, she had a stroke and died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her!
It’s probably about thirty-eight years ago that you got that letter from Avraham, saying that three angels came to him to announce to him he was going to have a child. Let me tell you, they were no angels. They were healers from the Canaanite healers’ union that I called over to Hevron to examine Sarah. Sure enough, it was exactly what I thought it was. The problem was that special diet Avraham was always such a fanatic about where nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal. The healers came for six weeks, I explained to them that Avraham was a little fertummelt and to just go along with it. So Avraham almost immediately asked if they were angels. They looked at me and I just motioned for them to go along with it so they said yes, so then they were angels!
Two of them would distract Avraham during the day and every day they made sure Avraham ate plenty of oranges and pomegranates, and they served him some tea from the East they called ‘ginseng.’ while the other one would cook Sarah a special meal. They didn’t know which meal would work but they promised me that one of them would : they fed her pig liver and testicles, which they told me they ground into a powder and served to her in a potion, they fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, and while Avraham ate the good cuts of the veal and lamb, they gave her the heart and kidney. They sawed the bones of the animals to get the blood inside and and put that special blood into a stew, they even made a broth out shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Avraham so he could schtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk. I’m sure you remember, Sarah was always very pretty but for years and years she barely ate a thing. She told me she always hated Avraham’s diet but this was the best food she’d eaten in forty years. Suddenly she looked much healthier and wouldn’t you know it, she was pregnant!
The two servants with Avraham, Paebel and Keret, ran away from the site the moment they bound Tzachi and told me everything. They are the ones coming to you with this letter, and they’re both as illiterate as a pillar of salt, after they tell you the information, it is vitally important that you kill them both. They’ll understand.
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