Encountering the Akedah
Rosh Hashanah 5784/2023
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
It seems strange to me, but I cannot remember the first time I read or heard the story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. Maybe I was in junior high or high school and the whole story seemed so preposterous that I didn’t find it worth worrying about. But there was an etching by Rembrandt of the story, which my parents had hanging in our living room, part of their collection of fine art. At some point in my life, I acquired a copy of the same etching, and it has hung in my office ever since.
About forty-five years ago, in the fall of 1978, I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio to interview for admission to rabbinic school. First came the psychological exam in which I was given a Rorschach test and had to decide whether to tell the doctor that, to me, the ink blot looked like a bear with a mouth full of blood. I think I did tell him what I saw. And then I met with a panel of rabbis and professors, who asked me among other questions: “do you have a favorite Bible story?” I said “the Binding of Isaac” and when they asked me “why?” I said “because I have thought and thought about it, and cannot get to the bottom of it.” Forty-five years later, I still feel the same way. I cannot get my arms around this story, but it won’t let go of me.
This Rosh Hashanah morning, sometimes called also Yom HaZikaron, the day of memory, I would like to go to the well of memory with you and to share with you a few of my own most profound encounters with the strange, disturbing, uplifting, unfathomable story which we just read together, with Jews all over the world.
Before I do, let me begin with the one thing I know about this story. The Binding of Isaac is not a story to be understood; it is to be encountered. Like another person. We can never fully understand another person, but we can meet them. We can see them, hear them, feel them and be moved and changed by them. Or God for that matter. Like a person, like God, this story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, is to be encountered.
By the way, if I were ever summoned back to meet again with my rabbinic school admissions committee, and asked the same question, I would say this: the Binding of Isaac is still my favorite story in the Torah. And if they ask me why, I would say: because from the extreme example of Akedah, I have learned that the entire Torah is not to be understood, but to be encountered. Experienced. Like a person. Like God.
The first time that I remember encountering the written story of the Akedah was in an undergraduate course in college. We read Fear and Trembling, by the 19th century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. Most of that book left me completely baffled. But I was shaken to my core by the three-page prelude near the very beginning, in which Kierkegaard tells the story of the Binding of Isaac, in four radically different ways.
In his first retelling, the story begins just as it does in the Torah. At first, Kierkegaard adds just one detail not in the Torah text: Sarah, looking out of the window, following Abraham and Isaac with her eyes, until they had passed down the valley and she could see them no more. Kierkegaard then stays close to the original story until after the three days of silence. Then the story begins to change and Abraham decides that he should reveal to Isaac what is really happening. The story begins to unravel. Abraham places his hand on Isaac’s head to bless him and Isaac bows to receive the blessing. “Abraham’s face was loving,” says the narrator, “his voice encouraging.” But Isaac could not understand; he could not accept that he was to be the sacrifice. He embraced Abraham’s knees. He fell at his feet imploringly. He begged for his young life. And suddenly, in Kierkegaard’s terrifying first re-telling, Abraham turns wild and cruel, seizing Isaac by the throat and throwing him to the ground, saying “stupid boy! Do you really think I am your father? No, I am an idolator! Do you think this is God’s bidding? No! It is my desire!” Then, says the storyteller, Isaac cried out in terror “God of Abraham, have compassion on me! If I have no father on earth, You be my father!” And under his breath Abraham murmured to himself: “I thank you Lord. It is better for him to think that I am a monster, than for him to lose faith in you.”
I read that over and over again. I found it hard to breathe. Kierkegaard’s vision of Isaac pleading for his life and Abraham turned wild and cruel was physically painful to read. But suddenly the story was alive and burning, that text was on fire. It was the word of God.
It is not lost on me that two of my most important early encounters with the Akedah were through the minds of two non-Jews, the etching by Rembrandt in my childhood living room, and then in reading Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard. From this 19th century Danish theologian, I first experienced midrash. To re-read the Biblical story, with passion and creativity and fearlessness. To crack it open, to tear it inside out and to find inside it new, fiery, life-changing meanings. For my first encounters with this text, I am forever grateful, both to Rembrandt and to Kierkegaard.
In the summer of 1979 I went to Jerusalem, to begin rabbinic school. The first Hebrew text we studied was Sefer ha-Aggada, a collection of classic midrashim compiled by Hayim Nachman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzsky. We spent an entire semester studying the classic midrashim on the story of the Akeda. And we read all of Rashi’s commentary on the story. I sat up late into the nights, drinking tea and soaking it all up like a sponge. My apartment in West Jerusalem was not far from Har HaMoriah, the mountain where Abraham bound his son on the altar. I was twenty-two years old, encountering the Akedah, encountering my four thousand year Jewish heritage, encountering God.
A midrash: when God said to Abraham, “take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac” we are hearing only one side of a dialogue. Between the lines, Abraham is pushing back against God, resisting, objecting, looking for some way out: “I have two sons. This is the only son of his mother and this is the only son of his mother. I love them both” until finally God ends the conversation: “Take Isaac.”
A midrash: Satan appears. Not the Christian Satan, but our Jewish Satan, who shows up…surprisingly…as the voice of conscience, asking Abraham “what if God comes back to you tomorrow and accuses you of murder?
A midrash: Satan appears to Isaac, whispering “what about your poor mother? Has it occurred to you that your father has dementia? He has lost his mind.”
And a midrash: when Abraham replied to Isaac’s question saying “God will provide the lamb for the offering my son” what he really was saying was “you, my son, will be the lamb for the offering.” Always, the fire of midrash is lit by the spark of a real question. If we are encountering the Akedah, we want to know: “What did Isaac know? Was Abraham still concealing the truth from his son, reassuring him that God would provide a lamb?” Were father and son walking apart through this story, or together? The midrash says: He told him. You will be the lamb my son. And when the text says “The two of them walked together” the midrash comments: “with one heart.”
One midrash at a time, my classmates and I came to understand a fundamental Jewish truth. When our sages refer to Torah as the word of God, they do NOT mean that it is perfect and must never be questioned. The word of God is fire, a burning bush, an erupting volcano.
Finally, I encountered the midrash which is transmitted by Rashi, in which the angel’s words to Abraham “Do not stretch forth your hand against the boy, and do not do anything to him” are read, again, as one side of a dialogue. According to that strange midrash, when the angel says “do not stretch forth your hand against the boy,” Abraham replies “well, can I just cut him?” What??!
I struggled with that midrash for weeks. It made no sense. I could not imagine any universe in which Abraham, after being told to drop the knife and let his son live, would ask to be allowed to cut him. After weeks of walking the streets of Jerusalem in bewilderment, I found myself sitting at the Shabbat table of my teacher Rabbi Jim Ponet, and I cried out to Jim “I just can’t understand that comment by Rashi! Why does he have Abraham asking permission to cut Isaac?” I will never forget Jim’s answer: “That is my favorite Rashi in the whole Torah. Rashi is saying that after three days of walking, and preparing, and bringing himself to readiness to fulfill God’s command, the most difficult thing in the world for Abraham was to stop himself. That was the real test: would Abraham be able to stop himself? And he passed.”
I had not thought of that. My fever broke. That was an Akedah encounter.
After three years of rabbinic school I took a year off and traveled in Europe, before making my way to Israel for six months on kibbutz. On the ferry from Italy to Greece, I struck up a conversation with a religious Jew and somehow the conversation came around to the Binding of Isaac. I didn’t bring it up. The one thing he wanted to discuss was an offensive midrash, which he loved, in which Abraham’s servants Ishmael and Eliezer, are referred to as am domeh lachamor “people who resemble a donkey.” I am only beginning to understand why, on my way to Israel, I had to hear this old Jewish voice comparing the people of Ishmael to donkeys. Our tradition includes much that is beautiful and plenty that is ugly. Both the beauty and the ugliness are very much alive, throughout the Jewish world, and especially in Israel today.
As a rabbinic student, I worked at Camp Swig in Saratoga CA. While working in the Learning Center there I came across the extraordinary piece Night Words, A Midrash on the Holocaust, by David Roskies. Night Words is a dramatic reading for 36 people, weaving Biblical texts about God and prophecy and exile and resurrection together with first-hand testimony from the Holocaust, and songs from the ghettos. In one of the most powerful segments, two readers take turns going back and forth between Kierkegaard’s retelling of the Akedah, which I described earlier, and a terror-filled firsthand account from the Nazi killing fields of Poland. One voice reads the passage I described earlier from Fear and Trembling, Isaac pleading with his father Abraham to spare his life, embracing his legs, and kissing his feet. Then a second voice answers, an eye-witness to the Nazi murders. Jewish women tearing off their clothes and jewelry, falling on their knees and kissing the boots of the Nazi soldiers, begging them to spare their lives.
At Camp Swig, a Holocaust chapel stands in the woods, modeled on the wooden synagogues of Poland before the War. There in the woods one night, in the Camp Swig Holocaust chapel, 36 of us sat in a circle and read through Night Words. We relived the nightmare of the Holocaust, refracted through the lens of Kierkegaard’s reading of this morning’s Torah portion. This text is not to be understood. It is to be encountered.
For twenty years after that, every year on Yom Hashoah, 36 UCSB professors, college students, and even young children sat in a circle. And we read through Night Words. In our circle, the text of this morning’s Torah morning ran like electricity, like liquid fire.
Reading the Akedah with friends and students over the years, one of the verses that has always caught my attention is Isaac’s question. Isaac is the only one who asks a question. Abraham never murmurs a word of question or protest. But Isaac wants to know: “Here is the fire and here is the wood. But where is the lamb for the offering?” Jewish readers through the centuries have identified with Isaac and with his question, and have wanted to know: What did Isaac think? What did he suspect? And how old was he anyway? The story never says.
Some Jewish storytellers have pictured Isaac as being just five years old, supremely trusting and unsuspecting, but others have pointed out that he had to be at least old enough to carry the wood for the fire. Others have imagined Isaac as being about thirteen, the age of Bar Mitzvah, but others have objected that in that case he would have been strong and fast enough to break free and to run away from his 113-year-old father. And some, in all seriousness, have said that Isaac was 37 years, a full-grown man, and completely aware and willing to sacrifice himself, to give up his life for his father’s God.
The idea that Isaac was thirty-seven comes from the fact that the very next thing we read in the Torah, after this story ends, is that Sarah has died, at the age of 127 years. Many sources see the two events as linked, and even speculate that Sarah died as a result of the Akedah. In one source, she learns of what her husband has done to her son and dies of shock. In another, she throws herself off the roof. In these old sources, Isaac is traumatized, but Sarah is a secondary victim of the akedah. According to another source, the cries of the shofar which we will hear in a few minutes are an echo of Sarah wailing, after hearing that her son had almost been slaughtered by her husband. The encounter with the Akedah does not end when we close the scroll. The shofar is horn of the ram. The cry of the shofar is Sarah’s scream. The encounter with the Akedah is a fundamental thread of the DNA of this holy day.
If it is true that Sarah died immediately, and maybe even as a result of the akedah, then we can calculate how old Isaac was in the story. Sarah died at 127, and she was 90 when she gave birth. Subtract 90 from 127 you get 37. That give us Isaac’s age, if Sarah died immediately after the akedah. The story reads very differently if Isaac is 37.
I thought a lot about this midrash, especially around the time that I turned 37. I wondered how the story might move within me, imagining my Dad as Abraham and me as Isaac. I always felt that my father loved me in just the same way that Abraham loved his son Isaac. Could my heart and mind contain the thought that my father would sacrifice me? As it happens, my son Ari was four years old back then. Could I bear to read the story with me as Abraham and him as Isaac? It was unbearable. But it felt like the only honest way to really listen to this story. If we do not make the story about us, in some fundamental way, then why does it matter? Now Ari is 33. In just four years, the wheel will have turned all the way around and the story will come back again, to me and my son. Once again, in my life, Isaac will be 37 years old.
In recent years, I have been hiking. In our front country, in the back country, and in the Sierras. On my day off, I like to go for six or seven hours, usually by myself. On the trail, out in the mountains, I spend a lot of the time lost in thought, and a lot of time just looking at the trail, to make sure I don’t trip on a rock or a root, and that I don’t fall off the trail. Then every once in a while, I pause to look up. Often, I think of the verse in this potion vayisa Avraham et einav vayar et hamakom meirachok. Abraham lifted up his eyes, and he saw the place from afar. For Jews, the word hamakom has multiple meanings. It means literally “the place” but in the context of this story, it refers to Jerusalem the center of our world. And also, Hamakom, the Place, is a name for God. Abraham lifted up his eyes and in the distance he saw…. HaMakom. The Place. Maybe he saw God. When I lift my eyes, out there in the mountains, I encounter this story; and I encounter God.
Last week, we moved my mom from her apartment in Independent Living to Assisted Living, which meant a big downsizing. We were packing up all her books and her art, much of it to go to our garage, where it will eventually be distributed among her grandchildren, nieces and nephews and their kids. At one point in the process of decision-making, the very warm, energetic and funny woman that we had hired to help organize the move came up to me. She was holding the Rembrandt etching of the story which had hung in our living room when I was a boy. As always, the etching fills me with awe, with love and with fear. Rembrandt is faithful to the Torah text, but he changes some of the details. Isaac is not bound; he is kneeling. In one hand Abraham holds the knife. The angel is gently but firming holding Abraham, who is holding Isaac. There are no ropes anywhere in the picture, but all three are bound together. Isaac, his father and the angel. Bound together in love and fear.
Our friend the moving organizer said to me “what about this? I think it’s kind of creepy.”
I said “It’s a Rembrandt.”
And she said “well, he has a lot to answer for.”
I said “we’re keeping it.”
L’shanah tova tikateivu v’teichateimu.
May you all be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for a good, sweet, healthy New Year.