The Akedah

Arthur Ripstein
Rosh Hashanah 5768 / September 2007

The Akedah is at once one of the most the most familiar and the most troubling passages in the Torah. Unlike some of the troubling passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, we teach it to our children when they are very young. The Israeli Poet Yehuda Amichai imagines Abraham taking Isaac each year to Mount Moriah to remind him of it, and Isaac taking his children, and, when he is old, being taken by them. The sounding of the shofar is supposed to recall it. It is central to our religious tradition, but deeply perplexing. What is it that we need constantly to be reminded of? Why do we need to be reminded?

Everyone knows the story: it is organized around the idea that G-d has prepared a "test" for Abraham. There appears to be no ambiguity about what G-d tells Abraham to do: he is to prepare a sacrifice, of his son Isaac, the child of his old age. Abraham proceeds to do as G-d has asked him to, taking wood for the fire. He leaves the servants behind, and he and Isaac take the wood up to the top of Mount Moriah to perform the sacrifice. Isaac asks Abraham where the lamb is, and Abraham responds that G-d will provide the lamb. Just as Abraham is raising his knife, an angel speaks to Abraham telling him to spare Isaac and, looking to the side, Abraham finds a ram tangled in a thicket.

Our traditions have come up with many different interpretations of the story, and so of the test that G-d is providing for Abraham. On one interpretation, prominent in medieval Europe, the "test" focuses on unwavering devotion to G-d, up to the point of sacrificing anything in order to obey the divine commands. On this interpretation, it is a test of faith, of devotion to G-d up to the point of rejecting G-d's most basic commandment, the prohibition on murder. On this first reading, the point of religion is to transcend everything, even morality, to be one with G-d, and so leave all other concerns behind. The point of religious observance is that it is incomprehensible. On this interpretation, the Akedah teaches us to be steadfast in our observance, to put it above life itself.

The implications of this interpretation for Jewish practice are startling: in the Middle Ages, Jews who feared that their children would be forcibly converted to Christianity killed them instead, invoking Abraham's readiness to sacrifice of Isaac as the ground. This same interpretation feeds into the tendency in some currents of Jewish thought to interpret every atrocity and wrong that others have done to the Jewish people, or to an individual Jew, as a be divine punishment for the lax observance of religious ordinances.

This first interpretation makes the story religiously significant in one way but sacrilegious in another. It portrays G-d as capricious, or despotic. It purports to show that the sanctification of the Holy Name is not only worth dying for but worth killing innocents for. Yet how can the fulfillment of command which is worse than arbitrary sanctify?

Our pre-Abrahamic ancestors worshiped idols, and were prepared to sacrifice their children to placate the finite gods they believed those idols to represent. Such finite deities might have needs and wants, and, horrific though it is, if there were such beings, particular things might need to be done in order to placate them. Moreover, such imaginary beings were said to threaten terrible consequences unless they are whims were satisfied.

Things are different with an invisible and Almighty G-d. An infinite G-d does not need to make threats to get things done. Moreover, it is difficult to even understand G-d's command to Abraham is taking the form of a threat. G-d does not say that something terrible will happen to Abraham if he refuses to sacrifice Isaac. What could G-d threaten that would be worse than the thing that Abraham is told to do? To lose the child of his old age, after G-d has promised that through Isaac, Abraham's descendents will become a mighty nation who will walk with G-d: this has to be worse from Abraham's perspective than anything else that could possibly happen. On this interpretation, G-d appears to be asking Abraham to do the unthinkable for no other reason than that G-d has commanded it.

The first interpretation supposes that the binding of Isaac teaches us nothing more than that we must be prepared to do the unthinkable, simply because G-d has commanded it. This interpretation portrays G-d as despotic, because G-d wants only to test the limits of Abraham's obedience, and cares nothing for his goodness.

If the first interpretation makes the story theologically troubling, it is even more troubling morally. It is bad enough to represent G-d as capricious or despotic; doing so is made worse by the fact that it represents the demands of morality as conditional, and subject to divinely ordained exceptions. Stranger still, it represents Abraham as not only a potential murderer, but as an actual liar. When Abraham says to Isaac that "G-d will provide the lamb," the first interpretation presents him as intent on sacrificing Isaac, because G-d has commanded him to. It also presents him as misrepresenting that fact to his son. Even if G-d could command human sacrifice - a point I will contest in a moment - G-d neither commanded nor permitted Abraham to lie about what he was doing. Judaism permits deceit when confronted with evil, but does not permit it to take advantage of an innocent. Yet the first interpretation must say that Abraham lied, so as better to carry our G-d's command.

The first interpretation also opens up a much broader line of moral objection to Abraham's response to the test, which in turn generates the second familiar interpretation.

The moral objection must have occurred to many people. It receives its most forceful and canonical statement in the 18th century, by Immanuel Kant. The first part of the objection points to a conceptual difficulty about all Revelation, similar to Maimonides' question about how an immaterial G-d could be audible: "For if G-d should really speak to a human being, the latter could still never know that it was G-d speaking." More significant is the moral point: "But in some cases the human being can be sure that the voice he hears is not G-d's; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion." Kant continues example is the Akedah, about which he remarks, "Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: "that I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, or G-d - of that I am not certain, and can never be, not even if this voice rings down to me from (visible) Heaven."" On Kant's interpretation, the only test the Akedah could pose can be a moral one, in which case Abraham failed it. By giving the story a moral moral, though, it, too, becomes oddly irreligious: the only point of religion is to be morality; observance, scripture and ritual are only exercises for making us more morally aware, ones that have only a contingent connection to it.

It might be thought that the Kantian moral objection could be dismissed on the ground that it issues from a perspective external to the story. It cannot be dismissed so readily, however, because it raises an interpretive problem internal to the story. The difficulty arises because, as I just suggested, the objection must have occurred to many morally conscientious people. Among those to whom it must have occurred, it would seem, is Abraham himself. The Akedah appears shortly after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that case, Abraham interceded for Sodom and Gomorrah on behalf of however many just people may have been present there. If he was ready to question G-d's will in relation to something G-d was planning to do, why does he not question G-d's command that he, Abraham, is to do something far worse? Abraham was unwilling to allow G-d to inflict what is now euphemistically described as "collateral damage" in delivering what Abraham was prepared to acknowledge as a just punishment of the wicked people living Sodom and Gomorrah. Why does he stop questioning G-d at the very moment he is asked to sacrifice his own, innocent son? We are told that walk to mount Moriah took three days. What was Abraham thinking all this time?

Reflecting on the exchange between G-d and Abraham concerning Sodom and Gomorrah reminds us that G-d already knew where Abraham stood on the question of arbitrary decrees: he insisted on judging them on their merits. The test G-d posed with his command to bind Isaac was not a test of unquestioning obedience, but of something else.

The first interpretation that I considered supposes that G-d wanted to test Abraham's resoluteness, as measured by his willingness to do the most horrible deed he could conceive, and bear the most horrible burden that he could bear in order to please G-d. On this interpretation, Abraham appears to come out well, for he has passed the test. G-d, on the other hand, does not look so good, a difficulty that is reflected back onto Abraham who does G-d's bidding. The second, Kantian interpretation, supposes that G-d is testing to see if Abraham will know better than to follow an unjust command, whether he will stand up of Isaac. On this interpretation, G-d sets a coherent test, which Abraham proceeds to fail miserably. So understood, the only reason for including this story in the Torah, and teaching it to our children, is as a sort of cautionary tale - Abraham, who opens his door to the stranger, and intercedes in behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, got carried away in his devotion to G-d.

It would be better if we could find an interpretation that made both Abraham and G-d come out righteous: G-d setting a morally significant test, and Abraham passing it. I want to suggest that the way to find such an interpretation is to focus on Abraham's response not only to the divine voice, but to the combination of the divine voice and that of the angel who spoke as he was lifting the knife. The first interpretation makes Abraham's readiness to listen to a (mere) Angel, having heard the divine command, a sort of failure of nerve. It seems he was not committed enough if anything, even an Angel sent by G-d, could dissuade him. The second interpretation makes the intervention of the angel into G-d's attempt to rescue an experiment that had gotten out of control.

want to suggest that listening both to G-d and the angel shows that he was committed in exactly the right way. As the Lithuanian-French-Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas observed in his discussion of the Akedah, "that Abraham obeyed the first voice is astonishing: that he had sufficient distance with respect to that obedience to hear the second voice-that is essential."

The second voice, that of the Angel, could Abraham have known to expect it? The answer is both yes and no. In some sense, he could not have known to expect it, because as a finite being, he could not know what G-d had planned. Moreover, there could be no test of anything if Abraham knew in advance exactly how things would turn out. We need something that G-d could test, that Abraham could pass and this, I want to suggest, must be a test not of blind devotion, but of faith in the one G-d, not in either some more powerful and unified version of some petty pagan deity, or in a morality that is already complete without religion. Faith requires that Abraham trust that G-d would have some reason for making a demand, one that would make it consistent with His law. Abraham does not know the Angel is coming, but G-d needs a test to determine whether Abraham understands that G-d rules through law, not through some sort of bill of attainder or decree against the innocent Isaac. The debate about Sodom already has already shown us that G-d and Abraham see eye to eye on killing the innocent. If Abraham had not fully grasped this, he would have disputed G-d's command. To so much as begin doing it, however, is to accept that G-d has asked him to do something that is not preposterous, even though it is, on its face preposterous. That is just to say that he must recognize that G-d is just, that G-d would not require the killing of an innocent, which enables him to accept G-d's command, not knowing exactly where it was leading. So the test was whether Abraham understood the command came from a G-d would not demand that innocent blood be shed. Abraham grasped that G-d did not want human sacrifice and saw it as an abomination, and was able to prepare to do what G-d commanded without intending to murder. G-d can conclude "Now I know you are a G-d fearing man" because Abraham has shown his faith in the true G-d; Abraham is knows that G-d is righteous.

On this interpretation, G-d wanted to test whether Abraham knew how to respond to a divine commandment. Abraham had to learn to take G-d's commands seriously, but, at the same time, to understand that every command G-d makes is just, and so must be interpreted and delimited so that it is just, no matter how it first appears. Abraham himself was the agent of such interpretation and delimitation on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah. He does not know how G-d's command will be limited, but he knows that it will.

Abraham passes both parts of the test, because he follows G-d's instructions, knowing in his heart that G-d will provide the lamb, and Isaac will be spared. G-d is just, because He does not demand child sacrifice.

G-d's test for Abraham is a test that Abraham passed, and one that every generation of Jews is called upon to pass again. The Torah teaches us that "when a man causes the disfigurement in his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth." The "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" image is more culturally familiar, though "fracture for fracture" more vivid. The rabbis of the Talmud interpreted this command as Abraham did G-d's earlier command: "fracture for fracture" means money damages. The same passage calls for capital punishment, against which the Talmud also recoils in horror. In other passages, forty lashes are read to mean no more than thirty-nine. We need the vivid language, even though we can not, and are not, to take it literally. It serves to remind us that although the severe sentence can never be carried out, anything short of it leaves a residue.

In the cases of punishment or restitution, the residue is the Biblical injunction that is never fully carried out. In the case of the ethical more generally, the residue is ritual, the ways in which daily life makes the divine, and so the ethical, present to us.

Divine commands must always be understood as just, it is consistent with the prohibition on the spilling of innocent human blood. This commands that regulate relations between persons are always so interpreted. As Levinas observes, Judaism is not fundamentally concerned with salvation, or with an individual's primary relation with G-d. The central theme is always taking care of the poor and the sick, the widow and the orphan. This priority reflects an understanding of what G-d could command, and an understanding of every command as answering to justice. That is just to say, with Levinas, that we must "love the Torah more than G-d." because The Torah "is our protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred that is unmediated by reason."

Other parts of Judaism concern only the relation between persons and G-d. There the Talmud takes a very different approach. Where moral demands are always moderated to make them less harsh, the statutory aspects of Judaism are always made harsher still. G-d tested Abraham to make sure that he knew the difference between the two. He taught us to understand every command, and to read every passage in the Torah in light of the aspiration to justice. That is how I have sought to explain the Akedah to you today.

Shana Tova.