HE ANNIHILATED THOSE

CITIES AND THE ENTIRE PLAIN, AND ALL THE INHABITANTS OF THE CITIES AND THE

VEGETATION OF THE GROUND. LOT'S WIFE LOOKED BACK, AND SHE THEREUPON TURNED INTO

A PILLAR OF SALT. NEXT MORNING, ABRAHAM HURRIED TO THE PLACE WHERE HE HAD STOOD

BEFORE THE LORD, AND HE LOOKED DOWN TOWARD SODOM AND GOMORRAH AND ALL THE LAND

OF THE PLAIN, AND HE SAW THE SMOKE OF THE LAND RISING LIKE THE SMOKE OF A KILN.

 (Bereishit 19:25-28)

'Hashkef' and 'Hashkeefa'

(looking down) – Can the Mode of Viewing Be Changed?

And he looked down – in order to know whether ten [righteous

men] had been found there and whether they were saved, or not.

(RaShBaM Bereishit

19:28)

And he looked down – looking down with scorn for their great

wickedness.

And he saw the smoke of the land rising – thus he knew there

was no point to continue praying for them.

(Seforno ad locum)

Rabbi Alexandri said: Great is the power of those who separate

out tithes, for they change the curse into a blessing. You find that every

place where the term hashkifa is used in the

Torah, it is an expression of suffering, as it is written, the Lord looked

down (va'yashkef) upon the Egyptian army (Shemot 14:24), and

in connection with Sodom it is said, and he looked down toward Sodom. Except

for this: Rabbi Alexandri said: Great is the power of

those who separate out tithes, for they change something cursed into a

blessing, for it is said, Look down from Your holy abode, from heaven, and

bless Your people (Devarim

26:15)

(Shemot Rabbah

41:1)

Trust

Game

Michael Haruni

According to accepted

thinking, God's hope in putting Abraham to the test of the Akedah

is that Abraham will exhibit his complete willingness to obey the command. But

is it really possible that God's ideal human being is one who, upon directly

hearing God's command to murder his son, will indeed choose to obey? Or would

God's ideal human being be capable of independent judgment which accords with

human ethical values?

It seems to me that

our conception of God as the benign Deity conflicts directly with the idea that

God hopes for obedience to His terrible command. And if this is correct, then

the possibility also arises that God's hope is for Abraham to revolt, and that

in failing to do so, Abraham failed his test.

Clearly, merely

declaring this intuition will persuade no one who views the Akedah

in the accepted way – as a test of Abraham's willingness to obey God's command

with complete disregard for any other consideration. Moreover, at first glance,

this accepted view appears to be founded on very convincing grounds: we are

presented with the awful fact that God so commanded Abraham; from which it

seems to follow inevitably that God wishes to see Abraham's willingness to

obey.

However, the

connection between this fact and the seemingly-inevitable conclusion is

weakened, when we look at it in the context of a midrash related by the Talmud:

"And it happened

following this business that God tested Abraham." Following what?

Rabbi Yochanan, on the authority of Rabbi Yosey

Ben Zimra, said: Following the business of the Satan,

where it is written, And the boy grew and

was weaned etc. The Satan said to The Holy One Who is Blessed,

"Sovereign of the Universe, You have graced the 100 years of this old man

with the fruit of a womb; yet throughout all the celebratory feasts he has

made, he has had not a single turtle-dove or nestling to offer to You."

[Then

God] said to him, "Has he really done nothing other than for his son? If I say to him, 'Sacrifice your son to me

immediately,' he will sacrifice him immediately. And then God tested Abraham…

(Sanhedrin 89b; see also slightly different version in

Rashi to Genesis 22, 1)

God's challenge to

Abraham, according to this, purports to justify to the Satan His affection for

Abraham. The Satan points to the fact that Abraham has been celebrating his son

without offering a single sacrifice of thanks to God, Who is thereby provoked

to prove to the Satan that His most excellent protégé is indeed

absolutely subject to His will.

It follows that

Abraham's willingness to obey the command satisfies not God's criteria for the

ideal worldly creature, but the Satan's. God wishes to impress the Satan, for

which purpose He must present Abraham as a person who acts by Satanic standards, not by God's own. Thus we need not infer

from the fact that the command was issued, the conclusion that God Himself sees

Abraham's blind obedience as desirable. It is admittedly true that, typically,

the motive for a subject's demanding something of a person is that subject's

desire for the person to fulfill the demand; and in this respect, the making of

the demand is testimony to a desire for its fulfillment. But here we can point

to a different motive – the desire to impress the Satan – so that the issuing

of the demand is not in this case testimony to a desire for Abraham's

willingness to obey. Hence significant credibility is gained by our

alternative, moral intuition: that while God wishes to present Abraham to the

Satan as totally obedient, God would at the same time detest the willingness to

perform this act commanded.

It is important to

note that it must be possible to interpret the manifest benignity of God, not

only in the fact that, in that final moment, God prevents the completion of the

act. We must also be capable of finding His benignity expressed in the values

which God requests human beings to act by. Imagine a military officer arming

his subordinate soldier with a gun and ordering him to shoot his son dead,

without telling the soldier that in fact the bullets in the gun are duds, and

afterwards praising him for performing the act. We would properly infer that

the officer holds the soldier's obedience in higher regard than a possible

refusal by the soldier to murder his son. It would likewise be implausible that

God has a cardinal abhorrence for Abraham's murder of his son, if we assume

that it pleases God that His most esteemed human being was willing to obey His

command to murder his son – and that he would actually have done so were he not

halted at the final instant by the intervention of God's agent. As long as we

accept that God wished for Abraham's willingness to murder his son in obedience

to His command, we are also committed to regarding this as God's own ethical

preference.

Yet it is clear to us

that God is good. And in order for this to have meaning, there must be some

correspondence between the goodness of God as we are able to interpret it, and the

basic ethical sense given to us as human beings. What then must we do if we

discover an incompatibility between what God tells us to do, and our basic

ethical intuitions such as that we must not murder, or that we must not hurt

unnecessarily?

One option is to

rework this basic ethical sense, so that it does correspond to some morality

which, insofar as appears to us, is manifested by God. The problem with this is

that, if a gap emerges between the morality which we shall then continue to

attribute to God, and the basic ethical sense we began with, then this divine

"morality" turns into an invention that is inadequately tied to any

collection of values which we can properly conceive of as morality. We may

derive, from this divine expression, some principles for conduct – but what

then entitles us to suppose that we have thus engendered a moral conception?

And if we attribute these principles to God, calling them "good", or

"right", then these terms will have been emptied of their regular

meanings, and will cease to signify what is properly familiar to us as ethical.

We would thereby endanger our understanding of God with a severe distortion:

using the lexicon of morality, we would be attributing to God a

"morality" that may be outrageously perverse.

An alternative option

is to hold fast to the correspondence between given human ethics and divine

manifestation, as axiomatic, and to optimally interpret God's commandments and

other expressions as ethical in accordance – in this way following the Rambam's approach in his program of halachic

research (as explained in Guide To the Perplexed, 3, 26). Indeed it

seems that the midrash

presented above purports to pursue precisely this course. It shows us that it

is unnecessary, and distortive, to attribute to God

the value-preference drawn from the traditional reading of the story, as that

is the "morality" of the Satan, which clearly must not be attributed

to God.

It may appear therefore

that what God considered passing the test was revolt. Did Abraham therefore

fail the test? I think in fact not. For it seems to me impossible that Abraham

took God's words, Please take your son, etc.

on face value.

The Talmud continues

the midrash referred to

above as follows:

And He said: Please

take your son Rabbi Simeon Bar

Abba said, Please belongs to the language of entreaty. The Holy One Who

is Blessed said to Abraham: I have subjected you to

several tests and you acquitted yourself well in all of them; now, for Me,

acquit yourself well in this test, so that no one says the founding patriarchs

lack substance…" (Sanhedrin, 89b; cf. also Rashi's version, to Genesis 22, 2.)

It is suggested here

that God openly shared with Abraham that the purpose of the command was not to

set up as a straightforward test, but to create a certain impression upon a

third party; so that Abraham consciously became God's collaborator in an act of

deception. Moreover, even without assuming that God requested this of Abraham

explicitly: how could Abraham not have grasped what

was going on? Think of two soul mates – say, father and son – each intimately

understanding the thoughts and motives of the other; when the father says

something to his son in a given context which, taken literally, is inconsistent

with the son's understanding of his father, then the son naturally interprets

this in some other, non-literal way, automatically switching to an alternative

"gestalt" which matches the context, and which posits some

alternative motive, such as irony, or compliance with an external coercion, or

a wish to deceive someone, perhaps also an invitation to participate in the

deception.

And we must keep in

mind that Abraham is that earth-bound mortal who reintroduced the existence of

God to human consciousness; and that his consciousness of God was not merely as

the Infinite Power; but that he discovered God also as the Champion of kindness

and compassion – recognized Him as the Source of all morality in the world. God's

benignity is revealed particularly touchingly when He tells Abraham what

finally decides the fate of Sodom. "Let Me descend and see: is this how

her screaming sounds (hak'tsa'akatah)? If they have done this, then they are finished, and

if not, then I shall know." (Genesis,

18, 21) According to midrash, the screaming referred to here is that of a

young girl in Sodom, who gave a pail full of flour to her girlfriend who was close

to dying of starvation. The people of Sodom learned of her act of kindness,

"hoisted her up and burned her. Said the Holy One Who is Blessed: Even if I wished to keep silent, the justice due to

a young girl does not allow me to keep silent. Thus it is stated, 'hak'tsa'akatah' refers

to the screaming of a young girl." (Genesis Rabbah, 49, 6)

It is unthinkable to

Abraham, knowing God in this way, believes that He really seeks Abraham's

willingness to murder his son. Absolutely convinced that God is a moral force,

Abraham immediately senses that motives are operating here other than those

suggested by a literal understanding of the utterance, Please

take your son etc. He knows with certainty that he must act out the pretense of total obedience – while certain to the same extent

that, at a certain point, he will be halted.

It is with this

certainty that he rises early and plays through the task, calmly and

unhesitatingly, until the moment of lifting the slaughterer's knife. Nothing in

his behavior is even faintly reminiscent of his anguishing and resistance prior

to his mission to Sodom, or before his exiling of Hagar and Ishmael. For he is

working as God's co-conspirator in the defrauding of the Satan – and it is

clear as daylight to him that the action will be arrested, the moment they

jointly "prove" his obedience. He even reveals his real intention to

his two lads when he tells them, we shall worship and we shall return, (Genesis 22, 5; and we

need not assume, as Rashi does there, that he is

revealing a prophecy). His eager responsiveness expresses, not his enthusiasm

to perform the sacrifice, but his conviction that God will not countenance

human sacrifice.

The Satan can also be

deleted from our version of the story – for those unhappy with the problematic

theology otherwise implicated – and retained just as metaphorical

representation of a certain abstraction. The Ramban

writes:

The test serves, in

my opinion, to impart to human action the status of an absolute. If he wishes

he acts, if he does not wish he does not act – in this respect it is a test,

from the perspective of the subject under test. But the Tester (Who will be

praised) is commanding him to bring this thought from potentiality to

actuality; so that a reward will attach to a right action, not merely to a

right intention. (Ibid, 1)

The Ramban is saying that the purpose of the test, from the

side of God, is not to ascertain what this person will do – for this is already

known to God. His purpose is to justify the granting of an appropriate reward,

in the history that will later unfold. For justice to be done, the person's

action, not only the intention underlying it, must be

fully compliant to the will of God. Hence it is not enough that Abraham has

excellent intentions: he must also act, in order to justify (in this case), the

elevating of his offspring to the status of sacred nation. In this version,

too, it is clear to Abraham from the outset that he is God's collaborator in a

game. And it is equally clear to him that a willingness on his part to perform

the sacrifice would be abhorrent to God; and that a different motive operates

for Him, namely, the need to establish the rule of justice in His world. As in

those games in which one player hurls himself groundwards,

completely trusting his partner to catch him before he lands, Abraham rushes to

collaborate, driven by his certainty that at the final moment – once it is

registered in history that Abraham did all in his power to complete the act – the

rule of compassion will gain ascendancy, and he will be halted.

Michael Haruni's play, STa"M, is scheduled for production in the 5765

repertoire of Herzliya Ensemble Theater.

Could it “Come to Mind” that God Would Demand Human Sacrifice?

For they and their

came to My mind.

(Jeremiah 19:4-5)

And it is written: which

mind (Jeremiah 19:5).

Which I never

commanded – That is the son of Meisha, king of Moav, for it is said, So he took his first-born son, who

was to succeed him as king, and offered him up as a burnt offering (II Kings 4:27)

Never decreed – that

is Yiftah.

And which never came to My mind – that is Isaac, son of Abraham.

(Ta'anit 4a)

And which never came to My mind – That is Meisha, king of Moav, of whom it

is written that when he fell into the hands of the king of Israel, He took

burnt offering (II Kings 4:27).

What caused Meisha to sacrifice his son? The fact

that he was not a Torah scholar. For if he had read the Torah, he would

have not lost his son, for it is written in the Torah, When anyone

scale shall apply: If it is a male… and if it is a female… (Vayikra 27:2). This

is [an example of] A wise man acquires lives (Mishlei 11:30).

(Tanhuma Be'hukoti

5)

Mine is Mine and Yours is Mine, this is the Attribute of Sodom

It was only because of

the beneficence which the Omnipresent bestowed upon them that the men of Sodom

were haughty before Him, for it is said, A land out of which comes bread… its

rocks are a source of sapphires… no bird of prey knows the path to it… (Job 28:5-7). The people of Sodom said: Since

food comes forth from our land, and silver and gold come forth from our land,

and precious stones and gems come forth from our land, we do not need people to

come to us – they will only deplete our wealth – so we shall keep away

visitors. The Holy One blessed be He told them: When I

was good to you, you wanted to keep visitors away from you, I shall cause you

to have no more visitors, and cause you to be no more in the world. Thus, he

said, They opened a stream far from where

men live [in places forgotten by wayfarers] (28:4)…

Robbers live untroubled in their tents (12:6)…

And so He says, As I live – declares the

needy] (Ezekiel 16: 48-9).

(Tosefta Sotah

3:3)

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