The Binding of Isaac (Akedah): Abraham’s Equanimity on his Journey to Mount Moriah

Jacob Staub based this piece in Evolve on this 2024 Dorshei Derekh Rosh Hashanah Davar Torah.  Yashar koach!

How can our religious and spiritual resources help us to meet the challenge of the next four years? We are not the first generation to face alarming, unthinkable prospects.

“Now I know,” God says to Abraham, “that you are a trembler before God (yerei Elohim), that you did not withhold your son from Me.” (Genesis 22:12) Following what he thought was a divine command, Abraham has journeyed three days and, binding his son Isaac on an altar, lifts his knife to sacrifice him, only to be stopped by a divine messenger.

I don’t think this is an accurate account of an actual event. And there is nothing in my experience that leads me to believe in a God who utters explicit commands. I follow the Rambam (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, twelfth-century Egypt), who teaches that though God exists, the human mind and heart cannot fathom anything about God, except the effects of God’s causation. I follow Rabbi Harold Schulweis, who taught Predicate Theology—that we cannot know what God is, only when God is. We can’t know that God loves; we can know, however, that when there is love, God is there.

I do think, however, that there is much we can learn from over 2000 years of interpretations of biblical texts made by Jewish students of Torah. Believing that the Torah was divinely revealed and therefore the fount of all truth and wisdom, they read into the text their deepest understandings and intuitions of what the text reveals to us. Their interpretations are treasures of our traditions that we inherit and on which we can plumb the meanings and imperatives of our own lives.

The Ralbag (Rabbi Levi ben Gershom, Gersonides, fourteenth-century Provence) was one of the leading disciples of Maimonides. He believed that God and God’s will cannot be known with any clarity or certainty. (He would say, except the revealed Torah, but that, too, is subject to interpretation.) Instead, he spoke of an immaterial divine overflow (shefa) that sustains this material world. The human enterprise, he taught, is to discern it—to distinguish between accurate and faulty perceptions of what God wants. The more we learn about this world, the more we can perceive the divine shefa and live accordingly.

It is not sufficient, however, to achieve knowledge about this world. In order to think clearly, to know what to do, he believed that we must cultivate equanimity, so that the conclusions we reach with our imaginations are not affected by our inclinations or emotions—that they do not just mirror our biases and fears.

Approaching our text with this perspective, Rabbi Levi engages in an extensive explorations of yir’ah, the Hebrew word that generally is translated in Genesis 22 as “fear”—“that you are a God-fearer,” and that I translate above, “that you are a trembler before God.” Yir’ah can mean “fear”, but it also has a semantic range that includes what you feel when you behold the stars in the sky or when you hike in the Rockies, and what you feel in the presence of God. Sometimes we translate it as “awe.”

So as he empathizes with the Abraham of the Akedah, here is what the Rabbi Levi sees: Abraham dreams that God commands him to take his son up the mountain for a burnt offering (le’olah). When he awakens, he knows that the most common understanding of what he has heard in his dream is that Isaac will himself be the burnt offering, and so he packs up and sets out with Isaac towards the mountains, because if that is the divine will, he will obey. We can only imagine how terrified he feels, but he remains sufficiently calm to remain aware that there is another, more benign understanding of what he dreamed: that at 100 years old, it is imperative that he take his son up the mountain for a burnt offering (le’olah), that is, to teach him how to offer a sacrifice. God also would want that, that he transmit the tradition to the next generation.

Remaining calm, he spends the three-day journey to Mount Moriah keeping an open mind about how to accurately interpret the imperative in his dream. He ascends the mountain, builds the altar, and binds Isaac, but just before it is too late, he sees the ram caught in the thicket and realizes that it is the ram that he needs to sacrifice in order to instruct Isaac. If he hadn’t been unambivalently willing and calm about offering up Isaac, he would not have been able to think clearly and to make the proper inference when he sees the ram.

According to Rabbi Levi, Abraham passes the test not because of his unquestioning willingness to kill Isaac, but because even in the face of a horrendous possibility, he is sufficiently calm and clear-thinking to avert a misinterpretation that would have ended the Jewish people before it had begun. That is what it means to be a yerei Elohim—one who trembles in awe before the abyss but does not succumb to hysteria or despair or passive resignation. A God-trembler is someone who does not look away from that which is most terrifying, but who is able to maintain control of their faculties and respond constructively to it.

Rabbi Levi was not speculating hypothetically. He lived in a place and at a time when the Inquisition was on the move, copies of Talmud manuscripts were being seized and burned, and the world was not a safe place for Jews to live. He was familiar with what it was like to face a terrifying political abyss. Jewish communities operated under duress and their days were numbered. His reading of Abraham’s test reflected his strategy for coping with his circumstances.

His strategy may remind us of Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, an attitude and practice that, among other things, refuses to give up in the face of the obvious consequences of the climate crisis. Many who seek to mitigate the ever-worsening effects of carbon emissions do not do so because they are confident about the outcome, but rather because they are calmly and mindfully working to create a world that is habitable. They do not surrender to passive despair in the face of alarming projections by scientists. They are not disabled by despair.

Rabbi Levi wants us to cultivate equanimity, but how? How can I not be angered and frightened by the prospect that the numerous promises that President-elect Trump made during the campaign will be implemented? There are a plethora of Jewish contemplative practices that we inherit, but for the moment, I find myself turning to lessons I have learned from Sylvia Boorstein, my teacher of Buddhist-inflected mindfulness practice.

1. What is true in this moment? 

Two other Evolve essays this month, by Jon Argaman and Jennifer Paget, discuss our collective inheritance of intergenerational Jewish trauma. We are easily triggered and prone to catastrophize. At this moment, however, we who are trans still have access to our medical care. We who are seniors still receive our Social Security checks. We who live in sanctuary cities are still able to thwart mass deportations of undocumented people. There are frightening assaults in the street on people who are identifiably Jewish, but at this moment, the assailants are not sponsored or protected by law enforcement. Remaining clear-headed, we have agency. We can resist in the courts, in Congress and state legislatures, in the streets. It is not true that on January 20, we will find ourselves in a totalitarian state.

2. It is essential that we distinguish between what I’ll call “pain” and “suffering”. 

This is a painful world. Those Americans who hold white-skin privilege may have been acculturated otherwise, but things do not always turn out happily. Pain—being hurt—is inevitable. Suffering—centering the pain and dwelling primarily in it—is optional. It is natural to suffer, lick our wounds, anticipate the worst, but we can choose not to do so. Imagine if Rabbi Levi’s Abraham had descended into anticipatory grief over the death of Isaac. The appearance of the ram would not have brought him to realize the actual imperative. The Jewish people’s survival on Mount Moriah, in Babylonian exile, in Rabbi Levi’s Provence and in 2024 U.S. and Israel has depended and continues to depend on our ability to endure the painful blows and to remain calmly clear-headed in our response.

3. Ultimately, we cannot control what is going to happen. 

Western culture instills a sense that if we eat healthily, we will remain healthy. If we achieve competence and earn the right credentials, we will succeed. If we just negotiate the right wording, we can reach a peace agreement. It is up to us to do our best, to act in furtherance of our values, but though we can hope that we can protect ourselves from disaster, it is not helpful to depend on the assurance of successful outcomes to motivate us, because we are not in control, and we will endure setbacks and defeats. There is an equanimity that arises out of our devotion to our values, no matter what the outcome.

4. Experiencing the light of the divine countenance. 

This one derives from the practices of Mussar. Practitioners are supposed to exhibit ha’arat panim (a bright and friendly gaze) to everyone they encounter, making them feel seen. The priestly blessing, ya’er Adonai panav eilekha (may God’s face shed light upon you), suggests that it is a blessing to be bathed in divine light. This feeling is a practice that can be cultivated—walking through our lives with the faith that, as we work to bring justice and compassion and generosity into the world, we are literally enlightened by an imperceptible brightness, that we are supported and accompanied by divine light. Look at Rabbi Vivie Mayer’s Evolve essay, The Light That Has the Capacity to Hold Us All.

Rabbi Levi’s Abraham passes the test because, in his language, he ultimately has faith in a God who supports and accompanies him as he seeks what is right. How might we articulate that in our own terms? His faith obviously included the possibility that he would not have living offspring. Perhaps our strength can emerge from a faith that we can and will endure if we calmly remain steadfast as we act to further our principles, manifesting the universe’s benevolence with no assurance of the outcome.