The Akeda Through the Lens of Jewish History
Walking to synagogue on a Shabbat morning after Purim, I finally began to understand the meaning of Akedat Yitzchak in our tradition. While rabbis, myself included, often engage in apologetics and attempts to reconcile the story of Abraham being willing to take the life of his own child, what was happening in the world had finally given me a whole new lens through which to view the Akeda.
Why was it that Shabbat morning? It was the week after the Iran war had begun, and several synagogues around the world had been attacked. Temple Israel in Michigan had been attacked by a Hezbollah-linked individual, as he nearly killed one hundred and fifteen Jewish children who were inside the building when his attack struck. If it were not for the courage and speed of the armed guards on site, the outcome of this attack would have been beyond horrific. There were also attacks on synagogues in Europe and Canada during that week. Iran had activated all of the sleeper cells it had at its disposal and asked them to attack Jewish institutions.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a warning telling Israelis abroad not to attend synagogue on that Shabbat or display Jewish symbols in public.
Waking up Shabbat morning, I wondered with my wife if I should take our children to synagogue that Shabbat as I do every week. We agreed that we simply cannot let a madman sitting in the IRGC headquarters in Tehran decide for us whether or not we take our children to synagogue in the US. I remembered how much my grandfather and great-grandfather had done to defy the Soviet NKVD and uphold Jewish life in Russia despite the danger it involved, and was sure that we would not cower now to any vague IRGC threats.
We got our girls ready, and I began walking with them to synagogue. As Mark Twain said: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” As I walked, I felt weary. Here I was taking my children to synagogue, looking visibly Jewish on a week when the Islamic Republic of Iran had activated its global network of sleeper cells. How much safer would it be if we didn’t go to synagogue? How much safer would it be if we were not visibly Jewish?
Despite the fact that the risk was statistically negligible and minute, and that we are blessed to live as Jews in an era of extraordinary safety, this small discomfort made me think of the centuries of Jews who chose to raise their children despite the extraordinary danger for themselves and for their children.
The instinct to protect our children is one that is stronger than our instinct to take care of our very selves, and yet Jews throughout the centuries who could have easily changed their faith and abandoned their Judaism, Jews who loved and cared deeply for their children, chose to hold on to their faith, despite everything that would mean for their children.
It was there that I began to understand the place of the Akeda in Jewish tradition, especially Sephardic Jewish tradition. Yes, Ashkenazi communities, like all others, do read the Binding of Isaac story on the first and second days of Rosh Hashanah, but Sephardic communities focus on it even more and for a good reason.
Most notable among these differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi liturgy is that of Et Sha’are Ratzon, a heartbreaking liturgy describing in detail the Binding of Isaac and its meaning. The liturgy is very different from Ashkenazi commentary, as it envisions the perspective of Isaac as he is taken to be sacrificed:
The liturgical poem written by Rabbi Judah Ibn Abbas of Fez, Morocco, in the 12th century, has God commanding Abraham about the Akeda in the following way:
“The son who was born to you from Sarah,
To whom your soul is deeply bound,
Rise, offer him to Me as a pure offering,
Upon the mountain where My glory shines for you.”
The binder, the bound one, and the altar!
Unlike Ashkenazi commentary and liturgy focusing on the element of sacrifice in the Akeda, Ibn Abbas captures the emotions Abraham and Isaac must have experienced following that commandment:
“The bright day became like night in their eyes,
And a multitude of tears flowed with trembling.
The eye weeps bitterly, yet the heart rejoices.
The binder, the bound one, and the altar!”
Isaac turns to Abraham and, almost rebuking him, describes what Sarah will certainly be going through in this process as Isaac tells Abraham:
“Tell my mother that her joy has turned,
The son she bore at ninety years
Was destined for fire and the knife.
Where shall I find one to comfort her?
I grieve for my mother, who will cry and lament.
The binder, the bound one, and the altar!”
Isaac is not only heartbroken for himself, but he is also devastated thinking about what it is that will happen to Sarah. The emotional and human difficulty of all this shakes the heavens too:
“All the angels of the heavenly chariot roared,
The Ofanim and Seraphim asked in supplication,
Pleading before God on behalf of the commander:
‘Please, give redemption and grant atonement.
Let the world not remain without its moon.’
The binder, the bound one, and the altar!”
The story of the Et Sha’are Ratzon liturgy gets all the more heartbreaking when you know that its author was in many ways talking about himself. Rabbi Judah Ibn Abbas was born in Morocco, but he later traveled around the Mediterranean and settled down in Baghdad, where he married his wife Hannah. Hannah was a highly educated and literate Baghdadi woman who was very well read. Like Hannah in the biblical story of Samuel’s mother, Hannah and Rabbi Judah did not have children. Then, like in the story of Abraham and Sarah, after many years of marriage, Ibn Abbas and his wife, Hannah, had one son. Following the biblical account of Samuel, Hannah named her own son Shmuel. As this one son of theirs grew up, he became highly educated, a doctor, a mathematician, and loved studying philosophy, and here is where the Akeda story comes in. Shmuel, son of Judah Ibn Abbas, decided he would convert to Islam. Not only would he leave his parents’ faith, but he also decided to write a book called Afaham El Yahud, which means “the silencing of Jews,” filled with antisemitic hate against the Jewish people and explaining what convinced him to convert to Islam.
While Ibn Abbas and his wife Hannah did not lose their only child in the same physical sense present in the Binding of Isaac, the loss of their child to what they valued most, Jewish peoplehood and tradition, is ever so present between the lines of his poem Et Sha’are Ratzon.
While Ashkenazi Jews faced occasional episodic forced conversions, Ashkenazi Jewry did not face forced conversions as a daily reality in any way that is similar to what Sephardic Jews had faced. The systemic, state-sponsored reward-and-punishment system in which Sephardic Jews had to face conversion as a daily challenge has shaped Sephardic Jewry in many unique ways that are unparalleled among their Ashkenazi brethren.
There is a good reason for the Akeda to be a far more powerful theme of the High Holidays among Sephardic Jews: the Akeda is very much their own personal experience. They had the option of delivering their children to a better and safer life if they had just converted out of Judaism. They had the opportunity to raise their children in a discrimination-free fashion and a better lifestyle if they had not raised them Jewish. To them, the choice of the Akeda was a daily dilemma and an active choice that they were making. While this does a great deal to help us understand the reality of life Sephardic Jews dealt with for many years, it also gives us a new perspective on the meaning of the Akeda.
“And it came to pass after these things, that God tested Abraham, and He said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he said, ‘Here I am.’ And He said, ‘Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go away to the land of Moriah and bring him up there for a burnt offering on one of the mountains, of which I will tell you. And Abraham arose early in the morning, and he saddled his donkey, and he took his two young men with him and Isaac his son; and he split wood for a burnt offering, and he arose and went to the place of which God had told him.’” (Bresheet chapter 22, Pesukim 1–3)
One of the greatest difficulties we have in reading the Akeda is a result of us seeing Abraham as the all-powerful parent, Isaac as the powerless child, and the danger that might come to Isaac as coming from Abraham. Yet the experience of Jews throughout the centuries finding themselves in the role of Abraham and their children in the role of Isaac gives a very different perspective to the way Jews have read the story of the Akeda: Abraham is as helpless as Isaac, and both are trying to live a life of faith in a world that makes that faith so dangerous.
The reason the Akeda is so central to the lived experience of Sephardic Jews is the fact that, unlike most Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews had the option of opting out and having a better life. Yes, the Jews of Ashkenaz faced the barbarism of the Crusades, the horrors of the pogroms, the persecution of the Czar, and the constant pressure of forced conversions, yet none of those persecutors offered their children a better life after conversion. Being a medieval illiterate serf or peasant in Europe was the dream of no Jewish parent ever. While this all obviously oversimplifies many countries over many centuries, it highlights the incredible fact that Sephardic Jewry resisted for centuries the temptations of assimilation and willingly paid with their lives and livelihoods to make sure they and their children lived and died as Jews.
From that lens, the story of Sephardic Jewry is one that sees both Abraham and Isaac as helpless in the face of God’s will. They are both walking to do the will of God. Yes, Abraham is the one God had spoken to, but he is not coercing his will upon Isaac, who is forty years old at the time. Abraham is the leader of the household, the spiritual leader, the one who has led the family in this path of the One God, but Isaac is no less of a member of that same faith. Unlike human sacrifices at the time, the biggest sacrifice that Abraham is making at the time is asking his son to live like a Jew as well. Abraham is the messenger bringing the news to Isaac, the man who agrees to that message. Abraham is not all-powerful, nor is Isaac powerless.
The Midrash (Bresheet Rabbah 56:8) shares the following: “Rabbi Isaac said: At the moment when Abraham sought to bind his son Isaac, Isaac said to him: ‘Father! I am a young man, and I fear that my body may tremble from fear of the knife, causing you distress. Perhaps the slaughter will become invalid, and your offering will not be accepted as a sacrifice. Therefore, bind me firmly, very firmly!’
Immediately, ‘And he bound Isaac’ (Genesis 22:9). Could a man bind a thirty-seven-year-old son (Isaac’s age) without his consent? Surely it was only with Isaac’s full consent!
Immediately afterward, ‘Abraham stretched out his hand’ (Genesis 22:10). As he reached out his hand to take the knife, tears streamed from his eyes, and his tears fell into Isaac’s eyes out of a father’s compassion. Yet despite this, Abraham’s heart rejoiced to fulfill the will of his Creator.”
In the view of this Midrash Isaac fully agrees to the process of the Akeda.
The contrast between the centrality of the Akeda in the Yamim Noraim services in Sephardic services, and the centrality of the Harugei Malchut, the Ten Martyrs, in Ashkenazi services, and the Akeda in Sephardic services, is perhaps the best reflection of the different histories of these two parts of the Jewish people. While the Jews of Ashkenaz were martyred in abrupt and extremely cruel acts of violence in which Jews had a flash of a second to decide if they would die as Jews or live as Catholic peasants, Sephardic Jews lived through an experience far more similar to what we all are living through today: we can abandon our Judaism and turn on our fellow Jews and have a more comfortable life, free of many risks and costs, or we can take the risks, pay the price, and continue to practice our faith.
It is important to also note the words of Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azikri, who was born in the city of Tzfat in 1533 to a family that was expelled from Spain in 1492: “Within my heart I will build a sanctuary for His glory; as a sacrifice, I will offer Him, my only soul.” These words are the foundation of the more popular version, written much later by Rabbi Isaac Hutner of the Rabbi Chaim Berlin Yeshiva in New York, Bilvavi, Mishkan Evneh:
“In my heart I will build a sanctuary for the splendor of His glory,
And in that sanctuary I will erect an altar for the radiance of His majesty.
For an eternal lamp, I will take for myself the fire of the Binding of Isaac,
And as a sacrifice, I will offer Him my one and only soul.”
From the time in 612 CE when Visigothic king Sisebut, who forced thousands of Sephardic Jews to convert or die, the sacrifice of choosing to be Jewish was very much a present reality in the life of Spanish Jews. Spain’s Jews not only had the pressure to convert, but in many cases, unlike Ashkenazi Jews, actually faced much better life prospects and upward mobility upon conversion. As the echos of the past become stronger and stronger today, let us remember the resilience of the Sephardic spirit, the spirit of the Akeda and the great Jews of Sepharad, and let us show our enemies that no pressure will have us abandon our faith and who we are.
