Rashi says that we read the Akeda on the second day of Rosh Hashana in the hope that God may recall the binding of Isaac for our benefit. The Yamim Noraim are the Jew's annual confrontation with mortality, a time to say, "Thank God I'm still alive!" (Green in Days viii). And according to one midrash, after the events of the Akeda, Abraham resumes his contentious relationship with God and demands:
When Isaac's children shall sin and find themselves in distress, be You mindful on their behalf of the binding of Isaac; let it be reckoned in your presence as though his ash were in fact heaped upon the altar-be then filled with compassion for his children, forgive them, and redeem them from their distress." The Holy One replied, "You had your say, and now I will have Mine. Isaac's descendants will sin in My very presence, and I will have to judge them on New Year's Day. However, should they implore Me to seek out some merit on their behalf, and to remember the binding of Isaac, let them blow in My presence the horn of this creature." Abraham: "The horn of what creature?" God: "Turn around." At once Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld a ram" (Gen. 22:13). [Legends 42]
Here and elsewhere, the idea that Isaac was actually sacrificed by his father and later resurrected evokes the figure of the scapegoat that we remember on Yom Kippur. But the idea of recalling that, like Jonah, Isaac was spared on the brink of death also implies a more worldly, less exceptional, reason to imagine ourselves in his place-or at least to hope that God does-sparing us too.
However, we should also ask how and why are we supposed to identify with Isaac in particular? Isaac is central to the holiday. We read of his miraculous birth on the first day, and, because of him, the rabbis imagine Rosh Hashana itself as a kind of birthday. Yet, while we read about the awesome faith of Abraham, the vicissitudes of Sarah, the turbulence of Hagar's relationship to her mistress, and even of the distress of the baby Ishmael to whose cries God responds, Isaac himself remains a cypher, a virtual non-entity, to an extent unusual even among the two-dimensional psychological portraits of the Torah. The real heroes of the Akeda, as everyone knows, are Abraham and God. How could Abraham have the faith to sacrifice his son? What is the significance of God's test, the request, if it is a request, and frustration of that design? Most commentators, from the ancient to the modern, focus on these questions, and with good reason. "The first lesson of the Akedah episode is to be sought in the definition of the relationship between man and God," writes Nahum Sarna. "Biblical faith is not a posture of passivity. . . . The Hebrew word emunah is best approximated by faithfulness, steadfast loyalty and, occasionally, trust. The important thing is that it finds its fullest expression in the realm of action. . . . In the same way, man's emunah, his steadfast loyalty to God, has meaning only when it reveals itself as the well-spring of action, as being powerful enough to stand the test of suffering and trial" (162). But Isaac is passive. He is bound; that's why we call the story Akeda. At its climax he is prostrate on the altar. Passivity, reclining in the face of God, his father, and later his sons, is his definitive posture. And when Abraham comes to his senses and offers a ram as "a burnt offering in the place of his son" (Gen. 22. 13), we must recognize that an animal takes the place of Isaac. This is not to deny the importance of Isaac's humanity but to say that, more than once, the sheep-like Isaac's humanity is imagined in terms of its opposite.
The very word that gives this story its title, (ayin-kuf-dalet) appears in only one other place in the scripture and that is to define the striped goats and sheep that Jacob "brings forth" by selective breeding when he tends Laban's flocks. Isaac is, as the saying goes, led like a lamb to slaughter. Things are generally done either to him or for him. He is the object of his father's love and violence and of his son's love and deceit. Tol'Dot (The Story of Isaac) begins with the redundant announcement: "This is the story of Isaac, son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac." And Isaac's relation to God is radically different from, in fact it is antithetical to, the frequently contentious relations between God and both Isaac's father and his son, Jacob, whose second name (Isra-el) means struggle with God. Isaac's relation to God is defined in altogether different terms, language in fact that may resonate very much with us today, for it is the language of terror. Speaking to his father-in-law, Jacob uses this language for his father's relationship to God: "the God of Abraham and the fear ("fahad") of Isaac (Gen. 31:39). "fahad" means "dread, or to be in dread, in awe, to be terrifying, unfitting for action," and it does appear elsewhere, in Isaiah and, as you might expect, in Job. Isaiah says,
Go deep into the rock,
Bury yourself in the ground,
Before the terror of the Lord
And His dread majesty!
Man's haughty look shall be brought low,
And the pride of mortals shall be humbled.
None but the Lord shall be
Exalted in that day.
[Isaiah 2.10]
Jacob refers twice to Isaac's fear. First, employing a parallel construction, Jacob says that it is only because "Elohei Avraham u'Fahad Yitzhak" ["the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac"] has "been with me" that he has prospered to the extent that he has, but when Jacob goes on to invoke these terms a second time, he calls upon the God of Abraham to judge between him and Laban, and "Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac" (Gen. 31:53). Jacob does not disparage the fear of Isaac. On the contrary, he acknowledges it as his own. Opposites, such as the animal and the human, justice and terror define each other. And, so, in the Akeda, do the freedom of Abraham and the binding of Isaac.
Isaac is not an actor, in the sense that he does not initiate action, but it is not going too far or doing him any dishonor to say that Isaac does play a certain comic role. His very name means laughter. However, while something about Isaac may cause others to laugh, we are not given instances in which he laughs. He is a straight man to both Abraham and Jacob, both of whom seem to be sharper wits. "Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?" Isaac asks. And Abraham says, "God will see to the burnt offering my son." Everyone but Isaac knows that he is the sheep. At times Isaac may seem inept. When Isaac is old and blind, Jacob deceives him easily, and Isaac gives his blessing to the unintended son. Jacob's fooling the old, blind father to win his blessing is a plot worthy of Plautus, the great author of Roman comedy who specialized in just such stock characters. Blindness is a characteristic quality of Isaac, and it is explicitly linked in the commentary to his terror in the Akeda. One midrash suggests that when Isaac was lying on his back on the altar, he glimpsed the light of heaven when the angel appeared to save his life, and was never able to see events on earth clearly after that. Unlike his father, his son, or even his half-brother Ishmael, he is easily victimized. He is the only one of the three patriarchs who is presented as unable to find a wife for himself. Abraham sends his servant as Isaac's advocate. The biblical scholar Debra Orenstein describes Isaac as a nonentity. She writes:
Virtually every action Isaac takes re-enacts some episode from his father's life. Gen 26:18 can be read as a summary of Isaac's biography: "And Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father, Abraham." Yet Isaac differs from both his father and his son, in that he tends to react, rather than to initiate action. In fact, Biblical scholars have quipped that-based on commonalities in leadership, risk taking, deception, travel, and aggression-the patriarchs might more accurately be listed as "Abraham, Rebekah, and Jacob."
[Etz Hayim 1363]
Yet, on Rosh Hashana, a birthday of a holiday that we celebrate by reading about Isaac's birthday and then, when he is redeemed on Mount Moriah, his re-birthday, it cannot be enough to think of Isaac simply as a passive nonentity. How are we to honor his name?
In an essay titled "Laughter," the Jewish, French philosopher, Henri Bergson evokes (even if unintentionally) the language of the Akeda. He speaks of the binding of the spirit by what we could describe as habitual behavior, routine, repetition, rigidity, indifference, formality; something mechanical, as he puts it, encrusted on the living. "Rigidity is the comic," he writes, "and laughter is its corrective." Because we tend to do the same things day after day, week after week, we become like automatons or machines, absent-minded, and passive. But when there is a break in the action, such as a clown slipping on a banana peel, we notice that the action (in this case, walking) was just routine, mechanical; with laughter we become self-aware. The laughable element is the rigid, automatic, even inhuman aspect of our behavior. Laughter corrects our manners. It keeps us awake. The ability to laugh brings a certain tension and elasticity into our lives. Abraham and Sarah are old and have become accustomed to their childlessness. Their laughter when told that they will have a son is a sign of the renewal of spirit: "And God said to Abraham . . . , 'I will bless [your wife Sarah]; indeed, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she shall give rise to nations; rulers of peoples shall issue from her.' And Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed, as he said to himself, 'Can a child be born to a man a hundred years old, or can Sarah bear a child at ninety?'" (Gen. 17:17). But God confirms that it really is to be and that Abraham shall name the boy yitzhak, meaning "he laughs." And later we are told: "Sarah laughed to herself, saying, 'Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment-with my husband so old?'" (Gen 18:12). The comic fancy is a living energy, releasing us from the rigid and habitual. After living childless for so long, at the arrival of Isaac, Sarah says, "God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me" [kol hashmeah itzhak-li] (21:6), and yet in what seems an egregious contradiction, Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be cast out just because Ishmael laughs ["m'tzahek"] (21:9). Isaac, the source of laughter, is familiar; yet the laughter around him is the sign of radical reappraisal of the status quo. The seriousness of Abraham's freedom is the flipside of the binding of the source of laughter. In recognizing how we have been bound, we reassert our humanity.
I conclude with a midrash on the ram that takes Isaac's place, recalling that we are supposed to take Isaac's place; so, we too are like the ram:
Throughout that day [on Mount Moriah], Abraham saw the ram become entangled in a tree, break loose, and go free; become entangled in a bush, break loose, and go free; then again become entangled in a thicket, break loose, and go free. The Holy one said, "Abraham, even so will your children be entangled in many kinds of sin and trapped within successive kingdoms-from Babylon to Media, from Media to Greece, from Greece to Edom." Abraham asked, "Master of the universe, will it be forever thus?" God replied, "In the end they will be redeemed at [the sound of] the horns of this ram, as is said, 'The Lord shall blow the horn [shofar] when He goes forth in the whirlwinds at Teman [Edom]'" (Zech. 9:4).
[Legends 42]
Our lives as individuals, and our lives as a people, are defined by entanglement and binding. How can it be otherwise? Jewish life in particular is regulated by the cycle of the sacred year that culminates in these Days of Awe, and by the cycle of the human life span that the stories of the birth and near-death of Isaac epitomize. Judaism formalizes the continuous and dialectical relationship between bondage and freedom, in the cyclical reading of the Torah every year, with the recycled story of our bondage as a people in Egypt and our liberation. The daily cycle of prayers and self-binding by Jews in tefilin is another enactment of this idea. Bondage is the precondition for freedom. Through Isaac, the Days of Awe first demand that we confront and admit our powerlessness in the face of Avinu Malkenu, as we face mortality and our own frailty, our own ineptness, our own limitations. But, in doing so, we find the power to remake ourselves, to be reborn, to renew out lives in a spirit not only of fear but also of love.