• This Week's Torah Portion

Did Abraham pass the test of the Akeidah or fail it? Did his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac in response to God’s command in Genesis 22:2 prove his faith and love of God? Or did Abraham at once pass a test of fear and awe, as indicated by the statement of the angel of God in Genesis 22:11 (“For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only one, from Me.”), and fail a test of love? The Akeidah story opens with a description of Isaac as the son “asher ahavta” (whom you love) but concludes by lopping off the modifier “whom you love.” This suggests a quelling of familial love during Abraham and Isaac’s hike up Mount Moriah. At the story’s end, father and son, previously described as walking yahdav (together), (Genesis 22:6,8), no longer appear together. Abraham moves to Beersheba; Sarah, conspicuously absent from the whole affair, dies apart from Abraham in Kiryat Arba near Hebron. But it is not merely Abraham’s emotional solidarity with Isaac and Sarah that breaks down as a consequence of the Akeidah. It is his relationship with God that comes apart, too. If the story begins with a direct command from God to Abraham, it culminates with God speaking to Abraham through an angel, and never again directly, indicative of a faith test gone awry. There you have it: my own interpretation of the Akeidah story, wherein Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac represents a model of faith through worldly detachment that alienates not just Isaac and Sarah, but in some measure, God, too. In contrast, Sarah’s absence from the narrative in Genesis 22 suggests an opposite and ultimately more successful approach, one of connection and love rather than detachment and fear. Proof of this is that when Isaac married Rebecca at the end of Genesis 24:68, he brought Rebecca into his mother, Sarah’s, tent and he loved her. Of course, there is no biblical story that has been commented upon and rewritten over the Jewish generations more than the Akeidah. Traditional liturgy invokes the story as a source of merit for the descendants of Abraham and Isaac. During the Middle Ages, liturgical poets rewrote the story with Isaac actually being sacrificed and then resurrected, thereby using the Akeidah to challenge the unique claims of Christianity (for more on this interpretation, see Shalom Spiegel’s “The Last Trial,” 1967). Twentieth century Hebrew poets used the sacrificial story of the Akeidahto protest the Jewish calamities of the Shoah and, after the establishment of the state of Israel, the death of Israeli soldiers in the country’s various wars. The emergence of Hebrew women’s poetry in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries added yet another facet to the Akeidah tradition. Recalling rabbinic midrashic attempts to account for the absence of Sarah from the biblical account in Genesis 22, Israeli women poets depicted the prospect of Isaac’s sacrifice from a Sarah-centric, maternal point of view, rejecting the idea that there was any merit to be gained from Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God. One of the earliest female-authored poetic midrashim is “The Akeidah,” a 1970 poem by poet and folklorist Aliza Shenhar (born 1943):

The Akeidah The loudspeaker screamed “Take your only one The one you love.” And the altar is destroyed The altar / battle wood is scattered. The youths roll balls of love on the grass of their youth. Their language is hot. The knife glints in the wadi in the light of the moon of mid-border. The white angel, the one who always cries “Please don’t lay a hand!” Is on leave.

הַעֲקֵדָה הָרָמְקוֹל צָרַח ״קְחִי נָא אֶת יְחִי‎דֵךְ אֶת אֲשֶׁר אָהַבְתְּ.״ וְהַמִּזְבֵּחֵ הָרוּס. עֲצֵי הַמַַּעֲרָכָה פְּזוּרִים. הַנְּעָרִים מְגַלְגְּלִים כַּדוּרֵי אַהֲבָה עַל-פְּנֵי דֶּשֶׁא צְעִירוּתָם. לְשׁוֹנָם חַמָּה. הַמּאֲכֶלֶת נוֹצֶצֶת בַָּוַאדִי לְאוֹר יָרֵחַ שֶׁל אֶמְצַע הַגְּבוּל. הַמַּלְאָךְ הַלָּבָן, זֶה שֶׁתָּמִיד צוֹעֵק ״אַל נָא תִּשְׁלְחִי יָדֵךְ״ בְּחֻפְשָׁה רְגִילָה.

Shenhar’s “The Akeidah” brings the story into the secular context of Israeli military service, but in so doing utterly undermines it as a source of merit and salvation. First, she imagines a (military) loudspeaker rather than God calling on a mother “to take” her only one, whom she loves. From there, she pictures a ruined, rather than ready, altar. Likewise, she describes the “atzei maʿarachah,” which can be translated either as “the wood of sacrifice” or “the wood of battle,” as being scattered, unfit for use in either ritual or war. The poet then portrays the youthful soldiers playfully rolling “kadurei ahavah” (balls of love) on the grass of their youth. The word “ahavah” (love) recalls the initial description of Isaac as the son whom Abraham loved. Here, though, the reference to love suggests late adolescent sexual awakening and a desire on the part of those performing their compulsory army service to make love, not war. The word “kadur” can be translated as either “ball” or “bullet.” It also points to military training and war games, a notion heightened by the descriptions that follow of heated (read, aggressive) language and of a “ma’achelet” (the term twice used for “knife” in Genesis) glinting in the wadi, an indication of a looming military threat. But while an angel intercedes in the Akeidah to save young Isaac from slaughter, Shenhar’s poem has no hoped-for angel who can stop the violence and death. Instead, the angel is absent, off on leave. The angel being on leave is the final bureaucratic undoing of the Akeidah as a tale of innocent youth saved. I sit here writing about this poem on the eve of the anniversary of the October 7^th attack against Israel. War now rages on several fronts, with some 97 of the original 251 hostages still being held in Gaza. Reading this poem against this grim backdrop brings a heightened sense of what the mothers and other family members of the hostages have been enduring all year, their loved ones either being held captive or newly called up to serve in the perilous wadis, towns, and tunnels of this war. One year later, we have no sense of if, when, or where the angels of peace might ever again appear. One can only pray that the “test” of this war will be passed in some lasting way so that love, not fear, can finally emerge triumphant in our national and political story.