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Chumash Themes

Class #6

A seminal event in Jewish national consciousness.

Genesis chapter 22

by Rabbi Noson Weisz

© 2007 JewishPathways.com

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Introduction

One day, God appears to Abraham and instructs him to sacrifice his

son Isaac on an undisclosed mountain. Abraham sets out on the quest

for the site early the following morning, accompanied by his sons Isaac

and Ishmael and his servant Eliezer. For three days he journeys

northward from Hebron, according to the Midrash in a state of

constant torment.1 On the third day he observes a pillar of cloud over

the spot that will eventually become the Temple Mount2 and concludes

that he has located the designated sacrificial site. Upon enquiry, it

turns out that the pillar is visible to Isaac as well, but not to Ishmael

and Eliezer. Reasoning that whoever cannot see the pillar was not

intended to participate, he sets out with Isaac towards the site, leaving

Eliezer and Ishmael behind with the donkey.3

Isaac comments on the fact that while they are carrying wood and fire,

there is nothing to sacrifice, and Abraham informs Isaac that God has

requested that he, Isaac, be the sacrifice. This does not appear to faze

Isaac, and father and son calmly proceed in perfect harmony.4

They build an altar and prepare for the ritual; the atmosphere

portrayed in the text can only be described as tranquil. Abraham binds

Isaac on the altar (according to Isaac's own request)5 and picks up the

sacrificial knife. Just as Abraham is about to cut into Isaac’s neck, an

angel instructs him to substitute the ram that has providentially

wandered on to the site. God thanks Abraham for having passed an

important test and, as the scene closes, Abraham predicts that a

Temple will one day be erected on this site.

1 Midrash Rabba (Genesis 56:8) 2 Midrash Rabba (Genesis 55:7) 3 Midrash Rabba (Genesis 56:1) 4 Midrash Rabba (Genesis 56:4) 5 Midrash Rabba (Genesis 56:8)

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At the time of the incident Abraham and Isaac were ages 137 and 37

respectively.6 Jewish tradition regards this event as one of the

cornerstones of the special relationship that exists between God and

the Jewish people; it is considered Abraham’s ultimate test.

Human Sacrifice

The Binding of Isaac (Akeidat Yitzhak in Hebrew) presents many

problematic facets but let us begin with the most obvious. In the

pantheon of Jewish values there is no crime more horrendous than

human sacrifice.

God finds the practice so offensive that He makes a declaration that

applies to no other offense:

But if the people of the land avert their eyes from that man

when he gives his offspring to Molech, not to put him to death –

then I shall concentrate my attention upon that man and

upon his family; I will cut off from among their people, him and

all who stray after him to stray after the Molech. (Leviticus

20:4-5)

How could God ask for a human sacrifice? How could Abraham, who

had dedicated his entire life to preaching against the practice, accede

to the demand?

Let's tackle this issue head on. Not all human sacrifice can be lumped

in one basket. Before we can understand what the Binding of Isaac is,

we must clearly understand what it is not. The sages of the Midrash

distinguish between the binding of Isaac and the sort of human

sacrifice that is abhorrent to God, illustrated in the following biblical

incident.

6 Midrash Rabba (Genesis 55:4); Rashi (Genesis 25:20)

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Sorely beset by an invading Jewish army, Mesha, the King of Moab

summoned his advisors and asked them why God favored the Jews

over the Moabites. Their answer: God’s preference can be traced back

to the patriarch Abraham who willingly offered his son Isaac to God.

The king inquired, 'Did Abraham actually go through with the

sacrifice?' When he discovered that Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac had

been aborted, he decided to outdo Abraham. If God had a taste for

human blood, he would offer more. He promptly sacrificed his son and

heir to God.7

This is human sacrifice at its most abhorrent. The King of Moab needed

God’s help against his enemies. He had no wish to give his son to God.

His sacrifice was a bribe indicating how much he was willing to offer

God and was initiated to gain a desired advantage. The belief that God

is hungry for human blood and can be bribed by the murder of a loved

one is the abomination.

The Binding of Isaac and this story have nothing in common.

God could never demand the murder of innocent children as a bribe or

a test of loyalty, and Abraham would certainly have refused any such

demand. Before Isaac was born, when God informed Abraham

[Genesis 15:1] that his reward was very great, his response was that

no matter how great the reward, he considered it worthless as long as

he remained childless. In Abraham’s eyes no possible gain, whether in

this world or the next, could offset the loss of Isaac. Without Isaac to

continue his traditions into future generations, his teaching would die

with him, and his entire life would turn into an exercise in futility.

Abraham was out to change the world through the creation of a nation.

Without Isaac, he couldn’t do it. He was certainly not out to bribe God

with Isaac’s blood.

So how then do we understand this baffling incident?

7 Psikta D’rav Kahane 2:5; see Kings 2:3

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A Fresh Look

The ensuing discussion is based on the work of Rabbi E.E. Dessler.8 In

order to understand his approach, we must learn a bit about the

Jewish view of death and its cure, techiyat hametim, the resurrection

of the dead.

Life would be wonderful if it weren’t for death that inevitably cuts it

short. We tend to blame God for this terrible flaw; after all He is the

Almighty and could have made our lives everlasting. The Torah tells us

that we are blaming the wrong party. Not only did God create Adam to

live forever; He designed human beings with the ability to pass the gift

of eternal life to their offspring as part of the human genetic package.

It was Adam who turned us into mortals, not God. The human origin of

death is plainly set out in Genesis.

"Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat; but of the Tree

of Knowledge of Good and Evil you must not eat thereof; for on

the day you eat of it you shall surely become mortal." (Genesis

2:17)

Fortunately, as anyone who has taken an elementary biology course

knows, life is actually spiritual; it has no precise physical definition.

Are viruses alive in their dormant state? Is a tissue of DNA replicating

itself in a laboratory alive? What gives an organism the power to be

‘alive’ one moment and not the next when there is no apparent organic

change in any of its components?

The fact that life is spiritual means that death is only a temporary

phenomenon. Judaism teaches that there is no spiritual death;

spiritual potential can never be entirely lost. It may lie dormant for

very long periods, but it can always be revived. The humble virus was

created to teach this lesson. It follows that we human beings can

regain our capacity for immortality.

8 Michtav M’Eliyahu (vol 2, pgs. 194-199)

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Human Life

We can comprehend this clearly by considering the Jewish definition of

humanity: a union of two opposites; a soul (neshama) in a body. The

soul is ‘a portion of the living God above’;9 while the body is a lump of

earth; “For you are dust and to dust shall you return” (Genesis 3:19).

By this definition the soul is immortal; it remains permanently

connected to the source of all life. As long as the soul is attached to

the body, we are alive; through the medium of our souls our bodies

also draw life from the source; when our soul separates, we die.

If the body and the soul were integrated into a single indivisible entity,

the soul could never separate from the body and we would live

forever. When God completed creation, He studied it and declared,

"And God saw all that He had made and behold it was very good"

(Genesis 1:31). Adam was a part of creation; this means he was also

‘very good’. A very good human being is one whose body and soul are

perfectly integrated. He is immortal by definition.

We forfeit the description of 'very good' by dissolving the integration

between our physical and spiritual selves. As this integration

decreases, our grip on life becomes tenuous. When we connect to evil

through our bodies we compel our souls to disintegrate from our

bodies. Being a ‘portion of the God above,’ our souls cannot endure

direct contact with evil. On the other hand, our bodies, being mere

lumps of earth, do not have such limitations. When we connect our

bodies to evil, we force our souls to connect to it as well since the

body and the soul were fused by God into a single, integrated entity.

But the soul goes along protesting vehemently. Even in the realm of

the purely physical, it takes enormous force to keep two mutually

exclusive entities welded together at a single joint. Such connections

are tenuous at best and must inevitably sever when subjected to

extreme pressure.

9 see Ohr HaChaim (Exodus 20:20)

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When we connect with evil, we place enormous strain on the soul/body

junction. Over the course of life, the connection eventually breaks

under the pressure and when the soul fully separates, our bodies

revert to being lifeless lumps of clay once again and we die. To attain

permanent integration, we must go in the diametric opposite direction

– the body must become spiritual, detach itself from evil and fully

integrate with the soul. Judaism teaches that the transformation of the

body is the only point of our earthly life.

It is a demanding process. We accomplish it by constantly battling with

our physical selves, channeling and uplifting our physical desires

through the performance of mitzvot (commandments) and filling our

minds with Torah knowledge. Each mitzvah and each word of Torah

accomplish a small transformation. It is the increment of these small

painful steps spread over a lifetime that accomplish the transformation

required to achieve immortality.

Kabbalah teaches that without such integration, eternal life is

impossible even in the Next World. For the World to Come is a physical

world just as ours is, albeit one that operates on a higher spiritual

plane; without bodies we cannot inhabit it. Physically, we will not be

identical to our present selves, but we shall require some form of body

there as well; in practice, attaining immortality means attaining it

physically. We must spend our time in this world accumulating the

enormous spiritual energy required to purify our bodies until they

reach the state of purity they must have to participate and enjoy

eternal life in the World to Come.

Return to the Binding of Isaac

Imagine that you had the ability to achieve this transformation and

eliminate death, once and for all, by performing a single action.

Wouldn’t you jump eagerly at the chance? The millennia of the painful

history we studied in school, a product of the need to offer every

human individual the opportunity to go through the snail paced

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process of integrating the body with the soul through the series of

small laborious steps we have described could be avoided entirely if

you could perfect the world in one fell swoop.

To Abraham and Isaac, this is what the binding of Isaac was all about.

Let us put ourselves in Abraham and Isaac's shoes and attempt to see

things through their eyes given their assumptions.

Abraham and Isaac proceeded to the sacrifice eagerly because they

were prophets and they knew God. In the light of their knowledge, the

idea that God might harbor a savage lust for human blood was not

merely sacrilegious, it was downright absurd. It was unthinkable that

the Almighty would ever demand Isaac’s life as a tribute. Isaac was

born through a miracle; his very existence was a gift of the Almighty’s

generosity. If God wanted Isaac's soul back He could take it at any

time without needing Abraham to murder him, and He surely had no

interest in turning Abraham into a murderer.

Abraham and Isaac therefore concluded that the Binding of Isaac was

not about tribute and death, it was about life. The sacrifice of Isaac

would bring on the resurrection. The time had come to repair the

broken world, undo Adam’s sin and restore man to immortal life. The

conclusion; God wanted to make Isaac immortal!

Remember that immortality requires the sort of integration between

the soul and the body that cannot be severed. The body we have

inherited from Adam is incapable of integrating with the spiritual in

this manner. Accomplishing this total fusion required a new body, and

the Binding of Isaac was the opportunity to make the trade in. Bring

me your old model and I will return you a new one! Imagine their

excitement and enthusiasm.

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The Binding and the Resurrection

Rabbi Dessler draws a connection between the Binding of Isaac and

the resurrection:10

When the sword touched Isaac’s neck his soul flew out of his

body but when the angel’s voice emerged from between the

Cherubim, “Do not send your hand…" it returned. Isaac stood on

his feet and glimpsed the resurrection; the dead would all rise

and return to life just as he had. At that moment he authored

the second blessing in the silent Amidah prayer, “Blessed are

you God who revives the dead.”

Isaac personifies the resurrection in Jewish thought. In Hebrew his

name is spelled Yitzhak; the Zohar11 rearranges the letters to express

the idea; Ketz Chai, meaning the ‘life at the end’. Literally, the name

Yitzhak is the verb to laugh expressed in the future tense. Isaac’s

laughter is the laughter of the future – an expression of joy at the

triumph over death. He is the living embodiment of the saying, "He

who laughs last, laughs best."

Abraham and Isaac began the process of mending the broken world

and returning it to the state of ‘very good’ it was in prior to Adam’s

fall, thereby eliminating the need to die. When Abraham reattached

Isaac’s soul to its Maker, the increased flow of life outwards from the

Source of all resurrected Isaac; his restored life force was more

spiritually intense and more intense; Isaac’s revival inaugurated a new

historic era which could/would end in total the total integration of the

physical with the spiritual. Human beings would no longer need to die.

When the sacrifice was aborted, Abraham realized that the process

would not be completed right there and then, and he was positively

disappointed.

And he said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad or do

anything to him….” (Genesis 22:12). Rashi comments on the

10 Based on Midrash (Pirkei D'Rebbe Eliezer 30) 11 Addenda 252b

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duplication, "do not stretch out your hand against the lad or do

anything:" "Do not stretch your hand" means don’t kill him – Abraham

said to himself, ‘So all this was for naught? Let me at least make a

wound!’ That is why the angel had to admonish "Or do anything to

him."

How strange! One would have thought Abraham would exult at the

cancellation of the sacrifice. Explains Rabbi Dessler: Abraham realized

what we do not; the opportunity to eliminate death was being

cancelled along with the sacrifice.

The Road to Life

But not entirely. The Binding of Isaac breached the walls of death and

placed our feet on the road that ends in Techiyat Hametim, the

resurrection of the dead.

As we stated in the introduction, the scene fades out with Abraham's

prediction that the Temple will be erected one day on the site of the

altar he and Isaac built together. This prediction is the expression of

the change in the world he and Isaac had wrought through their act of

reattaching the human soul to the Almighty. The pre-Binding world

contained no vestige of a Temple; post-Binding, the magic mirror of

the universe had begun to reflect the first vestiges of the Temple.

Resurrection and the Temple

The Temple is a living manifestation of perfect integration between the

spiritual and the physical. God’s presence, entirely spiritual, becomes

physically manifest; we can detect His presence in the Temple with our

physical senses. The Divine presence in the Temple is called the

Shechina, a derivative of the Hebrew word 'Shochen,' meaning

residing or resting12 in a way of everyday mundane existence. Such an

integration of the spiritual with the physical is the first harbinger of the

perfect integration of the resurrection.

12 see Bamidbar 32:34; Talmud - Shabbat 33a

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Abraham and Isaac were not mistaken. The Binding was about

resurrection and the elimination of death. The total actualization of the

integration of the physical to the spiritual was premature at this early

stage in human history, but the incident gave humanity its first grip on

eternal life. It brought the Shechina down to the top of the mountain.

If we can climb the mountain and bring it down to the valley, and from

there into our homes, we will reach the level of integration that makes

death impossible. The Divine presence is life; if we connect to life we

cannot die.

"Many peoples will go and say, “Come let us go up to the mountain of

God, to the House of the God of Jacob.”13 Why does the prophet

specify the God of Jacob? Is the Temple only the House of the God of

Jacob and not also of the God of Abraham and Isaac? The prophet

wants to teach us that when the Messiah comes, the Temple will go

beyond the definition of Abraham, who referred to it as a ‘mountain,’

and beyond the definition of Isaac who referred to it as a ‘field,’ and

correspond to the definition of Jacob who referred to it a ‘house’ – "he

named that place ‘the House of God’.”14 Our forefather Jacob did not

die.15

Transforming the Physical

What does the transformation of the physical into the spiritual mean in

more down to earth terms? How can we relate to the idea of

integrating them into a single entity? Can we also do some of this

integration, and if so how? Finally, how do the emotions experienced

by the participants of the Binding express integration?

Following this episode, God tells Abraham "for now I know you are a

God fearing man, since you have not withheld your son, your only one,

from Me" (Genesis 22:12). The commentators take exception to this

statement. Abraham was a world renowned tzaddik by this time; he

had leapt into the fiery furnace of Nimrod to exalt the Holy name, he 13 Isaiah 2:3 14 Genesis 28:19; Talmud - Pesachim 88a 15 Talmud - Ta’anit 5b

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had spent his entire life trying to bring the world to the recognition of

God. How can God say ‘now’ I know you are God fearing? Isn’t this an

insult? What about the first 137 years of Abraham’s life?

The Gaon of Vilna offers the following explanation:16 Human beings are

innately spiritual, but our spirituality tends to be limited to the things

that inspire us. Some of us are inspired by prayer, some take to the

heady intellectual pleasure provided by Torah study, while still others

find a sense of transcendence in the holiness of the Shabbat. We may

observe the other commandments that do not inspire us, but we

perform them as obligations; a sort of religious tax we are forced to

pay. If we are not yet fully observant we tend to avoid the uninspiring

commandments altogether.

While all religious people can be correctly described as God fearing,

nevertheless, the inspirational service of God is energized by love, not

fear. Fear of God requires the whole hearted performance of spiritual

tasks that go against the grain as well as those you spontaneously

enjoy. We feel alive when we experience the heady rush of positive

feelings. Whenever we can, we avoid the torment of negative emotions

or even the sense of emotional numbness. We want our Divine service

to provide us with a heady emotional high.

As long as Abraham was doing acts of kindness which conformed to his

essential character, serving God was always a rewarding personal

experience. But slaughtering your beloved son is impossible without

harnessing the energy of rage. If you can only energize actions with

the emotions that are part of your essential character, then the

Binding of Isaac is a deed Abraham cannot execute. Assume that

Rabbi Dessler fully hit the mark and Abraham perceives the necessity

of performing this act with absolute intellectual clarity. But Abraham

was human just as we are. When it comes to doing, not only do we

humans have to think and feel that what we are about to do is the

right thing; we have to harness the energy to act as well.

16 Kol Eliyahu (Genesis 22:12)

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How many of us have experienced the feeling of wanting to study for

an important test? In our minds we were sure it was what we wanted

to do, in our hearts we felt that it was the right thing to do and yet we

somehow ended up on the beach. We were simply unable to come up

with the positive energy to carry out our resolution.

The intense rage that fuels every act of murder was simply not in

Abraham’s character. The ability to come up with the energy to

actually perform the sacrifice came from his fear of God. To actually

kill his beloved son, Abraham had to harness the negative energy of

rage that was not part of his essential character. His ability to

approach it with enthusiasm represents a level of emotional discipline

that boggles the imagination. In terms of purpose, the Binding is no

doubt an act of attaching to God as Rabbi Dessler explained, and

attachment is an expression of love. But executing the deed demanded

the ability to harness the opposite emotion. We attach ourselves to the

people we love and distance ourselves from those we fear or hate.

Murder is detachment at its most extreme and can only be energized

by the most intense rage.

Abraham’s ability to carry out the sacrifice with the enthusiasm

appropriate to an act of love transformed the emotion of fear/rage into

love. The negative became positive; the physical was subsumed by the

spiritual. Death had become transformed into life, "for now I know you

are a God fearing man, since you have not withheld your son, your

only one, from Me."

In Hebrew, the word 'to fear' and the word 'to see' share a common

root, yirah. Abraham’s fear of God transformed God’s spiritual

presence; the invisible became visible; it gave mankind its first

glimpse of the Temple and of the resurrection that it represents. The

generations of Jews who followed the example of the Binding of Isaac

and kept Judaism alive through the dark ages of Exile by faithfully

raising and educating their children to a way of life that subjected

them to anti-Semitism, persecution and martyrdom brought us a great

deal closer. We must be near the climax of the transformation process;

resurrection is right around the corner.