The Akeida, the binding of Isaac is a story fundamental to our tradition. It is found in our daily liturgy, we read it on Rosh Hashana; and then again in the yearly Torah reading. It’s a story we trip over again and again, an endlessly provocative story. In fact, I am probably more upset reading it since I’ve become a father. Why would God command the sacrifice of a child? I may temporarily achieve a flash of understanding using one commentary, or another, but still I don’t ever fully grasp it. This is a story whose mystery is not to be exhausted. Nevertheless. I will try again to understand the story. Today I will use a midrash from Genesis Rabba, one that Rashi picks up on, to wrestle with its meaning yet again.

Rashi on Genesis 22:12 (on the angel of God’s words “Now I know that you are in awe of God”): Look God, I will explain to you my gripe [Abraham said], Yesterday you said to me “in Isaac you will have offspring named for you” then you came back and said, “take please my son” and now you say “do not do anything to the boy”! The Holy One Blessed Be He said: “I will not desecrate my covenant, and what emerged from my lips I will not change” (Psalms 89:35). When I said, “go take him”, “what emerged from my lips I will not change”. I didn’t say to you “go slaughter him”, rather “take him up”. Now that you’ve taken him up, put him down!!

The midrash turns the story completely around. God reassures Abraham that God has been consistent all along. It is Abraham who misunderstood God. And, moreover, the reader has misunderstood the story. For the sake, it seems, of God’s consistency, we are not to believe the plain meaning of what we just read. Are we, then, to believe that this story is all about miscommunication – this story of ultimate sacrifice whose mystery is at the heart of our tradition? There are a number of ways we might understand this midrash. Here I will entertain two possibilities. The Rabbis, post the failed Bar Kochba rebellion were frightened by the kind of religious zeal that would lead one to sacrifice one’s son. Thus, with the powerfully transformative tool of exegesis they radically tame the story. They take the edge off, and the knife out. Rather than a story about being willing to kill for God it becomes a story about being willing to serve God peacefully.

Reading the Akeida according to this midrash, I ask why would Abraham misunderstand God’s word? Why would he hear a command to slaughter in a simple command to raise up his son? Perhaps Abraham was making a mistake, a common mistake made in the course of our most important relationships. We often misunderstand the voices of those we are most intimate with, hearing echoes of a harsher voice from the past, voices that drowns out the present. Instead of hearing the gentle voice of our beloved or a trusted colleague, we hear a critical demanding voice belonging to another time and place. And we act on that misunderstanding in a way that often reinforces our mistaken belief. When we hear the command, the demand of another, divine or human, instead of a modulated measured request we might hear “Give me everything. Do the impossible. Destroy your life for my sake, I will take nothing less”. We then resist, or perhaps we withhold, pretending to give what we believe is required, but, after all, giving nothing in response. Or, maybe, in a misguided act of protest, we set out to destroy ourselves as we believe has been commanded.

If, then, the Akeida developed in a cultural context of human sacrifice, as scholars claim, perhaps what Abraham is hearing are the divine voices that guided him before the God of the Israelites revealed Himself to Abraham. He is hearing the divine voices from an earlier period in his life that drown out the strange, unfamiliar voice of Abraham’s new God. He hears then, the unspoken command to sacrifice his son echoing from an earlier stage in his life. But, as it turns out, Abraham was utterly wrong about who his new God was. He was confusing this God with the gods of the past. When God told him to take up his son, he heard “kill your son”. But that wasn’t it at all. This God is not a God who demands the lives of our children.

What this Midrash, then, comes to teach us is this: If we truly heard the gentle and loving voice of a divine or human other reminding us that giving does not have to be annihilating, we might then give more freely. Only in trusting the other not to destroy or require destruction, would the possibilities of gifts freely offered multiply. Were we to listen to this lesson the command, the demand in our own psyches, might be transformed. Instead of hearing the internal destructive voices we might hear these words instead: “take please your son, your only son, the one you love, and go, raise him up, hold him high up and show him to me, for he is beautiful. Raising him up is all the gratitude and recognition I need. And put that knife down!!”