The story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) has always troubled me, and reading it again this year has been no different. It's disturbing, even angering, to see commentators talk about Abraham suspending his compassion for his son in order to pursue his perceived will of The Eternal, as if that were a meritorious action. In my opinion, it is not.
Pardon me for a moment of pop culture, but it reminds me of a scene from Batman Begins in which Bruce Wayne is asked to execute a man as part of his initiation into The League of Shadows. He shows a compassion that makes him hesitate to do what is asked of him. When told by his mentor that his compassion is a quality his enemies will not share, Bruce replies, "That's why it's so important. It separates us from them."
Compassion is an important quality, and yet Abraham seems all too willing to forgo that quality. He doesn't even argue with The Eternal, as he did when he learned that Sodom was to be destroyed. Instead, he quietly and willingly sets about to comply with the command.
Then, I found this commentary, which is based on midrashim cited in Shalom Spiegel's The Last Trial:
A God who asks us what the text appears to ask is not the true God but one whom we fashion in our own image. We often believe that God wants us to sacrifice our children to an imagined demand. But then it is not God who is cruel, but we; it is we who all too frequently are prepared to immolate our offspring to satisfy our own concept of duty and who will restrain our compassion before our own sense of righteousness. The history of humanity is replete with misdeeds committed in the name of religion.
That's when it hit me: We've been reading the story all wrong. And the commentators who see Abraham's putting obedience to The Eternal above all else have missed the point.
What is the overarching theme of Abraham's story? He's a rebel. He's a monotheist in a world of polytheists. He fights a battle and returns the spoils of war to Sodom, a city known for being inhospitable, when he would have had every right to keep them. He argues with The Eternal to ensure that righteous people are not destroyed when judgement falls on Sodom. All this doesn't jibe with him killing his own son just because The Eternal told him to.
What if the story, instead, is a metaphor? What if, instead of being about obedience to The Eternal, it is really about the dangers of religious fanaticism? What if, instead of The Eternal testing Abraham, Abraham is testing The Eternal?
There are a couple of ways to look at it. One way is to take The Eternal stopping Abraham not as an external vision as portrayed in the text, but rather an internal triumph of human compassion over a fanatical zeal that could lead a person to do violence in the name of God. This, in and of itself, would be a rebellious notion in an age when human sacrifice was not unheard of.
But perhaps even more rebellious is the idea that Abraham was testing The Eternal, calling The Eternal's bluff. Abraham has already called The Eternal to the carpet once, challenging God as the Judge of all the earth to do justly. What's to keep Abraham from doing it in this instance as well?
This would explain the silence, as well as the language of the text where Abraham indicated to the servants that both he and Isaac would return, and later to Isaac when he said that God would provide the ram for the offering. For the Judge of all the earth to do justly, the Eternal could not let Abraham kill his own son. If Abraham knew this, he could have been seeing how far things would go, but with no intention to actually go through with the sacrifice. And if The Eternal had not stopped him, Abraham himself would have stopped it and probably would have had another little chat with God about doing the right thing.
Either way of looking at the story, the end result is the same: The religion of Abraham is not one of fanaticism, but one that sees the importance of doing what is just and compassionate.
Karen Humphrey is a liberal Jew who is currently living in central Texas and is committed to Judaism and Jewish learning.
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