As numerous as the stars

“I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and give all these lands to your descendants. Through your descendant all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”
– Genesis 26:4

This week was the “Festival of Sacrifice” called Tabaski in Senegal and Eid al-Adha in other Muslim countries. It is a day to commemorate the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his son to the Lord. When God stops him at the last minute Abraham sacrifices a ram (sheep) instead and thus on Tuesday of this week I watched the sacrifice of sheep and the preparing of the celebratory meal within the Senegalese Muslim community.

These past months living in a predominately Muslim country has made me want to better understand the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. In a world where there is often fear and great strife that comes from the meeting of these three religions it seems only right to understand what we share. For me it was in the sharing of a grilled sheep with a family here that I felt that I was having my Thanksgiving Feast. The feast I had missed because I was working in a far flung village of eastern Senegal. Like Thanksgiving, Tabaski is a time of celebration in family a time to reunite, to share, and to invite those people who are far from home to join at your table. While at thanksgiving we give thanks for the blessing we have received in the year at Tabaski we ask for forgiveness from those we have offended in the past year.

I was invited to celebrate with the family my officemate and friend along with another American colleague. The men of the family participated in the skinning and cutting of the sheep. The woman prepared the onion sauce, the rub for the meat, and grilled the meat. I corralled children so they neither got to close to the knives nor too close to the hot stoves. Everyone did their jobs well as the meat was delicious, the lunch was wonderful, and no small children were hurt.

My friend’s father, a the former diplomat, dressed in his flowing best white boubou that helped me understand Tabaski. I admitted that I knew it involved the killing of a sheep and that is about all, and I saw many of those sheep on the road to Dakar the week before. Thankfully, the diplomat was kind enough to explain to me what the day meant and tell me stories about his different trips to Mecca. I knew the story of Abraham, but I never knew or had forgotten that it is one of the places where the Judeo-Christian diverges from the Muslim faith. Jews and Christian belief that the son that Abraham brought to the sacrifice was Isaac, son of Sarah, while the Muslim’s believe it was Ishmael, son of Hagar. The story remains the same, Abraham bound one of his sons and was prepared to sacrifice him as God as commanded him to do. When God sees this he stops him and tells Abraham that he will be blessed with descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and that through all his descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

This is one of the passages of the bible that I think of most often when I am out working in villages here in Senegal or anywhere else I have been. I think this is in part because out there in the villages at night you can see all the stars in the heaven. When I stop to look at those stars and to think of Abraham so long ago being told that his descendents would be as numerous as those stars, I wonder what he would think of his descendents and what we have done to the world. Imagine that like me he will be hear sick with the fighting and the killing that happens in the world everyday and that he will be heartened by the willingness of some of his descendents to work together to make the world a better place. Looking up at the sky at night and seeing all the stars makes me remember just how very precious life is and how we are called to serve one another some in big and others in small way but all as descendents of Abraham.