Previous Commentaries

By Rabbi Joshua Kullock,
Comunidad Hebrea de Guadalajara, Mexico

Translated by Inés Baum - Proofreading by Ellen Zindler

I always considered the first stories of the book of Bereishit wonderful. I believe they hold, and move us all, and therefore it is not by chance that we read them with such eagerness and enthusiasm. The characters both inspire and teach us, but continue being human. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why they stand as paradigms to this day: by recognizing them as treacherous, finite, and limited, our heroes become main characters with whom we can all identify, instituting themselves as models that may be imitated.

Another important feature in our patriarchs is that of self-improvement. That is, from chapter to chapter and parashah to parashah, we are able to trace the actors’ gradual growth. Unlike what would be expected, the biblical text presents figures in continuous formation, letting us know that you are as you do and that, if you stop doing, sooner or later the accumulated credit will be squandered on the ups and downs of inaction.

As the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz pointed out, Abraham himself finds his physical and spiritual life framed between two texts that begin with the same admonition: Lekh Lekha – “Get thee” (12:1 and 22:2). Last week we read in Parashat Lekh Lekha about the beginnings of our first patriarch. His first steps, his first ponderings, his first desires and doubts. We find a man who decides to leave his father’s house and start a new life, not necessarily because of the love he felt for God but rather as a consequence of a divine promise, which augured him lands and, above all, descendants. Only several chapters later, when we move from Lekh Lekha to Vayera, we’ll begin to see Abraham as a “knight of faith”, as Soren Kierkegaard called him. Only after years of search and reflection will our patriarch become a spiritual giant.

And in this context, the fateful story of the Akedah, of the bindings. A story which, paradoxically or not, separates much more than what it attempts to bind. Because after this story, God will no longer speak with Abraham, and Isaac will no longer speak with Abraham. Are they, by any chance, synonyms of failure for a man as great as Abraham? Are they, perhaps, faithful testimony of such a high spiritual level that God’s talking to him is no longer necessary? We can find both answers in our tradition: those who criticize Abraham’s attitude and those who glorify it; those who took such an act as a frustrated filicide attempt and those who understood it as the paradigm of the violence and crusades, which would stain thousands of families of Israel with blood and sorrow.

The Akedah will be forever submerged in the darkness of the metalogical (and perhaps of the illogical as well). The attempts to explain it are just proof of generations and generations trying to understand that which, almost by definition, slips through our fingers. And even so, defying the Sisyphus text, we join together for that purpose. Because we do not renounce the task of commenting, translating and interpreting, since we trust that, as is written on Pirkei Avot: Aphoh ba veAphoh ba…, “Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it” (5:25), and because we know that, as we pray before the Shema: Em Chaienu veOrech Iamenu…, “For they (the words of Torah) are our life and the length of our days, and in them will we toil day and night.”

But active searching also means being able to see what is beyond the obvious. And in this sense, I would like to finish by sharing with you a fragment of a poem written by Yehuda Amichai, one of the greatest poets of Israel. In this text, Amichai presents us the true hero of the Akedah story:

The real hero of the Akedah was the ram,
who didn’t know about the collusion between the others.
He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac.
I want to sing a memorial song about him […]
The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
And Abraham and God left long ago.
But the real hero of the Akedah is the ram.

This Parashah commentary was done by the Union of Jewish Congregations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and may be reproduced quoting its source.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to the Torah commentary, send an e-mail to: UJCL_parasha@yahoo.com .
If you wish to dedicate the commentary to the memory of a loved one, or in honor of some family event, contact us at: UJCL_parasha@yahoo.com

Forwarded by Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik, from Kol Shearith Israel Congregation, Panama.
Translated by Inés Baum and proofread by Ellen Zindler, from B’nei Israel Congregation, Costa Rica.

Copyright © 2001, 2002 UJCL