AND HE LIFTED HIS EYES AND SAW, AND BEHOLD, THREE MEN WERE STANDING BESIDE HIM, AND HE SAW AND HE RAN TOWARD THEM FROM THE ENTRANCE OF THE TENT, AND HE PROSTRATED HIMSELF TO THE GROUND.

(Bereishit 18:2)

 

We have already stated that the forms in which angels appear form part of the prophetic vision. Some prophets see angels in the form of man, e.g., And behold three men stood by him (Bereishit 18:2); others perceive an angel as a fearful and terrible being, e.g., And his countenance was as the countenance of an angel of God, very terrible (Judges 8:6); others see them as fire, e.g., And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire (Shemot 3:2). In Bereshit Rabbah (chap. l.) the following remark occurs: "To Abraham, whose prophetic power was great, the angels appeared in the form of men; to Lot, whose power was weak, they appeared as angels." This is an important principle as regards Prophecy; it will be fully discussed when we treat of subject (chap. 32. sqq.). Another passage in Bereshit Rabbah (ibid.) runs thus: "Before the angels have accomplished their task they are called men, when they have accomplished it they are angels."

(RaMBaM Guide for the Perplexed, II:6 Friedländer translation)

 

There was an incident concerning Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Tzadok, who were reclining at the wedding feast of the son of Rabban Gamliel. Rabban Gamliel mixed a cup [of wine] for Rabbi Eliezer, but he did not want to take it.

Rabbi Yehoshua did take it.

Rabbi Eliezer said to him, "What is this, Yehoshua? Is it right that we sit while Rabban Gamliel waits upon us?"

 Rabbi Yehoshua replied to him, "Let him serve; Abraham, the greatest person in the world, served the angels, whom he thought were idolatrous Arabs, for it is said, And he lifted his eyes and saw, and behold, three men were standing beside him (Bereishit 18:2). Is it not a kal v'homer [an a fortiori argument, from the greater to the lesser]? Abraham, who was the greatest in the world, served the angels whom he thought were idolatrous Arabs, then shouldn't Gamliel serve the rabbi?

Rabbi Tzadok said to them: "You have ignored the honor of the Omnipresent and instead concern yourselves with the honor of flesh and blood! If the One Who spoke and the world was brought into existence makes the wind blow and raises up clouds and sends down rain and cultivates plants and sets a table for each and every one, should Gamliel not serve the rabbi?

(Sifri Devarim 38, s.v. lo ke'eretz)

 

"Don't raise your hand against the boy!"

Daniel Rohrlich

I dedicate this essay to the memory of my beloved wife, Babette. In fact, her connection with the essay goes far beyond the dedication. I knew that Babette had written her master's thesis on interpretations of the Akeda in midrash, but I had never read her thesis and did not even know where it was. Towards the second anniversary of Babette's death, I looked for, and discovered, the thesis. Writing in precise, lucid, and graceful French, she discussed some twelve strata of translations and midrashim dating from the Second Temple period up to the 13^th century, and cited additional commentaries, both ancient and modern. Her thesis opened up the world of midrash to me and left me with the question at the heart of this essay. Thus, I have written it in full partnership with Babette.

The Akeda ["Binding of Isaac"] tells how God subjected Abraham to a test. It begins with God's call to him:

He said to him, "Please take your son, your only one, whom you love - Isaac - and go to the land of Moria..."

Even before we reach the fateful word ve'ha'alehu - and offer him up - the tension mounts as the command becomes more and more explicit. It is as if God is showing Abraham that He is aware of how shocking it is. In Breshit Rabba Rabbi Yohanan amplifies the command to a dialogue:

He said to him, "Pray, please take your son."

He said to Him, "I have two sons, to which son [do you refer]?"

He said to him, "Your only son."

He said to Him, "This one is the only son of his mother, and that one is the only son of his mother."

He said to him, "Whom you love."

He said to Him, "Is my love limited to one of them?"

He said to him, "Isaac!"

Where have we seen a command that builds up such tension? It was in parashat Lekh Lekha (Breshit 12:1), as Rabbi Yohanan explains:

The Lord said to Abram, "Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you..."

Go forth - i.e. from your region,

and from your birthplace - your locale,

and from your father's house - literally, your father's house,

to the land that I will show you.

And why did he not reveal the whole command immediately?

In order to increase its value, to reward him for each and every word and for each and every step.

The two instances of the command lekh lekha - "Go forth!" - parallel and complete each other. The first command coincides with God's first revelation to Abraham, while the latter command coincides with God's last revelation to him.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (circa 9^th or 10^th century) counts these two commands as the first and last of ten tests to which God subjects Abraham. But the two commands also contradict each other. In the former, God promises Abraham, "I will make of you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great, and you will be a blessing," while the latter command nullifies that promise.

Commenting on this contradiction, Yeshayahu Leibowitz[1] pointed out that Abraham was already said to "have faith in the Lord" back in parashat Lekh Lekha (Breshit 15:6). So what is the significance of God's saying to Abraham at the Akeda, "For now I know that you fear God" (22:12)? Leibowitz answered that even if Abraham was known to have faith in the Lord, nothing had yet been said about the character of that faith. After all, also our forefathers were said to have had faith in the Lord (Shmot 14:31) - and they worshipped the Golden Calf! Hence parashat Vayera tells us the story of the Akeda "to make clear the uniqueness of the faith of our first ancestor." Leibowitz concludes, "The great test of religious faith is whether a person is at all capable of faith in the Lord solely as God, and not as a god invoked to serve human needs. The Akeda shows us Abraham bereft of everything save the pure service of God, shorn of any promise or reward, and of any presupposition about the ways of Providence. This is faith in its deepest sense."

I once heard Leibowitz mention a very intelligent woman who had come to visit him. She spoke to him of her son who had fallen ill, of how the doctors had lost hope, and of how she discovered faith in God "when, by the grace of God, my son recovered." Leibowitz (who himself had lost two sons) responded to her gently, "I know a woman whose son fell ill and, by the grace of God, her son died." The visitor fell into silence and then said, "I must thank you, Prof. Leibowitz, for opening my eyes to the true meaning of faith in God." This distinction between faith in God based on our expectations of Him and faith in God based solely on His divinity - between faith shelo lishma [with an ulterior motive] and faith lishma [selfless faith] - is indeed deep and vital for understanding the central place of the Akeda in Jewish religious consciousness.

Nevertheless it is hard for us to hear a story about such a horrific command - the command to Abraham to immolate his son. Doesn't God have more fitting tests? Doesn't Abraham have grounds for opposing this command? The midrashim make clear that he does. But Abraham keeps quiet, his famous question - "Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?" - left unasked. Why? Apparently, Abraham was willing to fight only for a cause in which he had no personal stake. Indeed, why did he not bargain God down to five righteous people? Perhaps for the same reason: asking to save Sodom for the sake of five righteous people would have been a personal issue (if we count Lot, his wife, their two daughters and two sons-in-law as righteous).

So we have not answered the question, why God tested Abraham with an act condemned in these words (Devarim 12:31):

You shall not do so to the Lord, your God; for every abhorrent act that the Lord detests they do for their gods; they even offer up their sons and their daughters in fire to their gods.

We read also, in Jeremiah 7:30-31:

For the people of Judah have done what displeases me, declares the Lord; they have set up their abominations in the house called by My name, defiling it. And they have built the shrines of Tofet in the valley of Ben-Hinom, to burn up their sons and daughters, which I did not command and which never entered My mind.

Jeremiah 19:5 is particularly suggestive:

They have built shrines to Baal to set their children on fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command, and of which I did not speak, and which never entered My mind.

Midrash Tanhuma (Buber edition) unpacks the verse's allusions: "Our Rabbis taught... that I did not command Yiftah to sacrifice his daughter, and I did not speak to the king of Moab about sacrificing his son, and it never entered My mind to tell Abraham to slaughter his son...; even though I said 'Please take', it did not enter My mind that he should slaughter his son, as it is written: 'I shall not profane My covenant'" (Psalms 89:35).

Did Abraham misunderstand God's command? God may well never have intended for Abraham to slaughter Isaac; nevertheless he led him up to the moment of "Don't raise your hand against the boy!" and at that moment proclaimed, "Now I know that you fear God" - Abraham passed the test. If so, we still lack an answer to the question, why did God choose such a monstrous test?

I will try to answer this question from the standpoint of the ancients who lived in the days when the sacrifice of children to idols was a fact of life. I shall assume that it was the ultimate sacrifice - also in the eyes of the idolaters whose sacrifice it was - as we can infer from Midrash Tanhuma (Buber edition):

And how was the Molekh [worshipped] in the valley of Ben-Hinom? It was done outside of Jerusalem in a grand place. There was an idol there with the face of a calf, its arms spread forth... they would heat it up until its arms were like fire. It had seven screens, and it stood behind them all. Each [devotee] would enter according to his sacrifice. One who offered a fowl would enter past the first screen; a goat - past the second; a lamb - past the third; a calf - past the fourth; a bullock - past the fifth; an ox - past the sixth. The priests would say that the sacrifice of one who offered his son was unsurpassed; he would enter past the seventh screen...

Considering how this horror was condemned by Scripture, we can assume that the Akeda story is actually meant to uproot it. But who could uproot it? Apparently, only someone who was capable of sacrificing his own son or daughter could uproot the practice. Abraham would have impressed the ancients as a weakling and a coward if he were incapable of making the supreme sacrifice. Also, a God willing to settle for a lesser sacrifice would have been thought weak. The Akeda is a personal example of putting an end to the horror as a value choice and not as an act of weakness. It comes to proclaim to the world both that the Lord is the Supreme God and also that His Torah is a Torah of life and not a Torah of death. A passage from Breshit Rabba can be understood this way: "`For now I know [yadati]' - I have made it known [hodati] to all that you [Abraham] love Me." From the land of Moria, which, according to Breshit Rabba, refers both to fear [yira] and to instruction [hora'a], came forth the instruction to stop child sacrifices, since God stopped Abraham, who loved Him, from sacrificing Isaac to Him. If so, the message of the Akeda contains both the example of Abraham's fear of God - faith in God for its own sake - and also God's instruction to uproot the sacrifice of children.

Midrash Tanhuma hints at both messages: "He goes along weeping, carrying the seed-bag; but he will come back with joyful song as he carries his sheaves" (Psalms 126:6) - Abraham went weeping to the Akeda; and the seed was Isaac - "for Isaac will be named your seed" (Breshit 21:12).

Daniel Rohrlich is a physicist.

 

The Binding of Isaac: The Humane View

And place him upon the altar: Abraham's eyes are fastened upon Isaac's eyes, and Isaac's eyes upon the highest of Heavens, and tears dropped from Abraham's eyes, his entire length covered with tears. He said to him: My son, since you have already begun to shed a fourth of your blood, your Creator will provide another offering in your stead. At that moment, his mouth opened in sobbing and great moaning, and his eyes looked about for the Divine Presence and he raised his voice and said, "I lift my eyes to the hills, from whence will come my help? My help is from the Lord creator..." The ministering angels stood in ranks in the firmament, saying one to the other: See how the only one slaughters and the only one is slaughtered! They said: Who will sing before You, "This is my Lord - I honor him"? What will become of the vow "So will be your seed"? Immediately [the angel spoke]: "Do not stretch out your hand against the lad."

(Yalkut Shimoni, Bereishit, 22:101)

 

The Thin Line between Idolatry and Service of God

That deep addiction to idolatry, which was, for primitive man, the be-all and end-all, even to the point of triumphing over parental compassion, making cruelty towards sons and daughters a permanent feature of Molokh - worship, is a clouded consequence of the recognition hidden in man's heart that the divine is the dearest of all matters, and everything beloved pleasant thing is nothing compared to it.

(Rabbi Kook's Iggrot RAYaH, Vol. II, p. 43)

 

 

"What Is Mine Is Mine, and What Is Yours Is Yours, This Is a Characteristic of Sodom."

The people of Sodom rebelled against the Omnipresent because of all the good showered upon them, as is written (Job 28): Earth, out of which food grows... Its rocks are a source of sapphires... No bird of prey knows the path to it... The people of Sodom said: Inasmuch as food comes out of our earth, and silver and gold comes from our earth, and precious stones and pearls come out of our lands, we have no need for people to join us - they will lessen our fortunes. Let us stand, and deny their presence among us. The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said: When I am good to you, you forbid others from joining you. I will cause you to disappear from the earth. What is the scriptural source for this? He carves out channels through rock, his eyes behold every precious thing" (Ibid.) and Robbers lie untroubled in their tents.. and [the verse] As I live - declares the Lord God - your sister Sodom and her daughters did not do what you and your daughters did...Only this was the sin of your sister Sodom: arrogance! She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility, yet she did not support the poor and the needy (Ezekiel 16).

(Tosefta Sota 3:3)

 

Elisabeth Nehama Warschawski - "Babette" - was born in Strasbourg on Shabbat, the ninth of Av 5718 (1958). She was the sixth of seven children born to Rabbi Meir Shimon Warschawski and his wife Mireille. After completing an MA at the University of Strasbourg, she came to live in Israel and continued her studies of the history of religion in the Second Temple period and of archaeology. In 1982 she joined the staff of the Centre de Recherche Français de Jérusalem - a French governmental institution that supports the work of French and Israeli researchers in the fields of archeology, history, and the social sciences - and in 1977 became the Secretary General of the Center. Babette died on the 15^th of Sivan 5766 after a protracted struggle with cancer, and was survived by her husband, Daniel Rohrlich, their daughter Talia (who became a Bat-Mitzvah two months after Babette's passing), her parents, brothers, sisters, and many others who loved her.

 

 

 

 

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