GEN452 What God was doing when He asked Abraham to offer up his son was not requesting a child sacrifice but something quite different. He wanted Abraham to renounce ownership of his son. He wanted to establish as a non-negotiable principle of Jewish law that children are not the property of their parents. That is why three of the four matriarchs found themselves unable to conceive other than by a miracle. The Torah wants us to know that the children they bore were the children of God rather than the natural outcome of a biological process. Eventually, the entire nation of Israel would be called the children of God. A related idea is conveyed by the fact that God chose as His spokesperson Moses, who was “not a man of words” Exodus 4:10. He was a stammerer. Moses became God’s spokesman because people knew that the words he spoke were not his own but those placed in his mouth by God. The clearest evidence for this interpretation is given at the birth of the very first human child. When she first gives birth, Eve says: “With the help of the Lord I have acquired [kaniti] a man” [this verse]. That child, whose name comes from the verb “to acquire,” was Cain, who became the first murderer. If you seek to own your children, your children may rebel into violence. If the analysis of Fustel de Colanges The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956) and Larry Siedentop Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Penguin, 2014) is correct, it follows that something fundamental was at stake. As long as parents believed they owned their children, the concept of the individual could not yet be born. The fundamental unit was the family. The Torah represents the birth of individual as the central figure in the moral life. Because children—all children—belong to God, parenthood is not ownership but guardianship. As soon as they reach the age of maturity (traditionally, 12 for girls, 13 for boys) children become independent with their own dignity and freedom. Sigmund Freud famously had something to say about this too. He held that a fundamental driver of human identity is the Oedipus complex, the conflict between fathers and sons as exemplified in Aeschylus’ tragedy. By creating moral space between fathers and sons, Judaism offers a non-tragic resolution to this tension. If Freud had taken his psychology from the Torah rather than from Greek myths, he might have arrived at a more hopeful view of the human condition. Why then did God say to Abraham about Isaac: “Offer him up as a burnt offering”? [Genesis 22:2 - AJL] So as to make clear to all future generations that the reason Jews condemn child sacrifice is not because they lack the courage to perform it. Abraham is the proof that they do not lack the courage. The reason they do not do so is because God is the God of life, not death. In Judaism, as the laws of purity and the rite of the Red Heifer show, death is not sacred. Death defiles. The Torah is revolutionary not only in relation to society but also in relation to family. To be sure, the Torah’s revolution was not fully completed in the course of the biblical age. Slavery had not yet been abolished. The rights of women had not yet been fully actualized. But the birth of the individual—the integrity of each of us as a moral agent in our own right—was one of the great moral revolutions in history.  SACKS 25-26