To understand this we need to understand a few elements about the character of the avot in general, and of Yitzchak in particular. The NeTziV (Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin from Veloshin) explains that each of the avot is associated with a unique aspect of divine service which they performed. While all the avot embodied all three qualities to some degree, each one had a particular quality that they represented completely and perfectly. Avraham represents Torah, Yitzchak represents Avoda (prayer, and service to Hashem in general), and Yaakov represents gemilut chassadim. Hashem gives a unique and direct response to each of these three qualities, and so responds to all of the avot in the area of all three; however, Hashem responds in a manner l’maala min hateva (on a supernatural level) to the unique quality that each individual av perfected. The NeTziV states that Hashem responded to Yitzchak’s perfection of avoda, directly and l’maala min ha teva, with parnassa – livelihood and sustenance.

The place where Hashem directs Avraham to bring Yitzchak is the future site of the Beit HaMikdash, where the Jews in Eretz Yisrael would offer up the Korban Tamid (an offering brought twice daily, every day, and a staple part of the Temple service). A korban is avoda in the truest sense of the word, and specifically, the Korban Tamid is linked to the blessing from Hashem of parnassa in Eretz Yisrael. The NeTziV explains that when Avraham brings up Yitzchak to be sacrificed, the act he performs mirrors the service and the idea of the Korban Tamid. Avraham was well aware of this parallel; the gemara says that the Avot kept all the mitzvot, and this was Avraham’s way of fulfilling the mitzva of Korban Tamid in a time when the Beit HaMikdash had not yet been built. Here, Yitzchak IS the Korban; he literally manifests the avoda itself. Moreover, from all the Avot, Yitzchak is the truest representative of Eretz Yisrael. Through his life, Yitzchak never left Israel; he is bound to the land in a way above and beyond that of the other two avot, Avraham and Yaakov.

In this way, it is clear that the akeida had to be at the future site of the Beit HaMikdash that Avraham brought Yitachak up to, as it sets a precedent for Jews in Eretz Ysrael who would later bring the Korban Tamid at that same place. And in the same way that Hashem responds to Yitchak’s perfection of avoda at the akeida with the blessing of parnassa l’maala min ha teva from that point onward, Hashem responds to the Jews performing avoda in Eretz Yisrael with shefa (an overflowing) of blessing and parnassa. (As a side note, this is why we read the story of the akeida on Rosh Hashana – a time when we pray for sustenance and livelihood for the year to come).

Through all of this, we can come to understand why the event is called “Akeidat Yitzchak” and not “Akeidat Avraham et Yitzchak.” Although the test was indeed for Avraham, the center point of the story is Yitzchak – and all that he represents.

It is so important for all Jews to take their avodat Hashem seriously especially in these difficult, global financial times. May Hashem bless all Jews worldwide with parnassa and hatzlacha, but specifically to the Jews who are embodying the qualities of Yitzchak Avinu by living in Israel. I hope that this will be an attraction to all Jews to return to Eretz Yisrael so we can speedily reach the time of geula and the rebuilding of the Beit Hamikdash, and bring korbanot in the makom of the akeida once again.

R. David Kimchi advances several theories. Perhaps this story challenges the Jewish people. If Ninveh could transform their society and repent, surely the chosen people should find the wherewithal to do so. Alternatively, the story instructs us regarding the ways of God. Hashem wants all human beings to repent and He offers that option to the nations of the world as well. Finally, a story about a prophet surviving three days inside of a fish conveys the wonders of God.

Abravanel disagrees with Radak’s first approach arguing that the people of Ninveh did not accomplish a full repentance since scripture makes no mention of their destroying the local idols and temples. Therefore, they can not truly serve as a model for emulation. Indeed, traditional sources debate the quality of their repentance and we shall return to this question in a forthcoming post.

According to Abravanel, the Ninveh model would not influence Am Yisrael. A people capable of ignoring the Torah’s messages and the words of the greatest prophets can ignore the Ninveh example as well. I believe Radak could parry this critique fairly easily. Sometimes, the cumulative effect of many forces motivates repentance. Different people react differently to various stimuli and some Jews may be particularly affected by the actions of their gentile neighbors. Lack of previous success in inspiring repentance would not provide sufficient reason to stop trying a host of methods.

Having disagreed with R. Kimhi, Abravanel offers another suggestion. Perhaps the story teaches that God always realizes his divine purpose. Yonah tries to escape his mission from God but the prophet ultimately performs that mission to great effect. We send much of life in the futile attempt to avoid God and his commanding voice and the book of Yonah instructs us about the futility of our attempts.

When we read this work each Yom Kippur afternoon, a duality of themes should affect us. On the one hand, God loves humanity and compassionately provides the possibility of repentance for each person and nation. On the other hand, God manifests awesome power and inescapable force. If Yonah aids our Internalizing love and fear of God, it surely deserves a place in our holy scriptures.

Why does Yonah flee? Some propose that Yonah wanted to avoid the accusation of false prophecy. If he calls out that Ninveh will be destroyed in forty days and the people of Ninveh cancel that decree through repentance, Yonah will be perceived as a false prophet. After all, he foresaw and publicized a calamity that did not occur.

Ibn Ezra strongly rejects this explanation. First of all, Yonah does not live among the people of Ninveh so why should he care what they will say about him. Let this prophet dwell among his Israelite brethren who may not even know about his prophecy or who understand the contingent nature of negative predictions. Furthermore, why shouldn’t the people of Ninveh, who obviously took Yonah’s dire warning to heart, appreciate the true nature of prophetic predictions? Prophecies of doom assume the ongoing evil behavior of those punished. When those forewarned adopt a more moral and devout lifestyle and escape the foretold punishment, the original prophecy remains authentic.

Instead, Ibn Ezra follows an approach of Chazal that Yonah stood up on behalf of Am Yisrael. If the evil population of Ninveh found it within themselves to repent while the Jews continued their transgressions, then Am Yisrael would be found worthy of punishment. To prevent this occurrence, Yonah tried to sabotage the prophetic mission to the gentiles.

The above approach seems to assume that divine providence judges nations on a comparative basis. A different approach asserts that desert depends upon individual behavior irrespective of how one’s neighbors act. Additionally, as Abravanel notes, Ninveh’s repentance could have the opposite impact since it might inspire the Jewish people towards emulation. If so, Yonah’s mission would help the Jewish cause.

A deeper message lies within Abravanel’s point. We should not hope for the poor behavior of others as a way to enhance our own account. Rather, we wish that the world becomes a better place with other nations acting with decency and that this change positively impacts on our own religious quest.

A simple answer might be that the Torah wants to disabuse readers of the notion that Moshe, or someone else, was actually the author of the Ten Commandments, or of some of them, and so the word ‘all’ emphasizes the divine source of the entire text. However, Rashi (France, 11th century), does not bring us this straightforward explanation. Rather, he says this: the word ‘all’ indicates that the first communication from God at Mount Sinai, heard by the Jewish people, consisted of all of the words of the ten Commandments, spoken together, as one sound; “all” means all at once. Now, this is something which, Rashi points out, no human being could do, it is a clearly divine, albeit incomprehensible, communication. Rashi then explains that the word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence version of the commandments written in the Torah – “I am the Lord your God” and the nine others that follow – is what God said next, after the strange, mashed together, all-at-once version.

Well, the obvious question is, why? What is God, a comedian? What is this first communication of all the words of the Ten Commandments spoken at once meant to convey? If God will immediately afterwards speak the commandments normally, one word at a time, what is the message of the jumbled up commandments? Why did God do this strange little parlor trick, and why did the Torah need, with the word ‘all’, to tell us about it, before telling us the actual content of the commandments?

Perhaps we can understand this first, incomprehensible communication as teaching us this: by prefacing the normal text of the commandments with their all-together-at-once version, perhaps God is modeling for us the nature of Torah study. Just as the Israelites experienced it on Mount Sinai on Shavuot, the first time the Torah was given, as an incomprehensible text, which was only subsequently elucidated, so, too, the Torah must always be experienced as a text whose essential meaning is divine and yet (therefore?) always obscure, not-yet-understood, which challenges us to interpret and elucidate it. The mashed-together version is a model for all of our interactions with the text of the Torah, an interaction which we do not understand, and which demands of us an effort to clarify, make sense, interpret, and explain.

How true or relevant this dynamic is in terms of other, non-Torah texts, be it Shakespeare, a Seinfeld episode or a comic book, is an interesting question, one which is much dealt with by postmodern literary theorists. I’d like to suggest that the greater the text is – the more it is like Torah, the more it is ‘divine’ – the closer to infinite are its implications, and, therefore, the more it can successfully and meaningfully inspire and bear the endless inferences and interpretations of its creative and active readers. Shavuot, as the holiday of the interpretation of the Torah, is an excellent opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to being those kinds of readers to those kinds of texts – or to comic books, if that’s where your personal literary theory takes you.

This is special, pre-recorded shiur given by Rabbi Brovender, about the building of the city of Jerusalem

Gershom Scholem, in an article on the Magen David (Shield or Star of David) which appears in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism, says the following about symbols: “…a symbol must be directly comprehensible. Research and examination must not be necessary to understand it. It is precisely the fact that…meaning appears through this symbol, in the most compact form and yet in its totality, that makes it a symbol. Despite all their profundity, symbols may not pose riddles.” [I would like to thank my wife Iris for bringing this essay to my attention].

I think that Scholem is wrong. Although there certainly are symbols which function in the way that he describes, many symbols – and I think this might be particularly true about Jewish ones – are in fact complicated, suggestive, multi-valent, and obscure in their ultimate meaning and message. The Matza, I think, is one of these.

In the Hagadda , the most basic understanding of the symbolic function of the Matza is stated very early on: “ha lachma anya – this is the bread of affliction, or poverty – which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt”. The Hagadda is apparently referring to Deuteronomy; 16,3, which calls the Passover Matza “lechem oni” – the bread of poverty or affliction. There are many understandings of this phrase; the simplest one seems to be that Matza was the food which the Israelites ate as slaves; it’s cheap, filling, easy and quick to make and transport, which is why the Egyptians supplied it to them. Historians, by the way, believe that bread was in fact invented in ancient Egypt, as a way to feed the masses of slaves and the working poor. The Matza would seem, first and foremost, to symbolize the rigors and deprivation of our slavery in Egypt.

However, Matza has another function: it is what the Jews were commanded by God to eat on the night of the Exodus, together with the Paschal lamb and the bitter herbs (maror), as part of the ritual meant to celebrate and trigger the plague of the first born sons, and the subsequent exodus, at midnight, from Egypt. In this symbolic function, Matza is eaten ritually, as part of the Israelites’ anticipation and celebration of their impending freedom. The eating of Matza at our Seder is a continuation of this ritual, a reenactment of that first Seder.

Matza makes another appearance a few verses later, when the Jews actually leave Egypt. We are told that “they baked the dough which they had brought out of Egypt into Matza cakes, for it had not fermented, for they had been driven out of Egypt, and were not able to delay, nor had they made provisions for themselves.” This is yet another function of the Matza: because of the speed at which it can be prepared and baked, it is what the Jews were able to take with them as food when they escaped from Egypt. The Matza, now, seems to represent at least three different things: the cheap food supplied by the Egyptians to their slaves, which is symbolic of our suffering there; the food which God commanded the Israelites to eat at the first Seder, just prior to their leaving Egypt, which is symbolic of our birth as a free people; and the only food we were able to take with us during the Exodus, due to the miraculous speed at which we were freed and left the country, which made it impossible for us to wait for the dough to rise and prepare normal bread. This last element would seem to be speaking about the sudden, miraculous, redemptive nature of the Exodus. All in all, the Matza seems a pretty complicated symbol for us to swallow on the Seder night!

The first and third of these messages seem contradictory: on the one hand, we have Matza as the bread of affliction – the crummy food eaten by slaves (which points to the crummy lives they led), and, on the other hand, it is the bread of freedom – the food eaten by the Israelites as a result of the miraculous suddenness and speed of their Exodus from slavery. How are we meant to understand the contradictory symbolism in these two uses of the Matza, representing both oppression and freedom?

I would like to suggest that the centerpiece of this story – the ritual eating of Matza at the first Seder in Egypt, which we repeat at our Seder table every year – and which stands mid-way between the other two eatings of the Matza, links and explains these two contradictory messages. God’s commandment to the Israelites to eat Matza at the first Seder must have seemed strange to them. After all, this is the miserable cardboard they ate all year long, day in and day out; why is this bread of affliction part of the exodus ritual? If they could afford lamb and bitter herbs, why couldn’t God command them to bake something different, festive, a challa perhaps, or some rye bread – with seeds – which would be more obviously symbolic of their impending freedom? Why eat the same bread of affliction that they ate yesterday, and the day before that, at the Seder? The answer might be this: the commandment to eat Matza at the Seder is meant to teach the Israelites in Egypt, and us, that the freedom which they were about to achieve is first and foremost located in their minds.

The first thing we must learn about freedom, the first freedom, is the freedom to define one’s world. The freedom to explain, understand, and contextualize the things we do and the objects around us. The Mitzva of eating the Matza, rather than some other, more obviously festive food, gave the Jews the chance to define for themselves their lives and their actions, something which had previously been done for them by Pharaoh and his people. This ritual eating of the Matza is an appropriation of the symbol of the abject slavery they were forced into in Egypt, and its transformation into a symbol of free men and women worshiping their God, and celebrating their freedom to do so. The Israelites are commanded to take the Matza – the very symbol of their slavery -and redefine it, sanctify it, own it, as a symbol of their impending freedom and autonomy. More than anything else, the Matza is symbolic of the freedom to define, to think, to explain the world as we see it, rather than as others explain it to us. The next day, after their midnight Exodus from Egypt, it is this very same bread of affliction which they again eat, as free men and women: the Matza made quickly with dough which did not rise.

The irony of the Matza, which served the selfish needs of the Egyptian task-masters, now serving the needs of the free Jewish people, is no accident. The Jews, by using the bread of affliction first as a bread of celebration, at the Seder, and then as a bread of actual physical sustenance in their flight from Egypt, teach us that their physical liberation began with, and was made possible by, an act of radical redefinition. An object which was emblematic of oppression and poverty – lechem oni – has been ‘liberated’ by the very people who were oppressed by it, through an act of intellect, faith, and will. The Jews take the bread of their affliction, and, through ritual, appropriate it for themselves as a symbol of their freedom from that very affliction, and then use that same bread as a tool to help them in their escape.

This, first and foremost, is what freedom really means, and what the complicated semiotics of the Matza would seem to embody and symbolize: being able to autonomously define and order the world in which you live; to understand the objects and events in your life, and use them – symbolically and practically – at your will.