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GENESIS — 22:3 early

GEN1131 The second aspect of enthusiasm involves finding and expressing the energy needed to complete a task.  As important as it is to be quick off the mark, it is equally important to sustain energy throughout the whole enterprise. … the sages said, “A mitzvah is judged only upon its completion.”   Kiddushin 40a.  As much as we like to comfort ourselves otherwise, good intentions are not enough.   MORINIS 128

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GENESIS — 22:3 early

GEN1133 Zeal is a great virtue that promotes Torah and mitzvos and also worldly progress.   It is a trait of the righteous.   By acting with zeal the righteous arrive at Divine serve.  Our Sages of blessed memory have said Pesachim 4a: “The zealous advance themselves towards the doing of mitzvos.” This can be seen in the case of our father Avraham in the incident of the binding of Yitzchak, as it is written [this verse].   Even though it was understandably difficult for him to slaughter his only son, he did the will of the Exalted Creator with zeal, rising early in the morning.   … When a man frees his heart of all other thoughts that reside in it and seizes upon one thought, then he will undoubtedly be zealous in its execution.   This is what Avraham did. He removed from his heart the love of his son and held on to the will of his Creator, and he negated the love of his son before the love of the will of his Blessed Creator.  … It is for this reason that the Holy One Blessed be He swore to Avraham to remember for his seed the binding of Yitzchak.   TZADIK 283

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GENESIS — 22:5 return

GEN1134 One [is permitted to] mislead others so as to avoid sharing information with them that they have no need – and no right – to know.   When Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, he set off for the mountain where God had instructed him to carry out the sacrifice, along with his son and several servants. When they arrived at the site, Abraham, who had no wish to share what he was planning to do with the servants, told them [this verse].  A short time later, God sent an angel to stop Abraham from carrying out the sacrifice (verse 12).  But at the time Abraham told the servants, “we will return to you,” he had every reason to believe this to be a lie.  Abraham apparently reasoned that what would happen that day was between God, Isaac, and himself, and did not concern the servants.   Perhaps he also feared that if he simply said, “The boy and I will go up there,” and nothing more, they might follow along and thwart his intended sacrifice.   TELVOL 1:449

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GENESIS — 22:5 stay

GEN1135 The Hebrew root tz-n-[ayin], usually translated as “modesty,” actually means “to be private, to do something in seclusion.” For example, the Talmud records that R. Hiyya b. Abba uses the term when he wishes to differentiate between solitary and communal prayer Taanit 16a. R. Yohanan of Anatot, opposing the free-for-all atmosphere of the Talmudic academy, claims that private study enables us to retain more Yerushalmi Berachot 5:1 and cites this verse to prove it: “With the secluded is wisdom.” Proverbs 11:12. In his discussion of Jewish mourning customs, R. Yohanan rules that, while outward displays of grieving should cease on Shabbat, private sorrowing may continue even on this sacred day Mo’ed Katan 24a. We read a striking example of tzeniyut in a comment that a woman tells her daughter: “Why are you not more secretive when carrying on your sexual affairs?” Bava Batra 58a   More than a millennium later, the Hasidic sage Nahman of Bratzlav, describing how he prays, uses the same Hebrew terminology: “When everyone is around me, that is when I seclude myself with God” Mykoff, The Empty Chair. Privacy played a role in some of the most important events in the lives of our biblical patriarchs. Before Abraham made his heart-breaking climb up Mount Moriah to sacrifice Isaac, he told his two servants to wait below with the donkeys so he and his son could be alone [this verse]. During the mysterious night before Jacob’s reunion with his brother Esau, “he was left alone, and a ‘man’ wrestled with him until the coming of dawn” Genesis 32:25. As we all know, the “man” was really an angel who changed Jacob’s name to Israel.   Ever since that secluded hour, our entire people has been called Israel. BOROJMV 150-1.

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GENESIS — 22:8 together

GEN1136 With ten trials was Abraham our Father proved, and he stood firm in them all; which informs [us] how great was the love of Abraham our Father [for God]. Pirkei Avot V:4  In the previous mishnah, our first Patriarch is introduced as Abraham, and at it conclusion he is “Abraham our father.” Abraham achieved this title by a lifetime of virtue and righteousness; he did not have it at the beginning of his career. But since the previous mishnah established his title of distinction, this mishnah calls him so throughout.   As psychoanalysis has learned, a father is of far-reaching importance to a son. Not only is he a first teacher, whom the boy generally admires and seeks to emulate. Far beyond this, the very image of his father – his perception, he way of being in the world, his way of meeting and understanding life – all flows into the son and becomes an indelible part of his psyche. Paradoxically, psychoanalysis itself often assumes that the son must free himself from this father image’s authority over him – perhaps because practitioners and patients have largely absorbed pain and conflict from unacceptable parents Hand-in-hand with this thesis generally goes a blanket denunciation and rejection of ancestral religion. Thus, if we read Freud’s biographies with care, we can detect considerable unconscious conflict about his father, and by extension, about the Jewish people, which is not unrelated to his aberrant, wholly unscientific Moses and Monotheism.   Scripture records instances enough where idolatrous Hebrew kings scorned the ways of pious fathers, and vice versa. But where father and son were sound in religious knowledge and character, there was no such conflict or upheaval. Thus, on their way to bind Isaac and offer him up as a sacrifice, the Writ states twice of Abraham and him that “they went both of them together,” [this verse, Genesis 22:6] in unison, toward worship of the Creator. We read, “These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son: Abraham begot Isaac (or, was the father of Isaac)”; the Midrash interprets the second part –apparently superfluous – to mean that Isaac utterly resembled Abraham. Genesis 25:19. Midrash Tanhuma, Tol’doth 6; ed. Buber, Vayyishlach 25; Aggadath B’reshit xxxvii; Yalkut Machiri, Psalms §61 More than physical resemblance is connoted: Zohar states, “Now that Abraham was dead, his image remained in Isaac, and whoever saw Isaac said, This is Abraham!” Zohar I 135a  In piety, the character of the son became a continuation of the father’s.   Where the father is truly, soundly religious, without inner conflict or contradiction, his image becomes the core of the son’s piety. In this vein, the Sages teach that under the ceaseless seductive efforts of Potiphar’s wife, Joseph the servant was about go yield to temptation at last, when he suddenly beheld the image of his father, and he maintained his resistance thereafter.  Talmud, Sotah 36b; Jerusalem Talmud Horayoth ii 5; Midrash Rabbah, Genesis lxxxvii 7; xc 20; Tanhuma, Vayyeshev 9; Midrash Shmuel v; Pirke d’R. Eli’ezer xxxix; Yalkut Machiri, Proverbs §29,3.   Freud taught that our perception of God is “no more than a father-image,” to be discarded as a neurotic aberration. Judaism teaches that the father-image forms the prefiguration and configuration of the Supreme Being that has existence beyond all existence, that a person later knows as God. Hence we read in the Midrash: When the Holy, Blessed one [first] revealed Himself to Moses [at the scene of the burning bush in the wilderness] Moses was a tyro, utterly inexperienced in prophecy” [as of little power, hence of little significance]. What did He do? He revealed Himself with the voice of Moses’ father.   Happily, Moses thought, “My father is alive! He has come from Egypt!” and he responded, “Here am I. What does my father wish?” Said the Holy One, “I am not your father; I am the God of your father. I have manifested Myself gently to you, that you should not be frightened.” Midrash Rabbah, Exodus iii 1; xlv 5; Yalkut Machiri, Proverbs 25; Tanhuma, Sh’moth 19; ed. Buber, 16 (see Exodus 3:4,6)   Moses stood, unknowing, at a turning point in his life, when he would learn to receive the word of God, more directly than any other human being or since. He first heard it as the voice of his father.   These are the dimensions of meaning that traditional Judaism finds in the concept of father. Hence in the traditional Jewish family the roles of father and son fit together as in the join of a master mechanic; The father is bidden to provide his child with a thorough knowledge of the the son is obliged to respect and honor his parent; and when he attains maturity and can appreciate his forefather’s worth and achievements, he is to say, “When shall my deeds equal theirs?” Deuteronomy 6:7: “you shall teach them [the words of Torah] diligently to your children.” Exodus 20:12; Leviticus 19:3. Seder Eliyahu Rabbah xxv (standard eds.).  In profound awareness of the meaning of “father,” our tradition bestows the title above all on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.   Though we have never known them personally, their influence permeates the continuing generations of Jewry. Starting from Abraham, as each father rears his son along the royal road of the Hebrew faith, his image is absorbed into t he psyche of the son, to become part of the very fibre of the son’s being: all his values, the fruits of the father’s maturing experiences, reflections, and hard-won inner certainty become the son’s own. In the next generation the son becomes the father, and the process continues.   Therefore, after the Almighty identified Himself to Moses at the burning bush as “the God of your father,” He added, “the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob.” No matter how removed in time and space Moses was from these ancestors, he yet knew of them in the depths of his being.   We study the lives of these Fathers, in Bible, Talmud and Midrash, over and over, trying to understand their trials and achievements, that we may the better emulate them, if only in some small degree. In our daily prayers we begin the central sh’moneh esreh with the benediction, “Blessed art Thou, our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob …” For as we remind our Maker in the preliminary morning prayers, “we are They people, the children of Thy covenant, the children of Abraham Thy loving Friend … the descendants of Isaac his only son … the community of Jacob They firstborn …” Before heaven we affirm them as our fathers, our Patriarchs, the archetypes of the Jewish soul.   Do we inherit something of their qualities through genes and chromosomes, biologically? Or through an unbroken continuity of family environment? Of this we are certain; the traits of these Fathers, their values and norms quicken our spirit and inform our striving. “A righteous man walks in his integrity – fortunate are his children after him.” Proverbs 20:7 Sometimes we see Jews far removed from traditional Jewish life and values, suddenly espousing a Jewish cause with fervor and enthusiasm. Such were the many young men, completely dissociated from any formal, overt Jewish interest, who joined the Israeli army in the war of liberation and made the supreme sacrifice to give their people back their historic homeland. Their background, their upbringing, can hardly explain why they should have suddenly risen to the defense of their people. When the moment called, through a higher, transpersonal self, the heritage of the Patriarchs moved them. In our own midst, ever so often a young man or woman raised in a totally non-Jewish home—with never a whisper of Torah or traditional, ancestral observance to warm it – turns to our age-old faith, for a lifetime of loyalty. They too are children of Abraham; because their spirits were attuned, some chords of the music of faith that their primordial ancestor played in his lifetime could arouse a sympathetic vibration, a Divine melody in their souls. For yet in Haran did Abraham know how to “make souls,” [Genesis 12:5] drawing them near to their Father in Heaven.  SINAI3 19-22

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GENESIS — 22:12 do not

GEN1137 We should find it easier to save someone than to harm him.   Several people complained to Rav Moshe Leib of Sassov about a certain shochet (ritual slaughterer) and called for his resignation.   One person, however, argued that the shochet was the victim of slander motivated by jealousy. Rav Moshe Leib decided to allow the shochet to retain his position despite the fact that more people condemned him than defended him.   He explained: “Although God Himself commanded Avraham to offer his son Yitzchok as a sacrifice, Avraham obeyed the angel who hold him not to harm Yitzchok. A command from a high-tribunal is necessary in order to harm someone, but to save someone, even a lesser authority should be heeded.” Eser Tzichtzauchus, p. 61. PLYN 87

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GENESIS — 22:12 not

GEN1139 Spiegel, The Last Trial, New York: Schocken 1967 and most scholars read Genesis 22 as a condemnation of human offerings since, dramatically, Abraham’s hand is staid…, but does the text condemn human sacrifice or do we want to read it that way? … No etiology is found such as “Hence we do not offer our children in sacrifice…,” no commentary directs this tale in a direction critical of child sacrifice. Rather, life is God’s to give and take.   He may on occasion demand the most valuable sacrifice a person can offer, a human who is his own child. Abraham’s son is redeemed, a ram is substituted, as the Israelites’ first-born are spared in the tale of Exodus, the blood on the doorpost being an adequate token substitute (or were the Egyptian children adequate to satiate the Destroyer’s appetite?). Redemption and sacrifice are the two options, but the deity is imagined not always to redeem. Even when he redeems, something else is offering instead. The banned person is a sort of human sacrifice that cannot be redeemed, but if someone should dare to withhold God’s herem, he himself may become the unwilling substitute as in the prophet’s interpretation of the Syrian king Ben-Hadad’s escape from death (1 Kings 20). As the tradition of human sacrifice is a recurring theme in Judaism, so the ban-as-sacrifice tradition is an ongoing thread in ancient Israelite religion. The ideology of the ban is thus not an ancient or primitive view of war that is later totally rejected, for Isaiah 34 testifies to its presence in a quite late poetic text, the symbols still intact. So Spigel shows how the notion of divine forgiveness through the death of a child surfaces in the 11th-century reflections on the crusade. NIDITCH 46

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GENESIS — 22:14 vision

GEN1141 Religious people of all times unite in their testimony that the practice of the Divine presence brings not only peace to the heart and mind but also renewed strength. Fear often issues from weakness and lack of self-confidence. Faith is a measure of energy and of self-assurance in the face of peril. Confident that God is on their side, the weakest of men have felt as mighty hosts. Like Elisha’s servant, they see the forces of Heaven ever on their side (II Kings 6-15 ff.). Experiencing an inrushing of power, they readily go forth to battle in behalf of righteous causes. “They that wait for the Lord renew their strength; they mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:29 – 31). The history of the Jews and the record of religious martyrs everywhere bear eloquent proof of the genuineness of this conviction. Often combating the pressure of public opinion and the intellectual and moral standards of the whole world, these stiff-necked people displayed a fortitude unknown to the rest of men. The faith which they held so intensely enabled them to see through the inmost nature of things, and to vision the highest goals. “In the mountain of the Lord it is seen” [this verse].  The darkness is lifted, and where chaos and bewildering confusion reigned, the eye of the soul beholds the creative forces of God shaping worlds of harmony. The disordered fragments of existence begin to fit into patterns of meaning and purpose. Religion reveals things both sub specie temporis and sub specie aeternitatis. It makes us see life steadily and see it whole.   COHON  46-7

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GENESIS — 22:14 vision

GEN1140 Natural theology, I believe, should link the idea of the good with that of God, for the core insight of monotheism is the recognition that God’s commands speak only in behalf of the good.   We can be sure of this nexus, since the idea of goodness is, for monotheists, constitutive in our idea of the divine.   It is this linkage, I have argued, that is intended when Genesis calls the mountain where Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac “the mountain where the Lord revealed Himself” [this verse].   For Abraham was blessed even though he did not carry through his initial intent to sacrifice his beloved son.   Indeed, he was blessed in that very choice, the choice forced upon him when he had to decide between God’s explicit and unambiguous command that he sacrifice Isaac and the angel’s urgent pleas that he refrain from such a horror and do no harm to his son.  His blessing, shared with all nations, lay in the recognition that divine holiness is found not in the tremendum of violence but in acts of kindness, generosity, and justice.  JHRHV xiv

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