Rabbi's Derasha

Every year, sometimes at this time of year but not necessarily, there appears an exposition of the life of Avraham Avinu in which he’s a mess up.  Rather than the man Kierkegaard called the Knight of Faith, he’s a failure.  It can be that he mishandled his wife in Egypt, or that he was too cruel to Yishmael and Hagar, or that the Akeida is a fiasco.   

The interpretation along these lines that I heard recently is about the Akeida.  It sets up a contrast between Avraham’s willingness to carry this out versus his discomfort when he has to send Yishmael away.  He loves Yishmael, but somehow he doesn’t love Yitzchok.  As evidence, the writer points to the fact that Yitzchok does not follow Avraham down the mountain.  And, in fact, they never appear together in another scene, and never speak to each other again.  

On the other hand, Avraham clearly loves Yishmael.  This is true.  Even when he finds out that Yitzchok will be born miraculously, Avraham pleads with Hashem about Yishmael and is reassured that Yishmael will thrive.  

But none of this means that the love is greater than that he has for Yitzchok.  And never mind that Yishmael and Avraham also never reunite and never speak again after the father sends away the son.     

This of course comes from an approach to the main figures in the Chumash as though they are characters in a 19th century British novel.  They are no more than the characters in Wuthering Heights.  But it also comes from an approach that does not want to take the Chumash on its own terms even if the interpreters often insist that they are “merely reading the text.”  

The Pashtanim, those commentators like the Ibn Ezra who also sought to “merely read the text,” say that Yitzchok did in fact come down the mountain with Avraham.  Just as earlier in the story, as Avraham rises and walks off toward the mountain, Yitzchok is with him though he isn’t mentioned explicitly, so also at the end of the story Yitzchok is there.  The Midrash does take another approach, as I’ll get to in a moment, but a simple reading does not automatically mean that Yitzchok has separated from his father.  

The Midrash does make something of his absence.  It puts Yitzchok in another world after the Akeida, understandably.  There are various opinions.  Either he went off to heal, to absorb what had happened, or he went off to learn, which might be the same thing.  But there is no falling out with his father.  Nor is there any less love.

When one changes the way the Chumash tells the story, one usually ends up with a story one would have preferred to tell.  The challenge in understanding the Chumash comes when one takes it on its own terms.  What does it mean that Avraham does in fact love his son, as the verse says in the beginning of the story -- “take your son, your only son, the one you love”….but he is still willing to take him to the top of the mountain, to bind him, and to raise the knife?  It means that there are things bigger than the love one has for one’s child, not because one does not love one’s child but because one’s relationship with Hashem must endure no matter what happens.  This is why Avraham was willing to sacrifice, and what Jews have been able to sacrifice since then.

The parents sending their children off to war now do not love them less for doing so.  The Kiddush is sponsored in honor of one who fell in the early phases of the war, a sacrifice parents are confronting daily now for over 400 days.  Ideally, in this they are able to walk together, as Avraham and Yitzchok walked together, even after Yitzchok learned that there was no animal to sacrifice.  This is the quality Avraham endowed the Jews with -- indeed, gifted to humanity -- because he triumphed at the Akeida, and did not fail.