The Genesis of Justice (15 page)

Now after these events it was

that God tested Avraham

and said to him:

Avraham!

He said:

Here I am
.

He said:

Pray take your son
,

your only-one

whom you love
,

Yitzhak [Isaac in English]
,

and go-you-forth to the land of Moriyya/Seeing
,

and offer him up there as an offering-up

upon one of the mountains

that I will tell you of
.

Avraham started-early in the morning
,

he saddled his donkey
,

he took his two serving-lads with him and Yitzhak his son
,

he split wood for the offering-up

and arose and went to the place that God had told him of
.

On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes

and saw the place from afar
.

Avraham said to his lads:

You stay here with the donkey
,

and I and the lad will go yonder
,

we will bow down and then return to you
.

Avraham took the wood for the offering-up
,

he placed them upon Yitzhak his son
,

in his hand he took the fire and the knife
.

Thus the two of them went together
.

Yitzhak said to Avraham his father, he said:

Father!

He said:

Here I am, my son
.

He said:

Here are the fire and the wood
,

but where is the lamb for the offering-up?

Avraham said:

God will see for himself to the lamb for the offering-up
,

my son
.

Thus the two of them went together
.

They came to the place that God had told him of;

there Avraham built the slaughter-site

and arranged the wood

and bound Yitzhak his son

and placed him on the slaughter-site atop the wood
.

And Avraham stretched out his hand
,

he took the knife to slay his son
.

But YHWH’s messenger called to him from heaven

and said:

Avraham! Avraham!

He said:

Here I am
.

He said:

Do not stretch out your hand against the lad
,

do not do anything to him!

For now I know

that you are in awe of God—

you have not withheld your son, your only-one, from me
.

G
ENESIS
22:1-12

N
o biblical narrative is more dramatic, more poignant, and more confusing than God’s command to Abraham that he sacrifice his
son Isaac. What kind of a God would ask such a thing of a father? What kind of a father would accede to such a request, even
from a God? Why did Abraham, the man who argued so effectively with God over the fate of strangers, suddenly become silent
in the face of so great an injustice toward his own beloved son? Why did God praise Abraham for his willingness to engage
in an act of ritual murder? And what are we to learn from a patriarch who follows, without question, immoral superior orders
to murder an innocent child?

These, and other questions, have been debated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims for generations. Again, there are the trivial
answers, designed to justify everything God and Abraham did. Some of the defense lawyer commentators argue that Abraham knew
that God was merely testing him and that He would never let him actually kill his son. A variation on this interpretation
comes from the fact that God never explicitly commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but rather to “offer” him. These commentators
argue that Abraham realized God would not accept his offer and would stay his hand, pointing to Abraham’s assurance to his
servants that both he and Isaac will return: “You stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go yonder, we will bow
down and then return to you.”
¹
As one midrash put it: “God informed Abraham by making him unintentionally prophesy”—a divinely inspired slip of the tongue.
²

The problem with this “defense” is that if Abraham knew the outcome, then it wasn’t really a test—or at least a fair test.
One who knows the answer to a test in advance is a cheat. Moreover, based on God’s past behavior, why would Abraham trust
that his son would survive? After all, this is the same God who destroyed the world in the flood and was prepared to sweep
away the innocent along with the guilty in Sodom. Why would such a God not also expect one of His followers to kill a single
child?

On the face of it, it seems that Abraham believed that God wanted him to kill his son and that the patriarch was willing to
do just that. Why would the man who argued with God over strangers be prepared to murder his own son without protest?

There is, of course, the possibility that Abraham went along with God’s command for entirely self-serving reasons: He believed
that if he disobeyed God’s direct order, God would kill him as he killed Lot’s wife. By killing his own son, Abraham would
be saving himself. Remember that this is the same Abraham who twice sacrificed Sarah’s virtue to save his own neck. Remember
too that God
invited
Abraham to argue with Him over the condemned of Sodom, but he
commanded
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Failure to comply with a direct command from God carried a divine punishment. To suggest a slightly
less selfish motive, perhaps Abraham decided that if he refused God’s command, both he and Isaac would be killed by God, but
if he complied, God might spare at least one of them. We do not know, of course, what was going through Abraham’s mind as
he lifted the knife to slay his son, but in light of his prior history—especially with Sarah—a self-serving motive cannot
be entirely excluded. A midrash suggests a different spin on Abraham’s self-interest.

It shows that out forefathers presupposed the existence of another world beyond this one. If not for Avraham’s belief in
olam haba
[the world to come], he certainly would not have agreed to sacrifice his only son and continue living a life without hope
and without a future. He was ready to listen to God’s commandment, knowing that for his sacrifice in this world, God would
repay him well in
olam haba.
³

This turns Abraham’s great test into a simple cost-benefit decision. Indeed, the very word “repay” connotes a crass balancing
of benefits. Neat as the equation may seem, there is no textual support that the patriarch believed in a world to come. Absent
any guarantee of eternal reward for following God’s command, Abraham’s decision to kill Isaac is especially dramatic precisely
because it would have left him with “a life without hope and without a future.” He was willing to accept such a life for one
reason alone: because God commanded it.

Maimonides refuses to attribute Abraham’s compliance to simple fear of consequences: “For Abraham did not hasten to kill Isaac
out of fear that God would slay him or make him poor, but solely because it is man’s duty to love and to fear God, even without
hope of reward or fear of punishment.”
⁴
But why then is Judaism (as well as other religions) so premised on reward and punishment, both in this world and in the
world to come? I believe that true morality can best be judged in the absence of threats or promises.
⁵
The atheist who throws himself in front of a car to save a child is performing a truly moral act, because he expects no divine
reward. The religious person who strongly believes that he will be rewarded for his moral acts and punished for his immoral
ones in the hereafter may simply be making a long-term cost-benefit analysis. Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French
philosopher and mathematician, argued that faith is a worthwhile gamble, since we lose nothing if we believe and God does
not exist, but we risk spending eternity in hell if we do not believe and God turns out to be real. The fallacy is that God
may despise those who engage in such self-serving wagers and prefer those who honestly doubt or even disbelieve. Maimonides
argued strongly against the midrashic variation of “Pascal’s wager”:

Let not a man say, “I will observe the precepts of the Torah and occupy myself with its wisdom in order that I may obtain
all the blessings written in the Torah, or to attain life in the world to come; I will abstain from transgressions against
which the Torah warns, so that I may be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or that I may not be cut off from life
in the world to come.” It is not right to serve God after this fashion, for whoever does so, serves Him out of fear. This
is not the standard set by the prophets and sages. Those who may serve God in this way are illiterate, women, or children
whom one trains to serve out of fear,
till their knowledge shall have increased, when they will serve out of love.
⁶

According to other commentators, Abraham was not aware of the world to come—of reward and punishment after death.
⁷
If so, the stakes were even higher. The death of Isaac would be forever, not simply a transition from this life to the next.

Even the noble motive attributed to Abraham by Maimonides and other commentators is somewhat self-serving. Abraham placed
his allegiance to the all-powerful God above his obligation as a parent and a husband. He never even consulted with his wife
about his decision to sacrifice
their
son. Of course, Sarah was not entirely blameless, either. After all, she was prepared to sacrifice Abraham’s other son, Ishmael,
to her own ambitions for Isaac—a deed for which she was called a “sinner” by Maimonides. It was only God’s intervention that
saved Ishmael from certain death.
⁸

What then is the nature of God’s test of Abraham? The best evidence of that comes from God’s own mouth when He declares that
Abraham passed the test: “…now I know that you are in awe of God.” The actual Hebrew word is
y’rei
, which literally means “afraid” or “in fear of” God. But what kind of a moral test is that? Acceding to an immoral command
out of fear does not show much courage or virtue. What if a powerful human king had presented Abraham with a similar, terrible
choice: “Either kill your child or I will kill you”? Would we
praise
a father for being “afraid” of the king, or being “in awe” of the king and killing the child? Of course not. At most we might
understand
why the father, like those parents during the Holocaust who abandoned or even sacrificed their crying children, might have
made such a decision.
⁹
We might even feel uncomfortable condemning them. But praise them? Never. Why then do we praise Abraham? He may have passed
God’s
test of justice, but he failed his
own
test of justice, as he articulated it during his argument over the condemned of Sodom—namely that it is always wrong to kill
the innocent, even if God commands it.

In addition to failing his own test of justice, Abraham also fails every contemporary test of justice. No one today would
justify killing a child because God commanded it. A contemporary Abraham would be convicted of attempted murder, and his defense—“I
was just following superior orders”—would be rightly rejected. Of course, today we believe that people who hear commands from
God are insane, but even if we were to entertain such a claim, we would condemn anyone who acted on it by killing a child.
Indeed, there are religious cults that cite the Bible in support of abusing disrespectful children, but we correctly reject
their claim that the Bible supersedes their legal obligation, especially when it comes to children.
¹⁰

My Harvard colleague Professor Jon Levenson of the Divinity School makes a powerful argument against viewing Abraham’s actions
through the prism of contemporary abhorrence to the murder of children. In the days of the patriarch, child murder was distinguished
from child sacrifice. The former was almost universally condemned, the latter widely accepted as a show of gratitude toward
the gods. (As recently as five hundred years ago, Incas in South America were still sacrificing children to their gods, as
preserved mummies prove.)
¹¹
God did not order Abraham to “murder” his son; such a command would have violated the Noachide laws against shedding innocent
blood. 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 sacrificed object. You murder those you hate; you sacrifice what you love most.

Professor Levenson makes an interesting argument against judging
historical
figures by the moral standards of a later age. Kierkegaard anticipated and answered Levenson’s argument:

Perhaps in the context of his times, what [Abraham] did was something quite different. Then let’s forget him, for why bother
remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?
¹²

Abraham is not seen as a mere historical figure whose actions are simply described; he is a
biblical
patriarch whose actions are supposed to be eternal, not timebound. Abraham is supposed to be more than a man for all seasons.
He is seen as a man to be emulated forever. Levenson acknowledges that Abraham, by being willing to sacrifice his son, violated
the Torah’s explicit prohibition against child sacrifice,
¹³
but, like other traditional commentators, he argues that Abraham’s actions took place before the Torah was given at Sinai
¹⁴
and that “any attempt to derive practical norms for ourselves immediately and directly from Abraham’s experience … is thus
a denial of the Torah, rather than an implementation of it.” This argument, clever as it is, proves too much. If accepted,
it would make all of Abraham’s actions—from his rejection of idol worship to his argument on behalf of the sinners of Sodom—irrelevant
to current life. Yet we do derive “practical norms” from Abraham’s pre-Sinaic actions. Indeed, Levenson himself derives a very
important norm from the
akeidah
, praising Abraham as “a man who scrupulously observes God’s commandments” and who “fears” the Lord. How are we to decide
which norms are universal and which time-bound?