Parashat Vayera
Dr. Ariel Resnikoff, Jewish Studies Teacher
At the close of this week’s Torah portion, Vayera–meaning “and he appeared”–we encounter the crucial and deeply challenging story of Akeidat Yitzkhak, the Binding of Isaac. God speaks to Abraham and commands him to sacrifice his “favored” son, Isaac, as a test of Abraham’s devotion. Abraham agrees and takes Isaac on a journey to Mount Moriah where he plans to bind and sacrifice him. Yet, just as he is about to go through with the grisly act, an angel appears and instructs Abraham to sacrifice a ram “caught in the thicket by its horns” instead of the boy. The angel then informs Abraham that he has passed God’s test and that God will bestow his blessing upon Abraham’s descendants and make them “numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore.”
In my Jewish Thought and Jewish Thought Honors courses these past couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing this unsettling story in the context of our unit “Ha-Makom: The Jewish Search for Divinity.” Is this not a strange legend-of-origin for the Jewish people’s devotion to God? Is it not a hard pill to swallow that our covenantal relationship with the divine originates from this painful near-filicide? There is no way around it: the story of the Binding of Isaac is a story of intergenerational trauma, and indeed, it is the last time we encounter Abraham and Isaac together in the Bible, and the last time God speaks to Abraham. Moreover, as Rashi expounds, when Isaac’s mother Sara heard of the traumatic event, it was simply too much for her to bear, and she died.
What then do we do with such an origin story, I asked my students, which has certainly not aged well–to say the least–and which poses major moral and ethical dilemmas for the Jewish collective and all peoples of the book? We can’t simply do away with the story, since it is, after all, scripture, and must somehow be maintained in order to keep the contours of our Jewish collectivity intact. And yet, it doesn’t sit well with us, doesn’t align with our modern values, and feels difficult to face from the perspective of the contemporary moment.
In his powerful essay, “Talking about God: Symbolic Language,” the Jewish philosopher, Neil Gilman, suggests the following as a possible way out of the painfully irreconcilable narrative a story like the Binding of Isaac poses: “We will retain the text, unaltered, precisely because we can interpret it in an infinite number of ways.” This iterative (re)interpretation process, Gilman argues, is in fact “a process of ‘remythologizing’ or, in Jewish sources, midrash.” Indeed, it is midrash itself, that allows the Jewish people to make relevant and palpable an origin story like the Akeidah.
A good example of this midrashic re-mythologization appears in the Babylonian Talmud, when R’ Abbahu asks: “Why do we blow on a ram’s horn? The Holy One, blessed be He, said: Sound before Me a ram’s horn so that I may remember on your behalf the Binding of Isaac the son of Abraham, and account it to you as if you had bound yourselves before Me” (Talmud Rosh Ha-Shanah 16a). Or else in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, when we recite the following: “O King, recall the ram caught by its horns in the thicket, / on behalf of those who sound the ram’s horn on this day” (Koren Rosh HaShana Maḥzor 416). The midrashic thinking in both these cases turns its focus to the ram, a wholly minor and utterly tangential character in the biblical narrative, which takes on a drastically new significance within the context of midrash. By turning our attention to the ram, we understand what might’ve been and shift our perspective away from the near-filicidal tradition and toward a more merciful and compassionate conceptualization of our origin story, which the symbol of the ram begins to represent.
I want to conclude here by reflecting that when I was a child my parents often spoke of the various lasting powers of the Jewish people–that is, the elements of Jewish life and culture that have allowed the Jews to survive and thrive through the centuries and millennia. Often they would speak of particular values – education, literacy, charity, community – which are all remarkable aspects of Jewish civilization; however, the more I think about it, the more I tend to imagine our ability as Jews to drash–to improvise on our own standards and make midrash from our ancient texts as a means of renewing & recontextualizing these ancient texts–which has allowed us to persevere as we have for so long. In discussing this with my students, I used the metaphor of art conservation, where midrash might be understood as the medium and mode of maintenance and preservation of the classical materials. Like the art conservator working with tweezers, awls, scalpels, brushes, erasers and cotton swabs, the Jewish people use midrash as a means of filling in the gaps between the reality of scripture and the reality of our contemporal Jewish existence. Or as Yehuda Amichai writes in his modern drash-poem on the Akeidah:
The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
Abraham and God had gone long before.
But the real hero of The Binding of Isaac
is the ram.
