The Return of Jewish Fate
Reflections on the Binding of Isaac after October 7
I have gone silent since this summer. (Loyal reader, this is by way of explanation, if not apology.) History has been flooding our lives with such force, I barely have time to process my thoughts and feelings, let alone put them to paper (or keyboard). It has given me a new respect for those who are able to give shape, even beautiful shape, to the experience of living through the unknown, the terrifying, the excruciating.
We are living in history because we are now in what Eliot Cohen recently called “real war.” By real war, we mean a fateful war, a war whose outcome will determine everything, and whose outcome is entirely unknown. Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding, I grew up in America in peacetime. Those adventures were failures, and while our defeat has certainly left its imprint on the world and American politics, it didn’t imperil America in any fundamental way.
This war is different. Especially at this moment, as it escalates and accelerates and Tehran has come out from behind the shadows, everything is on the table. In a matter of months, we may find ourselves in a true world war; in a year the Islamic Regime may topple — or the Jewish State. In either scenario, everything will look very different.
Cohen quotes Churchill:
Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.
War is not the only thing to have returned. Part of what I have been grappling with over the last few months is what this new era, now a year old, means for Jewish existence. And because on Rosh HaShanah we read together the terrifying story of the binding of Isaac, my thoughts are revolving around that dark fable.
Since I was old enough to understand a sliver of what went on in shul — or "temple", as it was to me in those days — I was haunted by the story. How can one not be? A boy sitting by his father in stiff holiday clothes hears the rabbi speak about a father raising a blade to slaughter his son. We all fear that somewhere lurking in our father's heart is the desire to kill us; that one day, perhaps, in a changing room as he reveals his adult nakedness to us he will reveal something else, that darker thing lurking within him, the violence that we know but don't accept all fathers are capable of toward their sons. And what can the rabbi do with this image, the son bound helplessly before the madness of his father, once it's out in the room on the Upper East Side, uttered among New York Times-reading lawyers and shrinks and money managers? He can try to clean it up, though it won't be cleaned. Rabbi Tattelbaum remarked once that the refrain "and the two walked on together" is not repeated at the end of the story, that the relationship between father and son is forever severed. Well and good, but it brings us no closer to the meaning of that awful mystery.
But for the enigma of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, I likely would not have turned to Judaism seriously. And over the years I tried on many different readings. Like perhaps every liberal American Jew, I discovered the possibility that Abraham might have failed the test by acceding to it — though I recognized that this is not so much an interpretation as a rejection of the text, and does violence to the place the Akedah holds as a source of merit in Jewish liturgy. (When I heard that interpretation from a pulpit in Los Angeles, that Abraham ought to have protested and fought for tikkun olam, I realized what a dead-end it really was.) I read Erich Auerbach’s literary appreciation of the story; Shalom Spiegel's exploration of the Akedah and medieval Jewish martyrdom; Jon Levenson's extraordinary account of Judaism as a sublimation of child sacrifice rituals; Kierkegaard on the teleological suspension of the ethical (I still think there’s a simpler way to say that); Ethan Tucker’s masterful repudiation of Kierkegaard and reconstruction of the ethical meaning of Abraham’s act; and devoured Aaron Koller’s survey of its treatment in modern Jewish thought.
On making Aliya and recognizing we would have to offer up our children's lives to military service, I felt I came closer to the simple meaning of the story — which, as R' Tucker argued, is not about violating moral norms to please God but surrendering something, someone, infinitely precious. Indeed, Israelis, who know sacrifice and death much more intimately than American Jews, have always been much closer to the simple meaning of the story.
But a year and a day after October 7, something else has become clear to me. Now I feel I am finally coming close to grasping what it is trying to tell us.
It seems to me that the Akedah is there to provide the faithful reader, the child of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with essential information about what it means to be a Jew. To be a Jew is to be in covenant with the Master of the Universe, to be close to His service, to view if not His face than Him from behind. But this is only one half of the relationship. The second half is to be subject to death and terrible suffering. The two are linked, as we see in the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, consumed as holocausts precisely because they drew near to God’s service. In the words attributed to Moses in the Gemara, "this (our obedience) is Torah and this (our agony) is its reward."
This is not a sales pitch. It is a setting of expectations. We can twist and turn to force that fate into some ethical mould. We can tie ourselves in knots to show that Nadav and Avihu and other blameless victims had it coming. But in doing so we stop our ears to what Torah is telling us. This is Torah, and this is its reward. Be silent, for thus have I decreed it.
In the modern period, Jews believed they had split the atom of Jewish existence. Both liberalism and Zionism claimed to have gamed the system in much the same way as Ulysses did with regard to the Sirens. Until Ulysses sailed past their island, to hear the song of the siren carried the penalty of madness and certain death. It was a package deal. But Ulysses, by his craftiness, succeeded in separating the first from the second, to experience the song of the siren without driving his vessel into the cliffs. Similarly, until Zionism and liberalism, to be a Jew was to be subject to obloquy and violence. Every Jew knew this. It was our fate. But Zionism and liberalism claimed to have preserved the blessings of Jewish existence and discarded its agonies. All of liberal Jewish thought is premised on our having overcome this core dimension of Jewish existence: We must no longer rely on the "covenant of fate" (in Soloveitchik's terms) but on the voluntary embrace of common purposes; we must choose Sinai over Auschwitz; we must reject tragedy as a Jewish event and focus instead only on our life-affirming responses to tragedy; Judaism must be rooted in love and choice and not in the mystery of our dark fate.
But the press releases were premature. We never escaped or dissolved Jewish fate. To be a Jew is, after all, a package deal. Obloquy and violence for us. Glory to the martyrs.
Perhaps no figure understood this better than Rabbi Akiva, who both enshrined passionate love as the holy of holies of Jewish existence and offered up his body to its agonies as a fulfillment not just of a divine decree but of a central commandment and pillar of the faith, the mitzvah to love God with everything we have and expect nothing at all in return. Akiva understood this with a clarity to which we all should aspire. And to understand it is to embrace it, as Abraham was the first to do.
To embrace our fate is not to actively seek martyrdom or exalt it. It is true and must remain true that the Jewish people celebrate and love life and are not eager to escape it to some other realm. Death is never a cause for celebration, and the most revolting feature of the culture with which we are at war is its avidity not only to kill but to die. But the Jewish love of life must not blind us to the darker side of our fate. We must not pretend to do our existence what Disney does to the fables it adapts — to remove the sting, extract the pain, dissolve the tragedy. In any case, from Nir Oz to Tel Aviv to Metula to the campus of Columbia University, we can no longer make believe.