At dawn, the sun strolled in the forest
Together with me and father, and my
Right hand was in his left.Like lightning a knife flashed among the trees.
And I am so afraid of my eyes' terror, faced by blood on the leaves.Father, father, quickly save Isaac so that no one will be missing from the midday meal.
It is I who am being slaughtered, my son, and already blood is on the leaves.
And father's voice was smothered and his face was pale.And I wanted to scream, writhing not to believe, and tearing open my eyes, I woke up.
And my right hand was drained of blood.
In this poem, the Israeli writer Amir Gilboa uses the Akedah as a metaphor for the Holocaust. The story of God's trial of Abraham becomes the tale of the slaughtered millions, embodied in the child Isaac, both an orphan and a victim in his own right. The poem is the dream of a man years after the traumatic event, a man whose right hand, a symbol of strength, had, as a child, nestled in his father's hand, but was now weakened, bloodless. It had been drained in a sacrifice without meaning, for in this retelling of the Akedah there is no God.
The Akedah is one of the most powerful stories in Hebrew Scripture. It is also among the most morally troubling, especially for those of us whose lives are circumscribed by universal liberal values as well as those of the Jewish tradition. Why did God ask Abraham to kill his beloved son? Why did Abraham so zealously comply? Why is this story so central to our tradition that we read it, davka this story, on Rosh Hashanah? We cannot answer the last question without addressing the others. Yet much of our most beautiful and stirring modern literature that invokes the Akedah evades these questions. If we want answers, we need to go back to traditional sources, although perhaps not the ones that might first come to mind.
Since the Holocaust and Israel's establishment, the ethical dilemmas posed by the Akedah have been evaded by focusing attention on Isaac, the innocent victim, rather than Abraham, the perpetrator. Gilboa, we saw, connected the Akedah with the Holocaust. So did another Israeli poet, Chaim Guri:
Isaac, they say, escaped the sacrifice. He lived many years, with luck, till his eyes became dim.
But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. Who are born with a knife in their hearts.
For early generations of Israeli writers, Isaac was, if not the victim of the Holocaust, then the Israeli soldier who fell in 1948, a sacrifice for the nation. In the last twenty years, Israelis have become more cynical and sometimes see themselves dying in battle for no reason, but the Isaac metaphor is still used, as in a characteristically wry poem by the late Yehuda Amichai:
The real hero of the Isaac story was the ram, who didn't know about the conspiracy between the others.
As if he had volunteered to die instead of Isaac
The angel went home, Isaac went home, Abraham and God had gone long before.
But the real hero of the Isaac story was the ram.
Note that twice, Amichai refers to the Akedah as the "Isaac story." Abraham is a side figure. Why do so many modern Hebrew writers de-center Abraham? True, in our tradition the story is known as akedat Yitzhak, but Abraham is the protagonist of the entire section of Bereshit in which the akedah story occurs. I think it is much easier for a modern, secular person to empathize with Isaac (or even the ram) than with Abraham. Few Hebrew writers have restored Abraham to central position. The great poet Uri Zvi Greenberg did so, but in a way that, I imagine, many of us would find repugnant. In 1954, a decade after the Holocaust in which more than a million Jewish children were killed, Greenberg writes of watching his children sleep in their beds while a great storm shakes Jerusalem:
Outside: Jerusalem, city of the Father's glorious trial, where he bound his son to one of the hills. That fire, kindled at dawn, still burns on the hill, the rains have not put it out…
"If God were to command me now, as once He did my ancient Father, I would surely obey," sing my heart and my flesh on this night of rain, as the Angels of Peace stand at the head of my sleeping children…
….The blood of the covenant sings on in the father's fervent body. He is prepared to offer his sacrifice on the Temple Mount at dawn.
Few of us share Greenberg's zealous messianism. Few of us really would fulfill a divine command to slay our child, and we are frightened of those who would. So how can we deal with the Akedah in a way that acknowledges the centrality of Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people?
Some modern commentators have employed an anthropological explanation, saying that the story is a reference to ancient child-sacrifice practices that were common in the ancient Near East but which the Israelites abhorred. The Akedah is meant to tell us that God does not want human sacrifice but animal sacrifice instead (thus the ram). Even the mystical and deeply Orthodox Rabbi Abraham Isaak Kook believed that the Akedah was meant to draw a distinction between primitive pagans, whose fear of the natural world was so great that they would murder their most beloved in order to placate their gods, and the Israelites, who knew God's love was infinitely greater than his anger.
I am not convinced by Rav Kook's explanation. If God wished to prohibit child sacrifice, He simply could have told Moses as much on Mt. Sinai when He listed a vast variety of other prohibited behaviours. And besides, the Tanakh tells us of at least one case of child sacrifice, that of Jephtah slaying his daughter in Judges 11. The biblical author clearly doesn't approve of the act, but the point is that Israelites were not immune to it.
The medieval commentators like Abravanel and Nahmanides don't provide much comfort either. They tell us that God did not doubt Abraham's faith, but it is His way to try the righteous for their own spiritual improvement - as if Abraham needed to be improved. The medievals do acknowledge Abraham's inner turmoil at hearing the command to slay Isaac, but they glorify Abraham's action as motivated by zealous love and fear of God. At any time during the three-day journey to Mt. Moriah, they point out, he could have given up. The commentators say that Abraham's piety was a sign to the Gentiles of the truth of the Torah and the strength of the Jews. In our own day, where religious fanaticism justifies the most heinous acts of murder and suicide, I find all this hard to swallow.
As I was preparing for this devar torah and going through these modern and classic texts, I was wondering if I would ever find a source that could speak to us about Abraham in a clear, authentic yet compassionate voice. Unexpectedly I found it: an 18th century Ladino Torah commentary, Me-Am Lo'ez, whose section on Bereshit was written by R. Yaakov Culi. Culi's commentary is earthy and folksy. At times it's very funny. It humanizes Abraham, and in so doing it makes traditional explanations of the akedah a lot more appealing.
Culi begins by noting that Abraham's life was full of tests. First was God's command to leave his parents and family to go to a distant and unknown land. Then came nine more, such as famine in Canaan and flight to Egypt, Sarah being taken captive by Pharaoh, and the divine command to circumcise himself at the age of 99. (Not only did it hurt, it added to Abraham's anxieties about ever being able to father a child again.) In the penultimate test, Ishmael, the man of the bow, began to use Abraham for target practice. Sarah, fearing for Abraham's life and the future of the Jewish people, urged Abraham to write a will leaving everything to Isaac. It was then that God commanded Abraham to drive Ishamel and Hagar away. "Of all the troubles that Abraham suffered, none was worse than driving away his firstborn son," writes Culi.
So Abraham in R. Culi's telling is a fully human being. He feels pain and fear. He loves Ishmael as much as Isaac. And Abraham, no stranger to arguing with God, had to suppress the urge to do so again when commanded to offer up Isaac. Culi notes that Abraham could have told God, what of your promise to make my son the father of a great nation? A mortal king doesn't go back on his word; all the more so with the God of Israel. But Abraham did not argue. He had the gift of prophecy, and that gift kept him from plunging into sorrow and depression, which would have befallen most men in his situation.
R. Culi injects humour into the story by having Satan appear as an old man on the road to Mt. Moriah. What are you doing?, the old man asks Abraham. To worship, Abraham replies. Why do you have wood and a knife? In case we need to prepare food. At this response Satan loses his temper. "Don't you think I know what you're doing? You old fool! You idiot! You were given a son when you were a hundred years old, and now you are going to kill him? You think that God commanded you to do it. Ha! Maybe you just dreamed that God told you to sacrifice your son. Are you stupid enough to give up your only son because of a dream? Tomorrow you will dream that God told you to jump I the lake! Will you run and do that too?"
Satan, we see, can speak like a Jewish mother. He tries a similar tactic with Isaac, but here he tries to induce guilt rather than shame. How can you let Abraham kill you, Satan asks, when your poor mother prayed for a child for ninety years. "Is this what you call being a saint? Killing your own mother? Don't you realize this will be the end of her?" (And in fact, there are midrashim that say that Sarah's death was the direct result of the fear and anguish surrounding the near slaying of her beloved son.)
But neither Abraham not Isaac are dissuaded. Each makes an independent decision and takes responsibility for his actions. In Culi's retelling of the akedah, as in the ancient midrash, Isaac is no child. He is a grown man, often said to be thirty seven years old. (Sarah died at 127, and she was 90 when Isaac was born.) He, just as much as Abraham, could have resisted God's command. He could have snapped Abraham's arm and flung the knife aside. Isaac is thus a partner with Abraham, and not, as most of the modern writers depict him, a simple child.
Yet Abraham is still at center stage in this story. He binds his grown son, places him on the altar, raises the knife, and prepares for the act of slaughter. The angels, who unlike God are not omniscient and can't predict the future, are afraid that Abraham will really carry it out. Thus an angel tells Abraham to cease. Abraham is perplexed; how can he disobey a divine command? I won't desist, he says, unless I know this new order comes from God himself. (Abraham, like many a good Jew, wants to speak directly with the manager.) So God appears to Abraham and tells him that he misunderstood. God never told Abraham to kill Isaac, but rather to "bring him up as a burnt offering." Tie him and be willing to offer him; that's enough. "Take him down now and go in peace," God says.
Now Abraham finally begins to lose his cool. Lord, he says, I am not moving until you grant this petition. You told me my descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and that my line would be made great through Isaac. "Still, when you told me to bring him as a sacrifice, I overcame my deepest emotions and hurried to obey. I could have held you to your promise but I never thought of doing so. There may come a time when Isaac's descendants sin and are worthy of punishment. I petition you that at such times, you should recall the binding of Isaac….Let this merit stand up for his descendants and save them from their troubles."
Today, at the beginning of the New Year, we beseech God to consider our merits as well as our sins, and, since we so often fall short of the former, to take into account the merits of our ancestors. As Culi says, bluntly and firmly, "All the merit of the Jewish people stems from this act [the Akedah]." Our sages teach us that the Akedah took place on Rosh Hashanah. (To be precise, 26 September 1676 bce, says Culi). According to the Talmud, the shofar, which is after all a ram's horn, is blown in memory of the Akedah (BT Rosh Hashanah 16a). And thus in the Selichot service in the days before Rosh Hashanah we say, "De-'anei le-Yitzhak 'al gabei midbacha 'aneinan." (May he who answered Isaac on the altar also answer us).
Perhaps more in keeping with our own age, we may pray that recalling the merits of our ancestors will guide us to greater virtue and to greater awareness about the motives and consequences of our actions. The Akedah is a story for our time, and for our world, if we do not read it as a tale of a fanatical patriarch impervious to fear and pain. Nor is it the story of a child whose victimhood absolves him of all responsibility. The Akedah does not justify Greenberg's nationalist extremism or Gouri's sense of eternal Jewish trauma or Kook's assertions of Jewish ethical superiority over Gentiles. It is rather a tale of two grown men, both of them righteous but neither of them innocent, who took responsibility for their actions. Let us strive to do the same. Even if we make a mistake, our responsibility will be a merit, a zekhut, in and of itself. Shanah tovah: tikatevu vetihatemu.