Devar Torah on Parshat Vay’era
By Elisa Kukla
Parshat Va’yera includes one of the most famous (and infamous) Biblical moments – the Akedah, the Binding of Yitzhaq. The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son begins when God calls to Avraham and he responds with the word hineni, “here I am.” (Genesis 22:1) Not a particularly common Biblical phrase, hineni is repeated by Avraham three times in the 14 verses that convey the story of the Akedah -- he uses it in response to God, Yitzhaq and an angel of God. Avraham replies “Here I am” to God and to Yitzhaq as soon as he is called, but the angel cried out “Avraham, Avraham,” twice before he received a reply (Gen 22:11). Why does the angel of God need to cry out his name twice, before Avraham answers “hineni?
Imagine what it took for Avraham to force himself to bind his beloved son Yitzhaq on the altar in order to fulfill God’s command. Once he got to that point what would it cost him to stop and consider that perhaps the slaughter of Yitzhaq was not God’s will and the whole ordeal had been unnecessary? Perhaps the angel of God needed to call out twice, just to get Avraham’s attention because he was so caught up in the religious zeal of the moment. Rabbi Sharon Anisfeld in a Devar Torah for Jewishsocialaction.com suggests that Avraham’s greatest was his ability to allow doubt even at this moment.
This instant of doubt in the midst of zeal takes the form of the expansion of vision: “Avraham lifted up his eyes and saw, here was a ram caught in the thicket (Gen 22:13).” When Avraham allowed himself to hear the voice of doubt, his vision became clearer and suddenly he saw that there was another option, another way to sacrifice to God. In the next verse Avraham names the spot after this expansion in vision calling it Adonai-Yireh, which means “God will see.”
Unlike Avraham Avinu, few people today claim to have direct conversations with the divine. However, there are people who think, as Avraham did, that God’s voice is commanding them to sacrifice other human lives. Many of them even turn to the Binding of Yitzhaq as a proof text for their beliefs. The past year here in Israel and recent events in the United States has shown the world the most dangerous face of religious certainty. In responding to these zealots, it is tempting to succumb to an equally smug form of certainty and claim that drastic solutions must be put into place, or we must maintain the status quo, since there is no other way. However, in my reading of the Akedah the central message is that there is always another way if only we can allow enough doubt to lift up our eyes and see it.
The moment of the Akedah that is immortalized in Judaism is not Avraham’s moment of faith when he agrees to sacrifice his child, but rather his moment of doubt when he stops, looks up and sees the ram caught in the thicket. The blasts of the Shofar on Rosh HaShana are, in part, a remembrance of this moment. The 17th Century Moralist Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz points out that each series of shofar blasts begins and ends with tekiah, a whole sound, but in the middle there is always either shevarim or teruah, broken sounds. In his reading this is because we were whole as a people, became broken and will one day be whole again. I would like to suggest a related but different reading of the order of Shofar blasts – that our wholeness contains brokenness and that our moments of faith, like Avraham Avinu’s, encompass shards of doubt.