HE ANNIHILATED THOSE CITIES AND THE ENTIRE PLAIN, AND ALL THE INHABITANTS OF THE CITIES AND THE VEGETATION OF THE GROUND. LOT'S WIFE LOOKED BACK, AND SHE THEREUPON TURNED INTO A PILLAR OF SALT. NEXT MORNING, ABRAHAM HURRIED TO THE PLACE WHERE HE HAD STOOD BEFORE THE LORD, AND HE LOOKED DOWN TOWARD SODOM AND GOMORRAH AND ALL THE LAND OF THE PLAIN, AND HE SAW THE SMOKE OF THE LAND RISING LIKE THE SMOKE OF A KILN.

 (Bereishit 19:25-28)

 

'Hashkef' and 'Hashkeefa' (looking down) - Can the Mode of Viewing Be Changed?

And he looked down - in order to know whether ten [righteous men] had been found there and whether they were saved, or not.

(RaShBaM Bereishit 19:28)

 

And he looked down - looking down with scorn for their great wickedness.

And he saw the smoke of the land rising - thus he knew there was no point to continue praying for them.

(Seforno ad locum)

Rabbi Alexandri said: Great is the power of those who separate out tithes, for they change the curse into a blessing. You find that every place where the term hashkifa is used in the Torah, it is an expression of suffering, as it is written, the Lord looked down (va'yashkef) upon the Egyptian army (Shemot 14:24), and in connection with Sodom it is said, and he looked down toward Sodom. Except for this: Rabbi Alexandri said: Great is the power of those who separate out tithes, for they change something cursed into a blessing, for it is said, Look down from Your holy abode, from heaven, and bless Your people (Devarim 26:15)

(Shemot Rabbah 41:1)

 

 

Trust Game

Michael Haruni

According to accepted thinking, God's hope in putting Abraham to the test of the Akedah is that Abraham will exhibit his complete willingness to obey the command. But is it really possible that God's ideal human being is one who, upon directly hearing God's command to murder his son, will indeed choose to obey? Or would God's ideal human being be capable of independent judgment which accords with human ethical values?

It seems to me that our conception of God as the benign Deity conflicts directly with the idea that God hopes for obedience to His terrible command. And if this is correct, then the possibility also arises that God's hope is for Abraham to revolt, and that in failing to do so, Abraham failed his test.

Clearly, merely declaring this intuition will persuade no one who views the Akedah in the accepted way - as a test of Abraham's willingness to obey God's command with complete disregard for any other consideration. Moreover, at first glance, this accepted view appears to be founded on very convincing grounds: we are presented with the awful fact that God so commanded Abraham; from which it seems to follow inevitably that God wishes to see Abraham's willingness to obey.

However, the connection between this fact and the seemingly-inevitable conclusion is weakened, when we look at it in the context of a midrash related by the Talmud:

"And it happened following this business that God tested Abraham." Following what?

Rabbi Yochanan, on the authority of Rabbi Yosey Ben Zimra, said: Following the business of the Satan, where it is written, And the boy grew and was weaned etc. The Satan said to The Holy One Who is Blessed, "Sovereign of the Universe, You have graced the 100 years of this old man with the fruit of a womb; yet throughout all the celebratory feasts he has made, he has had not a single turtle-dove or nestling to offer to You."

[Then God] said to him, "Has he really done nothing other than for his son? If I say to him, 'Sacrifice your son to me immediately,' he will sacrifice him immediately. And then God tested Abraham... (Sanhedrin 89b; see also slightly different version in Rashi to Genesis 22, 1)

God's challenge to Abraham, according to this, purports to justify to the Satan His affection for Abraham. The Satan points to the fact that Abraham has been celebrating his son without offering a single sacrifice of thanks to God, Who is thereby provoked to prove to the Satan that His most excellent protégé is indeed absolutely subject to His will.

It follows that Abraham's willingness to obey the command satisfies not God's criteria for the ideal worldly creature, but the Satan's. God wishes to impress the Satan, for which purpose He must present Abraham as a person who acts by Satanic standards, not by God's own. Thus we need not infer from the fact that the command was issued, the conclusion that God Himself sees Abraham's blind obedience as desirable. It is admittedly true that, typically, the motive for a subject's demanding something of a person is that subject's desire for the person to fulfill the demand; and in this respect, the making of the demand is testimony to a desire for its fulfillment. But here we can point to a different motive - the desire to impress the Satan - so that the issuing of the demand is not in this case testimony to a desire for Abraham's willingness to obey. Hence significant credibility is gained by our alternative, moral intuition: that while God wishes to present Abraham to the Satan as totally obedient, God would at the same time detest the willingness to perform this act commanded.

It is important to note that it must be possible to interpret the manifest benignity of God, not only in the fact that, in that final moment, God prevents the completion of the act. We must also be capable of finding His benignity expressed in the values which God requests human beings to act by. Imagine a military officer arming his subordinate soldier with a gun and ordering him to shoot his son dead, without telling the soldier that in fact the bullets in the gun are duds, and afterwards praising him for performing the act. We would properly infer that the officer holds the soldier's obedience in higher regard than a possible refusal by the soldier to murder his son. It would likewise be implausible that God has a cardinal abhorrence for Abraham's murder of his son, if we assume that it pleases God that His most esteemed human being was willing to obey His command to murder his son - and that he would actually have done so were he not halted at the final instant by the intervention of God's agent. As long as we accept that God wished for Abraham's willingness to murder his son in obedience to His command, we are also committed to regarding this as God's own ethical preference.

Yet it is clear to us that God is good. And in order for this to have meaning, there must be some correspondence between the goodness of God as we are able to interpret it, and the basic ethical sense given to us as human beings. What then must we do if we discover an incompatibility between what God tells us to do, and our basic ethical intuitions such as that we must not murder, or that we must not hurt unnecessarily?

One option is to rework this basic ethical sense, so that it does correspond to some morality which, insofar as appears to us, is manifested by God. The problem with this is that, if a gap emerges between the morality which we shall then continue to attribute to God, and the basic ethical sense we began with, then this divine "morality" turns into an invention that is inadequately tied to any collection of values which we can properly conceive of as morality. We may derive, from this divine expression, some principles for conduct - but what then entitles us to suppose that we have thus engendered a moral conception? And if we attribute these principles to God, calling them "good", or "right", then these terms will have been emptied of their regular meanings, and will cease to signify what is properly familiar to us as ethical. We would thereby endanger our understanding of God with a severe distortion: using the lexicon of morality, we would be attributing to God a "morality" that may be outrageously perverse.

An alternative option is to hold fast to the correspondence between given human ethics and divine manifestation, as axiomatic, and to optimally interpret God's commandments and other expressions as ethical in accordance - in this way following the Rambam's approach in his program of halachic research (as explained in Guide To the Perplexed, 3, 26). Indeed it seems that the midrash presented above purports to pursue precisely this course. It shows us that it is unnecessary, and distortive, to attribute to God the value-preference drawn from the traditional reading of the story, as that is the "morality" of the Satan, which clearly must not be attributed to God.

It may appear therefore that what God considered passing the test was revolt. Did Abraham therefore fail the test? I think in fact not. For it seems to me impossible that Abraham took God's words, Please take your son, etc. on face value.

The Talmud continues the midrash referred to above as follows:

And He said: Please take your son Rabbi Simeon Bar Abba said, Please belongs to the language of entreaty. The Holy One Who is Blessed said to Abraham: I have subjected you to several tests and you acquitted yourself well in all of them; now, for Me, acquit yourself well in this test, so that no one says the founding patriarchs lack substance..." (Sanhedrin, 89b; cf. also Rashi's version, to Genesis 22, 2.)

It is suggested here that God openly shared with Abraham that the purpose of the command was not to set up as a straightforward test, but to create a certain impression upon a third party; so that Abraham consciously became God's collaborator in an act of deception. Moreover, even without assuming that God requested this of Abraham explicitly: how could Abraham not have grasped what was going on? Think of two soul mates - say, father and son - each intimately understanding the thoughts and motives of the other; when the father says something to his son in a given context which, taken literally, is inconsistent with the son's understanding of his father, then the son naturally interprets this in some other, non-literal way, automatically switching to an alternative "gestalt" which matches the context, and which posits some alternative motive, such as irony, or compliance with an external coercion, or a wish to deceive someone, perhaps also an invitation to participate in the deception.

And we must keep in mind that Abraham is that earth-bound mortal who reintroduced the existence of God to human consciousness; and that his consciousness of God was not merely as the Infinite Power; but that he discovered God also as the Champion of kindness and compassion - recognized Him as the Source of all morality in the world. God's benignity is revealed particularly touchingly when He tells Abraham what finally decides the fate of Sodom. "Let Me descend and see: is this how her screaming sounds (hak'tsa'akatah)? If they have done this, then they are finished, and if not, then I shall know." (Genesis, 18, 21) According to midrash, the screaming referred to here is that of a young girl in Sodom, who gave a pail full of flour to her girlfriend who was close to dying of starvation. The people of Sodom learned of her act of kindness, "hoisted her up and burned her. Said the Holy One Who is Blessed: Even if I wished to keep silent, the justice due to a young girl does not allow me to keep silent. Thus it is stated, 'hak'tsa'akatah' refers to the screaming of a young girl." (Genesis Rabbah, 49, 6)

It is unthinkable to Abraham, knowing God in this way, believes that He really seeks Abraham's willingness to murder his son. Absolutely convinced that God is a moral force, Abraham immediately senses that motives are operating here other than those suggested by a literal understanding of the utterance, Please take your son etc. He knows with certainty that he must act out the pretense of total obedience - while certain to the same extent that, at a certain point, he will be halted.

It is with this certainty that he rises early and plays through the task, calmly and unhesitatingly, until the moment of lifting the slaughterer's knife. Nothing in his behavior is even faintly reminiscent of his anguishing and resistance prior to his mission to Sodom, or before his exiling of Hagar and Ishmael. For he is working as God's co-conspirator in the defrauding of the Satan - and it is clear as daylight to him that the action will be arrested, the moment they jointly "prove" his obedience. He even reveals his real intention to his two lads when he tells them, we shall worship and we shall return, (Genesis 22, 5; and we need not assume, as Rashi does there, that he is revealing a prophecy). His eager responsiveness expresses, not his enthusiasm to perform the sacrifice, but his conviction that God will not countenance human sacrifice.

The Satan can also be deleted from our version of the story - for those unhappy with the problematic theology otherwise implicated - and retained just as metaphorical representation of a certain abstraction. The Ramban writes:

The test serves, in my opinion, to impart to human action the status of an absolute. If he wishes he acts, if he does not wish he does not act - in this respect it is a test, from the perspective of the subject under test. But the Tester (Who will be praised) is commanding him to bring this thought from potentiality to actuality; so that a reward will attach to a right action, not merely to a right intention. (Ibid, 1)

The Ramban is saying that the purpose of the test, from the side of God, is not to ascertain what this person will do - for this is already known to God. His purpose is to justify the granting of an appropriate reward, in the history that will later unfold. For justice to be done, the person's action, not only the intention underlying it, must be fully compliant to the will of God. Hence it is not enough that Abraham has excellent intentions: he must also act, in order to justify (in this case), the elevating of his offspring to the status of sacred nation. In this version, too, it is clear to Abraham from the outset that he is God's collaborator in a game. And it is equally clear to him that a willingness on his part to perform the sacrifice would be abhorrent to God; and that a different motive operates for Him, namely, the need to establish the rule of justice in His world. As in those games in which one player hurls himself groundwards, completely trusting his partner to catch him before he lands, Abraham rushes to collaborate, driven by his certainty that at the final moment - once it is registered in history that Abraham did all in his power to complete the act - the rule of compassion will gain ascendancy, and he will be halted.

Michael Haruni's play, STa"M, is scheduled for production in the 5765 repertoire of Herzliya Ensemble Theater.

 

 

Could it “Come to Mind” that God Would Demand Human Sacrifice?

For they and their fathers and the kings of Judah have forsaken Me, and have made this place alien [to Me]; they have sacrificed in it to other gods whom they have not experienced, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built shrines to Baal, to put their children to the fire as burnt offerings to Baal - which I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came to My mind.

(Jeremiah 19:4-5)

 

And it is written: which I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came to My mind (Jeremiah 19:5).

Which I never commanded - That is the son of Meisha, king of Moav, for it is said, So he took his first-born son, who was to succeed him as king, and offered him up as a burnt offering (II Kings 4:27)

Never decreed - that is Yiftah.

And which never came to My mind - that is Isaac, son of Abraham.

(Ta'anit 4a)

 

And which never came to My mind - That is Meisha, king of Moav, of whom it is written that when he fell into the hands of the king of Israel, He took his first-born son, who was to succeed him as king, and offered him up as a burnt offering (II Kings 4:27).

What caused Meisha to sacrifice his son? The fact that he was not a Torah scholar. For if he had read the Torah, he would have not lost his son, for it is written in the Torah, When anyone explicitly vows to the Lord the equivalent for a human being, the following scale shall apply: If it is a male... and if it is a female... (Vayikra 27:2). This is [an example of] A wise man acquires lives (Mishlei 11:30).

(Tanhuma Be'hukoti 5)

 

Mine is Mine and Yours is Mine, this is the Attribute of Sodom

It was only because of the beneficence which the Omnipresent bestowed upon them that the men of Sodom were haughty before Him, for it is said, A land out of which comes bread... its rocks are a source of sapphires... no bird of prey knows the path to it... (Job 28:5-7). The people of Sodom said: Since food comes forth from our land, and silver and gold come forth from our land, and precious stones and gems come forth from our land, we do not need people to come to us - they will only deplete our wealth - so we shall keep away visitors. The Holy One blessed be He told them: When I was good to you, you wanted to keep visitors away from you, I shall cause you to have no more visitors, and cause you to be no more in the world. Thus, he said, They opened a stream far from where men live [in places forgotten by wayfarers] (28:4)... Robbers live untroubled in their tents (12:6)... And so He says, As I live - declares the Lord God - your sister Sodom did not do... Only this was the sin of your sister Sodom: arrogance! She [and her daughters] had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility;[yet she did not support the poor and the needy] (Ezekiel 16: 48-9).

(Tosefta Sotah 3:3)

 

 

 

 

 

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