In a Bind

This week we read “The Binding of Isaac” (Akedat Yitzchak), one of the most enigmatic ethical puzzles in the Torah. That rabbinic name for the story brings us right to the point of moral tension. Abraham, on God’s orders, has brought his son Isaac up a mountain, and has bound him in preparation for ritual sacrifice. A heavenly voice ultimately stops him from going through with it. But even though the two walk away from the scene alive, the binding haunts them and later readers through the ages.

Each character evades easy understanding: 

Why did Abraham not argue for justice like he did earlier regarding Sodom and Gomorrah? 

What’s the deal with Isaac???? Was he tricked? A willing participant? A child or a grown son?

And most perplexingly, why did God tell Abraham to do it, and then why did God stop him from doing it? What was the point of it all? 

We are left in a bind, unable to resolve the contradictions neatly. 

Surely Abraham can’t be the one that God “singled out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of God by doing what is just and right” (Genesis 18:19), and also be a father who “picked up the knife to slay his son” (Genesis 22:10). And yet he is. 

And even if we lean towards hearing God’s command as requiring faith above ethics, or alternatively as demanding ethical condemnation, we struggle to resolve God’s initial directions with the later change of mind. Does God want this, or not? 

For me, the story resists resolution because it is illustrating through a graphic and memorable parable an enduring tension in human ethics, one that cannot (or should not) be fully resolved: the tension between purpose and survival, and more abstractly between universalism and particularism. 

The moral tension in the story does not resolve around the problem of one human killing another (there are other stories exploring that subject), but around the problem of sacrificing one’s own family in pursuit of ideology. God puts Abraham in a no-win situation. He has to choose to follow the voice of his purpose or ensure the survival of his family and future, but he cannot choose both. 

Ultimately, God seems pleased that Abraham chose purpose, but also aware that although ideas never die, only living people can carry them forward. God tells Abraham, “All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants, because you have obeyed My command” (Genesis 22:18).

In this one sentence, the strange bind of Jewish community emerges. We have a universal purpose (if vague), and a distinct and particular need to survive as ourselves, as people who carry forward the covenant between God and Abraham. Our job as Jews is to bring survival and purpose into balance. 

Although this moment in time for Jews in America feels exhausting and complicated and fraught and fraying in so many ways, we have a fascinating opportunity to hear “out loud” the essential tension of Judaism and take ownership over our part in the ongoing conversation. We are in an akedah moment. 

How many of us feel like we must choose between what we think is right and who we are related to (maybe in a literal and immediate sense, or in a looser tribal sense both ethnically and politically)? 

Some hear God’s initial call of moral purpose, and are willing to sacrifice their familial ties for the sake of what they think is right.

Some hear the voice telling Abraham to stop, and furiously denounce anyone who would threaten Isaac, the survival of the Jewish people. (This voice was particularly loud regarding New York in recent weeks…)

The disagreements seem sharper than a knife. But we have two ears, and capacity to hear both voices. Most of us, I think, continue to feel bound up in our complex Jewish family, and are doing our best to navigate how to live up to our Jewish ideals and protect actual Jewish lives, even as we may have wildly different readings of reality. 

I believe complete polarization fails the test of an akedah moment. Abraham and Isaac walk down the mountain separately, and they appear not to exchange words again. It is possible that centuries from now, history books will document the emergence of a schism, and dedicated practitioners of various religious communities will ponder with difficulty how we could have all understood ourselves as klal yisrael, one Jewish whole, when it was obviously the foment of now fully independent communities and traditions. This has happened before in Jewish history. There was a time when Christians were still a Jewish sect. 

But that’s not what happens in the Torah’s story of the akedah. When we invoke Abraham and Isaac today, they are both our ancestors. We must somehow internalize rather than externalize the poles of purpose and survival if we are to carry on together in any meaningful sense.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine