PROOF TESTS OF A FATHER'S LOVE
Francie Schwartz

PARASHAH OVERVIEW |

God tests Abraham, instructing him to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. (22:1–19)

FOCAL POINT |

Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. God said to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “Here I am.” And God said, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.”… He [Abraham] laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. (Genesis 22:1–2; 9–10)

YOUR GUIDE |  

1. The Hebrew verb nisah (Genesis 22:1), translated by Plaut as “put to the test,” can also mean “put on trial,” “proved,” or “tempted” (The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon, p. 650). If God “put Abraham on trial,” what was Abraham’s “crime”? What was God trying to “prove”? How was Abraham being “tempted”?

2. The Torah is often quite terse, giving only the most essential points. Yet in this story we read detail after detail: “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love,” and “He laid him on the altar, on top of the wood,” and “Abraham picked up the knife….” Why is so much specific information presented here? What emotions are being conveyed?

3. With whom do you identify, the parent or the child? Has your perspective shifted through your years of studying this story?

4. Why is the story of the Akeidah, the “Binding of Isaac,” read on Rosh HaShanah?
   

• “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love” (Genesis 22:2). This is the first time that the Hebrew verb meaning “love,” ahav, appears in the Bible, used here in connection with the parent-child relationship. (Etz Hayim, The Jewish Publication Society, 2001, p. 118)

• The words of the dialogue between the father and the son become charged…. Isaac adds the phrase “my father” in his question addressed to Abraham, and Abraham adds “my son” in each sentence in response. The words “son” and “father” occur twelve times in the story and are, in almost every case, unnecessary for identification. (Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on The Torah, Harper San Francisco, 2001, p. 74)

• “And offer him” (literally, bring him up). He did not say “slay him,” because the Holy One did not desire that he should slay him, but God told Abraham to bring him up to the mountain to prepare him as a burnt offering. (Rashi on Genesis 22:2)

• In the light of the historical reality of second-century persecution under the Roman Empire, it seemed almost as though something of the splendor and awe of the biblical Akeidah story was diminished. Right before your eyes, in the immediate present, fathers and sons en masse ascend the executioner’s block. (Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Commands to Abraham to Offer Isaac As a Sacrifice, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993, p. 15)

• [Said Mushullam ben Isaac:] “Listen to me both great and small. This son God gave me, my wife Zipporah bore him in her old age, and his name is Isaac. Now I shall offer him up as did our ancestor Abraham with his son Isaac…. He who gave him to us will take him as His portion…. He then bound Isaac his son and took in his hand the knife with which to slaughter his son and made the benediction for slaughtering. The lad answered, “Amen.” He then slaughtered the lad. He took his screaming wife. The two of them departed together from the chamber, and the Crusaders killed them. (“The Mainz Anonymous” in In the Year 1096…The First Crusade and the Jews by Robert Chazen, The Jewish Publication Society, 1996, p. 94)

• God ordered Abraham to “sacrifice” his son, and sacrifice is different from murder, as evidenced by the inclusion of “whom you love” in the description of the sacrificial object. You murder those you hate; you sacrifice what you love most. Abraham may have been entitled to sacrifice “what is most precious” to him—as long as it was his to sacrifice. His life, his fortune, his health—yes. But his son? No! (Alan Dershowitz, The Genesis of Justice, Warner Books, 2000, p. 112)
  
  

YOUR GUIDE |

1. Why do you think that the story of the Akeidah includes the first incidence of the word “love” in the Torah, as noted in Etz Hayim? How do Abraham’s actions in this parashah demonstrate his love for Isaac? Compare Abraham’s love with the manner in which we are commanded to love God: “You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5).

2. Based on Friedman’s commentary, whom and what do you think God was testing—Abraham, Isaac, or God’s own resolve?

3. Compare the views of Rashi and Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. Are “burnt offering,” sacrifice,” and “murder” synonyms for the same act? Did Abraham have the right to sacrifice Isaac? Did God have the “right” to request this of Abraham?

4. Scholars Spiegel and Chazan cite times of Jewish persecution, during which Jewish fathers did in fact kill their sons and were then slain. In what way might the story of the Akeidah have given these Jewish fathers some solace?
   

A popular song of some years back asked quite bluntly, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” The answer is, everything! If our biblical narrative had not detailed the love that our first patriarch, Abraham, felt for the longed-for son of his old age, Isaac, would the Akeidah have the same impact, and would this test have struck us as being so cruel and unbearably sad? I don’t think so. For love is not, as the song continues, “some second-class emotion” but the most all-embracing passion that we humans are able to experience. In fact, stories that describe tests of our love for God and for our children have served as important allegories throughout history.

An understanding of the depth of parental love is not restricted to Jewish traditions and texts. The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, tells the same story through a literary device that is often used in the Jewish Bible, namely, a dream: “‘My son, I dreamt that I was sacrificing you. Tell me what you think.’ He replied: ‘Father, do as you are bidden. Allah willing, you will find me faithful’” (The Koran, Penguin Classics, 1974, 37:99). The Christian Bible tells the story of parental love and sacrifice in its depiction of God’s love for Jesus, as it is stated, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version).

Thus the saga of the test of a father’s love has universal dimensions. Yet we Jews feel particularly bound to the Akeidah’s message of courage and faith. Too often in our history, Jews have been confronted with the certainty of death at the hands of an enemy. From Abraham’s unflinching resolve, Jewish fathers have found the strength to do what would have been otherwise unthinkable. In the first century c.e., hundreds of Jews killed their loved ones and then committed suicide at Masada rather than submit to inevitable death at the hands of the Roman legions. More than one thousand years later in the Rhineland, the author of “The Mainz Anonymous” offered an account of identical behavior, even naming the father Abraham and the son Isaac to make sure that readers grasped his inspirational source.

Repeated throughout our history, this theme of tests of love and faith is also relevant to our experience as Jews today. In the words of a contemporary Israeli father, “Every parent in Israel who sees his son off to the army hears the divine command ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love…’” (Dershowitz, The Genesis of Justice, p. 128). As we observe these Yamim Nora-im, let us pray that our choices are guided by our love of God and of those who are dear to us.

Francie Schwartz, MAJS, is an author/educator who works as a special projects associate for the UAHC Department of Adult Jewish Growth in New York. Her book Passage to Pesach will be published by the UAHC Press in December 2002.

For additional Divrei Torah for this parashah, please see the Torat Hayim archive and Family Shabbat Table Talk. Please visit the Adult Jewish Growth Website for information about our programs and resources.

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