Vayera (Torah)

Prelude: The Path of Seeing

Lekh Lekha and Vayera, the two Torah portions devoted to the life of Abraham, seem to form one continuum. Indeed, Nehama Leibowitz (no doubt among others) has noted the symmetrical, chiastic structure of these chapters, molding them into one integral, cyclical unit. What, then, is the significance of their division into two parshiyot, and at the particular point where this was done?

The late Lubavitcher Rebbe commented that Brit Milah, the covenant of circumcision, constituted the turning point in Abraham’s life. Until then, he only knew God in a mahazeh, a dreamlike vision (as in Chapter 15). After Brit Milah, he saw God clearly, speaking to Him intimately, like a man conversing with his friend. The very first word of the parshah, Vayera—“And he [God] appeared to him..”—is emblematic of this new relationship. This phase of Abraham’s life thus represents living with God on a transcendent, covenantal level, quite different from the natural, spontaneous piety of the earlier stage. Interestingly, its first major manifestation was Abraham’s standing up as defense attorney for the righteous people within Sodom against God Himself!

The Paradox of the Akedah

So much has been written about Akedat Yitzhak, the Binding of Isaac, with which this portion concludes, that it seems impossible to say anything new. Nevertheless, one can hardly ignore this story, which is one of the great pinnacles and paradigms of Jewish faith.

The power and paradox of the Akedah have been strikingly articulated by the 19th century Danish Christian theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. In his famous essay, Fear and Trembling, he speaks of Abraham as a “knight of faith,” the intensity and reality of whose faith, of his burning love for God, being the overwhelming reality of his life to which all else was subsumed. Kierkegaard defines the Akedah as the “theological suspension of the ethical.” However much morality and religion seem intertwined, the latter providing the anchor and rationale for the former, a point comes at which man must choose between morality which, divine though its roots may be, is still somehow a function of the “normal” standards of human society, and the theological—the all-consuming passion and demand for devotion to God, and to Him Alone. Kierkegaard movingly describes how, at each step of the journey to Moriah, Abraham never ceased to wonder and question whether this command was in fact from God, or was the voice of some demon.

But is this at all a Jewish approach? The consensus seems to be that in Judaism the whole point of the Akedah is God’s intervening to say, “I do not want such sacrifices,” and the substitution of the ram for Isaac. (This is perhaps strengthened by the midrash about the use of this ram in central movements: its skin became the tunic worn by Elijah; its sinews, the string of David’s harp; and its two horns, the two shofars—the one sounded at Sinai, the other, set aside to announce the coming of the Messiah). A key Rashi says that God never said, “slaughter your son” but only “offer him up as a burnt offering,” seemingly hearkening back to the fine halakhic distinction between the sanctification of an offering, as a significant act in itself, and the actual performance of the sacrifice, which comes thereafter.

But that seems to be begging the question. If God does not want, nay, abhors, human sacrifice, then why should he want Abraham to obey Him by following an order that so perverts His very essence? What sort of religious mind-set can God want, that requires Abraham to overcome his own decent, human sense that the act he is being asked to do is dreadfully wrong? That way lies the type of fundamentalist mind-set that would reject any and all autonomous morality as a religious category, and insist that moral acts are only so because they are commanded in the Torah, rather than vice versa.

An interesting bypath was taken by many Medieval Jews, who had their fill of their own troubles. Shalom Spiegel, in his The Last Trial, demonstrates how the Akedah was often used in a half-ironic, half-midrashic/poetic way by liturgical poets, who compared the Binding of Isaac, which was in the end averted, with the “hundreds of bindings” suffered by the Jewish people in the Diaspora—specifically in the Crusades of the 11th and 12th century, in which such venerable Rhineland Jewish communities as Speyers, Worms, and Mainz were decimated.

But let us take another turn. There is an interesting play in our chapter between the two Divine names, “Elohim” and ”HVYH” (conventionally translated as “God” and “Lord”). At the beginning of the chapter , the former name is used; only at the turning point, when Abraham is told to stay his hand, is the name HVYH used. A conventional Kabbalistic reading would say: but of course. Elohim, which signifies Midat ha-Din—stern Divine sternness and severity and Judgment— calls for the ultimate sacrifice. HVYH—the name of Midat Harahamim, the Divine quality of compassion and mercy, the power that forgives sins and makes covenants with imperfect human beings—calls a halt to this cruel and bloody drama.

I would like to take this idea a bit deeper, and in a slightly different direction. In other essays in this series, I have spoken of the typology, perhaps most fully elaborated by Rav J. B. Soloveitchik in his essay Uvikashtam misham (“And you shall seek from there”), of two kinds of religious experience—the natural and the revelatory. The natural experience is the product of the innate religious drive present in man himself; together with the more instinctual and pragmatic elements in human makeup, every man and woman has an inborn, natural impulse to seek meaning, to discover the ultimate truth of his existence. (This is also the characteristic quality of Abraham, who sought to know his Maker through ceaseless questioning and reflecting and pondering over the strangeness of the world—and ultimately attained it; as against Moses, the father of the prophets). But like all other natural impulses, the religious drive can, in some individuals, dominate the personality to the exclusion of all else, just as can the other natural impulses. Thus, just as a person may become a hedonist, immersed in lust and sexuality; or by driven by an overwhelming desire for power or violence or money; or by intellectual curiosity and the thirst for knowledge; so too may he be dominated by the drive for mystical union with or knowledge of God.

Is this a good or a bad thing? On the face of it, the God-preoccupied obsessed man, the one filled with Ahavat Ha-Shem day and night—“like one lovesick with longing for a certain woman, only more so”—is the ideal type (Rambam, Hilkhot Teshuvah, Ch. 10).

Yet there is a darker side to this. The impulse to serve God with all ones being is a familiar one in the history of human culture. It is the impulse underlying monasticism, in Christianity and in the religions of the Far East. Think of the early Church fathers —of Simon of the desert, who stood upon a pillar for twenty years in order to mortify his flesh, to withdraw from the corruption of an ungodly world. Christianity, in its classic form, is beset by the contradiction between worldliness and faith. Jesus telling his disciples to come and follow him, without even stopping to say goodbye to their father and mother, is a classic example. Or, to take a random example I came across recently, 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 exalts the unmarried state because “the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided”—and vice versa for the married woman. It is the single-mindedness made possible by the state of chastity, and not so much blue-nosed objections to sexuality per se, that underlie the Christian celebration of virginity.

Nor is this extremism confined to the Christian camp. Recently a prominent rabbi, allegedly elucidating the teachings of Rabbi Soloveitchik, wrote that anyone who engages in any other activity—watching a movie, reading a book, talking with friends—when he can be engaged in studying Torah, is guilty of ki devar Hashem baza—“because he has despised the word of the Lord” (Num 15:31). (This same extremism, welded to ideological, political single-mindedness, may give birth to truly demonic acts, as we witnessed in horror at the conclusion of one of these Abrahamic sabbaths just a few years ago—a true sacrifice of Yitzhak. The assassin was no madman, but a fanatic, enjoying the support of an entire community of thought and feeling—much as people would like to forget it.) Fanatical, world-rejecting devotion as the sine qua non of true religion is thus a basic moment in human life—and one manifestation specifically of what the Rav called “natural religious experience”—which for some becomes the dominant theme.

One of the midrashim of the Akedah speaks of God being “put up” to the test of the Akedah, by the taunts of Satan, or of the prince of Ishmael. Sanhedrin 89b describes a heavenly scene reminiscent of the opening chapters of Job, in which God boasts to Satan about the unswerving and unquestioning loyalty and devotion of his servant Abraham. Almost like two drinking buddies in a bar, they make a wager: that Abraham will follow God even to this ultimate absurdity. The test was thus NOT one of whether he would maintain his sense of the truth of God, and be able to say, “This cannot be.”

This strange bet was perhaps met by an equally strange stirring within Abraham’s soul. What greater expression of his own burning passion to serve God with all his being could Abraham find—Avraham ohavi, the one who loved Him with a crazed yearning and thirst—than to sacrifice that which was dearest to him. Precisely because this was the son of his old age, for whom he had yearned and prayed for so many years, until at last, at the age of 100, long after his wife’s body had withered and dried out, her fecundity was miraculously renewed.

In that light, what is signified by the climactic moment of transformation, when the angel of HVYH tells Abraham, “and lay not your hand upon the lad”? I see this as the intervention of the message that the true way of God is not that of fanaticism, of denying ones humanity, of rejecting human needs, but, on the contrary, of their acceptance, and of knowing how to perform the fine balancing act between the service of God and living in the world, between the theocentric and the anthropocentric.

Applying these ideas to the earlier-mentioned typologies, perhaps this balance is paradoxical provided davka by the “revelational experience.” The Jewish understanding of revelation, of Sinai, is not focused upon mystical union, nor even upon a few simple principles (viz. the ambiguous and ambivalent attitude toward the Ten Commandments), but rather upon the Torah in its entirety: the Torah as a complex, multi-faceted book, nay, an entire tradition, of which the written Torah is merely the tip of the iceberg, entering into every area of life. Perhaps the reason for the Revelation being connected to such complex and all-embracing, specific contents is that the Almighty, in His infinite compassion and wisdom, understood that, left to his own devices, man can easily stray from the balanced, holistic life; hence, He gave us the Torah, with its precise guidelines to lead us among the multiple impulses, each one valid and good in themselves, to reach some kind of balance and integration in our lives.