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Citat:
Rabbi J. H. Hertz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire) wrote that child sacrifice was “rife among the Semitic peoples,” and suggests that “in that age, it was astounding that Abraham’s God should have interposed to prevent the sacrifice, not that He should have asked for it.” Hertz interprets the Akedah as demonstrating to the Jews that human sacrifice is abhorrent. “Unlike the cruel heathen deities, it was the spiritual surrender alone that God required.”
Citat:
Many readers have noted Abraham’s prophetic Freudian slip. he says “I and the boy will go there, bow down, and we will return to you”. Many classical rabbinic commentators hold that Abraham knew that Isaac wouldn’t die.
Citat:
Let’s also consider the view of Shlomo Hakohen Rabinowicz (1825 – c.1865) known as the Tiferet Shlomo, after the title of his classic work. Mark Kirschbaum writes
To him the word “nisayon” does not mean a test, there was no test here, and neither God nor Abraham read it this way. He states that the root of the word nisayon are the initial Hebrew letters “NS“, an acronym for “Somech Noflim“, meaning ‘support for those who are falling’, in this case, for those failing or flagging in spiritual resolve.
The purpose of this exercise was not to test Abraham, but rather as a ritual, a way for Abraham, mystical archetype of Love, to symbolically/textually bind Yitzhak, mystical archetype of Severity and Judgement, thus creating an eternal symbol of spiritual yearning overcoming personal self judgements of inadequacy and failing.
This strengthening of the weak needed to be done right at the beginning of Jewish history, where all the future descendants of the Abrahamic message are represented by Isaac, son of Abraham. Thus the akedah becomes a spiritual ritual enactment, a mystical exercise, meant as a symbol of will overcoming self doubt.
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The ethics of the Binding of Isaac
The Binding of Isaac – עֲקֵידַת יִצְחַק – is a story in the Hebrew Bible. God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah.
Abraham “bound Isaac, his son” before placing him on the altar, giving the story it’s Hebrew name – the Akedah – הָ)עֲקֵידָה) – the binding.
The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio (1603)
In our annual liturgical reading of the Torah this story is found in parasha Vayera, Genesis 18:1–22:24.
In many readings this is one of the most ethically challenging parts of the Bible.
The Bible states that God tests Abraham, by asking him to present his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah. No reason is given within the text. Abraham agrees to this command without arguing. According to the text, God does not want Abraham to actually sacrifice his son; it states from the beginning that this is only a test. The story ends with God stopping Abraham at the last minute and making Isaac’s sacrifice unnecessary by providing a goat to be sacrificed, which had become caught in some bushes nearby.
Context matters: Where and when did Abraham and Isaac live? What was the culture of this time and place?
Modern readers – and even medieval Bible commentators – often misunderstand Biblical stories and commands, as they tend to read the text in the light of their own present-day culture. But Abraham and Isaac from the Bronze age of history, in a region that historians call the ANE, Ancient Near East.
It is a fact that in that time and place some cultures that sacrificed human beings to their gods – sometimes even their own children. Indeed, the Torah itself tells us
Do not act this way toward the Lord your God, for these people performed for their gods all manner of abominations that the Lord hates. They even burned their sons and daughters for their gods. – Devarim 12:31
Our Bible tells us that even centuries after the time of Abraham, pagans, including kings, practiced child sacrifice. Consider the story of King Mesha of Moab, 9th century BCE. Baruch Margalit writes
[During a war] when the alliance besieged the Moabite capital of Kir-Hareseth, the Moabite king Mesha, in desperation, sacrificed his eldest son to the god Chemosh. King Mesha offered the crown prince as a burnt offering on top of the city wall in full view of the enemy forces (2 Kings 3:26–27).
Rabbi J. H. Hertz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire) wrote that child sacrifice was “rife among the Semitic peoples,” and suggests that “in that age, it was astounding that Abraham’s God should have interposed to prevent the sacrifice, not that He should have asked for it.” Hertz interprets the Akedah as demonstrating to the Jews that human sacrifice is abhorrent. “Unlike the cruel heathen deities, it was the spiritual surrender alone that God required.”We should focus on the peshat, and that requires reading it light of the ancient near-east where it was written. The Torah is a rebuke and transmogrification of the surrounding pagan ideologies. That includes a rebuke of pagan child sacrifice.
How did the ancient Israelites, and the later rabbis of classical Judaism, understand this story? A midrash tells us
R. Yose says: My son Elazar says three things about this [verse]: “Which I did not command” – in the Torah, “which I did not speak” – in the ten commandments, “and which I never considered” – that a man would sacrifice his son on the altar.
Others say: “Which I did not command” – with respect to Yiftah, “which I did not speak” – with respect to Mesha, the king of Moav, “and which I never considered” – that Avraham would sacrifice his son on the altar.
Sifrei Devarim #148
One understanding of the text is that God inspired Abraham in this episode in order to teach him a lesson, in order to stop human sacrifices from happening.
Many readers have noted Abraham’s prophetic Freudian slip. he says “I and the boy will go there, bow down, and we will return to you”. Many classical rabbinic commentators hold that Abraham knew that Isaac wouldn’t die.
Jewish ethical readings of the Akedah
The early rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah quotes God as saying “I never considered telling Abraham to slaughter Isaac (using the Hebrew root letters for “slaughter”, not “sacrifice”).
Rabbi Yona Ibn Janach (Spain, 11th century) wrote that God only demanded a symbolic sacrifice.
Rabbi Yosef Ibn Caspi (Spain, early 14th century) wrote that Abraham’s imagination led him astray, making him believe that he had been commanded to sacrifice his son. Ibn Caspi writes “How could God command such a revolting thing?”
The early Hassidic teachers were deeply uncomfortable with the idea that God wanted Abraham to kill Isaac. They didn’t read the Torah as teaching such a thing, and instead offered other ways to understand this story.
Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev (1740–1809), also known as the holy Berdichever, or the Kedushas Levi, taught that the very idea of Abraham actually sacrificing Isaac, or any person sacrificing any other was person, is senseless. Mark Kirschbaum writes
Similarly, the Kedushat Levi points out that Avraham, who in the Midrash is frequently described as one who fulfilled all 613 mitzvot intuitively, without a command (because of his autonomous intuition as to what actions would bring him closer to God) needed in this particular case to be commanded, because Abraham could not intuit any sense of meaning or value in this action.
Justification for his sense that there was no sense to the original command is that in the end he was commanded not to sacrifice Yitzhak, proving the senselessness of the first three days.
The Kedushat Levi adds, and in this is followed by R. [Abraham isaac] Kook, the sense of the whole exercise is in fact the senselessness of using human life as a means of sacrifice. The point of the text is the non-sacrificing of Yitzhak, thus for the initial (senseless) command.
Mark Kirschbaum, Perashat Vayera- The Non-Sacrifice of Isaac, 11/1/2012
Let’s also consider the view of Shlomo Hakohen Rabinowicz (1825 – c.1865) known as the Tiferet Shlomo, after the title of his classic work. Mark Kirschbaum writes
To him the word “nisayon” does not mean a test, there was no test here, and neither God nor Abraham read it this way. He states that the root of the word nisayon are the initial Hebrew letters “NS“, an acronym for “Somech Noflim“, meaning ‘support for those who are falling’, in this case, for those failing or flagging in spiritual resolve.
The purpose of this exercise was not to test Abraham, but rather as a ritual, a way for Abraham, mystical archetype of Love, to symbolically/textually bind Yitzhak, mystical archetype of Severity and Judgement, thus creating an eternal symbol of spiritual yearning overcoming personal self judgements of inadequacy and failing.
This strengthening of the weak needed to be done right at the beginning of Jewish history, where all the future descendants of the Abrahamic message are represented by Isaac, son of Abraham. Thus the akedah becomes a spiritual ritual enactment, a mystical exercise, meant as a symbol of will overcoming self doubt.
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, also known as the Aish Kodesh, or the Piaseczna Rebbe, wrote how our matriarch Sarah protested the Aekdah with her own soul.
Based on the commentary of Rashi, and Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, he writes –
“It is also possible to argue that Sarah the Matriarch, who was so heartbroken with the binding of Isaac that her soul burst forth, did so for the benefit of the Jewish people, to demonstrate to God how it is impossible for the Jewish people to tolerate excessive afflictions….
It seems that Sarah may have sinned by forsaking the remaining years of her life, had she not chosen to be so heartbroken over the binding of Isaac. Since, however, she forsook them for the benefit of the Jewish people… [Sarah] “died in order to show God that a [person] should not be expected to suffer unlimited levels of anguish.”
An Orthodox view: Kierkegaardian suspension of the ethical
On his blog Alan Brill writes
“I repeatedly hear from a generation of Modern (or Centrist) Orthodox youth, who grew up at the end of the twentieth century, that they were told that Torah Judaism is about adopting a posture of submission in which one’s individuality and moral intuitions are suppressed. Representative students of Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik publicly taught in the 1990’s and beyond that to accept divine authority one needed to sacrifice individuality for the sake of the tradition.”
This sacrificial religiosity was in origin based on Rabbi Soloveitchik’s use of Soren Kierkegaard’s ideas from Fear and Trembling on the need for a teleological suspension of the ethical as exemplified in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as a divine command despite the violation of the command not to murder.
But after Rabbi Solovietchik’s death, it became globalized to the prosaic. To affirm the divine and follow the true nature of the halakhah meant that one must be prepared to override their ethical judgement.
This ideology trope was, and is, so pervasive in some sectors of Modern Orthodoxy [that] pulpit rabbis who never read ‘Fear and Trembling’ exhort their congregants that one needs to consider the entire halakhah as above ethical concerns or moral critique.
All discussion of the morality of the law is precluded. Rather than limiting the sacrifice of Isaac to an extraordinary one-time prophetic event, the suspension of the ethical in order to follow halakhah becomes incumbent upon all of us.
Rabbi Ysocher Katz writes
“Ultimately, the suspension of the ethical is inescapable.” and “it seems clear to me that if you are orthodox, his theological construct is inescapable”
“Kierkegaard is the contemporary observant person’s Rorschach test. If you are orthodox, you have to (tremblingly!) embrace his theological premise that worship of God will inevitably demand of you the suspension of the ethical-at least sometimes…. We have to accept that God can sometimes be amoral, not immoral. God transcends ethical categories and therefore is neither moral nor immoral, only amoral.”
Critique of Kierkegaardian Orthodoxy
From within the Orthodox world there has been some strong pushback against Orthodoxy’s worldview on this issue.
Aaron Koller responds:
This is a modern problem, and that Jews more than a couple of hundred years ago would not have agreed with you. They may have been troubled by certain mitzvot and halakhot, but they took it for granted that there were answers to those questions, because of course the Torah is ethical.
I’ll give one quick random example, out of many. Ramah (R. Meir Abulafia, 1170-1244, Spain), in a letter on the laws of the עיר הנדחת (published in Lifshitz, סנהדרי גדולה, 1.186 [in the back]), asks:
“And further, that which [the Rambam] said, ‘and we execute the children’ – far be it from God to do evil! (Job 34:10) Where have we ever found that a child is liable, that this one should be liable?” (ותו דקאמר “מכין את כל הטף”, וחלילה לאל מרשע! [איוב לד, י] וכי היכן מציגו קטן חייב, שזה חייב?)
So if you are right that any Orthodox Jew will have to adopt a Kierkegaardian perspective, I would frame the question as distinctive to modernity, not definitional to Judaism.
[The Orthodox view is] … God doesn’t need to be ethical, but that the mitzvot can violate all ethics – and that this is just to be accepted, not contested.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l writes
The story is about the awe and love of God. Kierkegaard wrote a book about it, Fear and Trembling… What Abraham underwent during the trial was, says Kierkegaard, a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” that is, a willingness to let the I-Thou love of God overrule the universal principles that bind humans to one another.
Rav Soloveitchik explained the episode in terms of his own well-known characterisation of the religious life as a dialectic between victory and defeat, majesty and humility…
These are the conventional readings and they represent the mainstream of tradition. However, since there are “seventy faces to the Torah,” I want to argue for a different interpretation.
The reason I do so is that one test of the validity of an interpretation is whether it coheres with the rest of the Torah, Tanakh and Judaism as a whole. There are four problems with the conventional reading:
We know from Tanakh and independent evidence that the willingness to offer up your child as a sacrifice was not rare in the ancient world. It was commonplace. …
Child sacrifice is regarded with horror throughout Tanakh. Micah asks rhetorically, “Shall I give my firstborn for my sin, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” and replies, “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”…
How could Abraham serve as a model father if he was willing to sacrifice his child? To the contrary, he should have said to God: “If you want me to prove to You how much I love You, then take me as a sacrifice, not my child.”
As Jews – indeed as humans – we must reject Kierkegaard’s principle of the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” This is an idea that gives carte blanche to a religious fanatic to commit crimes in the name of God.It is the logic of the Inquisition and the suicide bomber. It is not the logic of Judaism rightly understood. God does not ask us to be unethical. We may not always understand ethics from God’s perspective but we believe that “He is the Rock, His works are perfect; all His ways are just” (Deut. 32: 4).
To understand the binding of Isaac we have to realise that much of the Torah, Genesis in particular, is a polemic against worldviews the Torah considers pagan, inhuman and wrong… Each family had its own gods, among them the spirits of dead ancestors, from whom it sought protection and to whom it offered sacrifices. The authority of the head of the family, the paterfamilias, was absolute. He had power of life and death over his wife and children….
The Torah is opposed to every element of this worldview. As anthropologist Mary Douglas notes, one of the most striking features of the Torah is that it includes no sacrifices to dead ancestors.[7] Seeking the spirits of the dead is explicitly forbidden.
…The principle to which the entire story of Isaac, from birth to binding, is opposed is the idea that a child is the property of the father….
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l, Rabbi Sacks on Parsha, The Binding of Isaac, OU website
Maharat Ruth Friedman writes
God is sending us a clear message that the Akedah is a unique set of circumstances that should never be replicated. It is the exception, not the rule. The God of the Torah does not desire human sacrifice and will not be appeased by it.
Orthodox Rabbi David Fried, editor at thelehrhaus.com, discusses this in his Reclaiming the Akeidah from Kierkegaard. He looks at Abraham’s responses to God’s intention to destory Sodom and Gomorrah, to banish Yishma’el, and finally the test in which Abraham believes that he is to sacrifice Yitzchak.
What if Abraham had reacted differently at Sodom? What if he had inquired all the way down to one? What if he had been able, from the beginning, to fully come to terms with Lot’s failings? Perhaps, then, God could have revealed His attributes of mercy to Abraham. Perhaps He could have told Abraham that Lot would be saved on Abraham’s behalf. Perhaps Abraham could have asked for the cities to be saved as a pure kindness the way Lot himself did with Tzo’ar (Genesis 19:18-22). Perhaps the entire akeidah would not have been necessary.
Non-Orthodox Judaism never accepted the Kierkegaardian attitude that one should leap beyond ethics. Conservative Rabbi Milton Steinberg lashes out against the Kierkegaardian attitude:
“Nor does anything in Judaism correspond to Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical. From the Jewish viewpoint—and this is one of its highest dignities—the ethical is never suspended, not under any circumstance and not for anyone, not even for God. Especially not for God!”
The same from Conservative Rabbi Robert Gordis
When the Akedah narrative is read in the larger context of the book of Genesis, it offers no support for the doctrine of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Just four chapters earlier, when God reveals his decision to destroy the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham does not hesitate to dispute the decision…
Here there is no hint of “submission” by the “knight of faith” to the incomprehensible will of God. Abraham feels that God’s decision is in violation of the ethical law and he expresses his unshakable conviction that God cannot violate the principles of righteousness, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth act justly?”…
How, then, can Abraham, himself, have submitted to an active violation of the ethical law? In view of Abraham’s ringing affirmation of the binding character of the moral law, how is this uncomplaining acceptance of God’s command to sacrifice his son to be understood?”
Robert Gordis, “The Faith of Abraham: A Note on Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of the Ethical” Judaism 25 (1976): 414-419
Parallels to Yishma’el, Abraham’s other son
Written while at Yeshivat Har Etzion, Rav Michael Hattin offers us a penetrating essay, Akedat Yishma’el.
“it should therefore not come as a surprise that Parashat Vayera itself concludes with proverbial fireworks of the spiritual sort: the episode of the Akeda. While often we tend to analyze the episode of the Akeda from its own entirely internal and self-contained text, this week we will consider the Akeda as it stands in comparison and contrast to another, seemingly dissimilar event: the sending away of Hagar and Yishma’el.”
Also from Yeshivat Har Etzion, Rav Amnon Bazak writes about Akedat Yitzchak – The Double Test, carefully studying the many deliberate parallels between the tests of sending away Yishma’el and Yitchak.
Related articles & books
“Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought” Aaron Koller, 2020
“The chapters that comprise the core of the book presents the Kierkegaardian approach, followed by a chapter on the modern Orthodox acceptance of the Kierkegaardian approach by Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Rabbi Soloveitchik, and finally a critique of Kierkegaard’s approach.”
M
