Abraham Page 8

  “There is none better to sacrifice our lives to than our God,” wrote a chronicler of Mainz, where three hundred died, in 1096. “Let everyone who has a knife inspect it lest it be flawed. Let him come forth and cut our throats for the sanctification of Him who Alone lives Eternally; and finally let him cut his own throat.” Women cut the necks of their children, rabbis their flocks, lovers their beloveds—“until there was one flood of blood.”

  And what did they cry as they were committing mass suicide? “Ask ye now and see, was there ever such a holocaust as this since the days of Adam? When were there ever a thousand and a hundred sacrifices in one day, each and every one of them like the akedah of Isaac son of Abraham?”

  Faced with their own deaths, Jews turned back to Abraham, and in so doing altered the notion of suffering that had existed for centuries. In antiquity, the children of Israel suffered because they had disobeyed God’s laws. This malfeasance explained their punishments in the desert under Moses or in Israel after they set up a kingdom.

  By contrast, medieval Jews began to see suffering as a sign of God’s favor rather than his fury. Exemplary individuals are often asked to suffer for their righteous behavior, the rabbis said. Hardship is an indication of worthiness, not sin, and only strengthens those who are faithful. For proof they turned to Isaac. But in order to sell this idea of Isaac as the ultimate victim, interpreters had to make his story more closely parallel to the times. To do this they introduced a radical idea: Isaac, they said, actually was a victim. Abraham did kill his son.

  The idea that Isaac died on Moriah has deep roots in Jewish interpretation. As Shalom Spiegel showed in his 1950 study, The Last Trial, commentators once again grounded their view firmly in the text. They pointed to the fact that Isaac does not return with Abraham from the mountain, and that the word for the ram, hr, is actually a cognate of hryt, or “end of days,” which suggests Abraham understood that his descendants would be ensnared in thickets until the end of time.

  But the biggest hook is that, as Abraham was binding his son, the angel called out twice to stop him. The first time he said, “Do not raise your hand.” The second time, “Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your favored son, I will bestow my blessing upon you.” Interpreters pounced. Why call out twice if Abraham actually stopped the first time? Also, why say Abraham did not withhold his favored son?

  Only one reason suggested itself: Abraham actually killed his son the first time. As Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn wrote in an influential twelfth-century poem, Abraham made haste, pinned Isaac down with his knees, and slaughtered him.

  Down upon him fell the resurrecting dew, and he revived.

  The father seized him then to slaughter him once more.

  Scripture, bear witness! Well-grounded is the fact:

  And the Lord called Abraham, even a second time from heaven.

  Abraham then saw the ram, the interpreters suggested, and killed it the second time.

  So if Isaac was actually dead for a limited time, what happened to him? He clearly returns later, fathers Esau and Jacob, and dies in old age. Here the commentaries get even more complex, and show their deepest allegiance to Christianity. Isaac, the rabbis said, actually went away for three days, then returned. In some versions he went to heaven; in others he went to the Garden of Eden, or even to study Torah. (The significance of three days actually predates Judaism and Christianity and was well known among Mesopotamian pagans as the time the gods traveled to the netherworld, then returned.)

  Yet even for Jewish interpreters, the point is not that Isaac died but that he was resurrected. God revived him as a reward for his righteousness so he could provide salvation for his descendants. The idea that Isaac was sacrificed and reborn became so widespread that Jews in the Middle Ages began to put ashes on their foreheads to remember their slain forefather. Every Jew who faced trial became another Isaac. “Recall to our credit the many akedahs,” Rabbi Ephraim concludes. “The saints, men and women, slain for thy sake.”

  The idea of Isaac’s death and resurrection is so powerful that once it entered the tradition it never entirely disappeared. If anything, Isaac’s agony may be more responsible for the story’s enduring influence. Abraham’s test is so extraordinary it makes him seem remote in many ways, while Isaac’s plight is more immediate. Abraham has become so godlike, he is no longer human. He is no longer us.

  Isaac is us—our willingness to trust our fathers, our constant pain, our everlasting desire to be rewarded for our righteousness. At any point in history when innocent people have suffered, poets have cited Isaac as a beacon of dignity and injustice. The English poet Wilfred Owen invoked Isaac’s death in a vivid denunciation of fathers sending their sons off to die in World War I. An angel beseeches Abraham not to kill the lad, and even points to a ram to sacrifice instead. “But the old man would not so, but slew his son— / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

  The sculptor George Segal employed Abraham and Isaac the same way to commemorate the Kent State killings. Bob Dylan wielded Abraham similarly to protest Vietnam in “Highway 61 Revisited.” God says to Abraham, “Kill me a son.” “Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ ” God says, “No.” Abraham says, “Where should the killing be done?” God says, “Out on Highway 61.” (The number 61 is believed to refer to a highway in Dylan’s home state of Minnesota.)

  But the idea of Isaac as a metaphor for needless death reached its definitive expression in the Holocaust. One Yiddish lullaby at the time wailed:

  You, my child, you are a member

  Of a holy congregation,

  Tender branch of a wandering tree,

  While, like Isaac to the akedah,

  The ship carries us across the sea.

  Sleep, my child; it’s early morning.

  Soon the waves will quiet down.

  In the fog so deeply hidden

  Lurks our people’s abiding power.

  As Elie Wiesel has written, “All the pogroms, the crusades, the persecutions, the slaughters, the catastrophes, the massacres by sword and the liquidations by fire—each time it was Abraham leading his son to the altar, to the holocaust all over again.”

  But as Wiesel also emphasizes: Martyrdom, for all its endurance in religious history, is not the theme of the Jews, or the theme of the binding. Survival is. Isaac, whatever happens to him on Moriah, ultimately lives—as do his descendants. Jewish survival, in fact, depends on his survival, and draws on it for inspiration. This reassurance begins with his seemingly inappropriate name, Yishaq, “He laughs.” As the first survivor, Isaac teaches the survivors of future Jewish history that it is possible to suffer and doubt for a lifetime yet not to lose the art of laughter.

  Isaac, Wiesel suggests, never forgets the terror that befalls him on Moriah. He looks forever into the face of his father, sees the outstretched knife at his throat, and hears the saving call of God. And he knows that the shadow of his own death is illuminated by the light of his own endurance. And he knows, most of all, that in the glare of such calamity, there is only one response. He laughs, Wiesel imagines: “Nevertheless.”

  IF THE POSSIBILITY that Isaac dies in the binding jostled the meaning of the story forever, another idea challenged it even more. What if Isaac wasn’t the son?

  On the ninth day of the month of Dhu l-Hijja, up to 2 million white-robed worshipers gather in the valley of Mina, just outside of Mecca. Under scorching sun, the worshipers prepare for the climactic events of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage that all able-bodied Muslims who can afford it are called to make at least once. At dawn, the pilgrims take handfuls of pea-size pebbles, mount long ramps, and toss their pebbles at three giant stone pillars. These fifty-foot columns, actually conical in shape, represent the devil, who three times tried to tempt Abraham to disobey God by refusing to sacrifice his son. Abraham did not succumb.

  The following morning, the pilgrims assemble again in the open plain. An imam leads a communal prayer, then takes a sheep at least one ye
ar old and turns it on its left side, facing Mecca. He recites the holy words Allahu akbar, “God is great,” then carefully slits the animal’s throat—windpipe and jugular—in a single stroke. Blood forms in a puddle. The ‘Id al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, is the concluding rite of the pilgrimage and commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice of the ram in lieu of killing his son. In Saudi Arabia alone, half a million goats, sheep, rams, cows, and camels are killed; the bulk of the meat is distributed to the poor.

  “Eat of their flesh,” the Koran says of the slaughtered animals, “and feed the uncomplaining beggar and demanding supplicant.” The purpose of the act is not to feed God but to feed the souls of humans. As sura 22 says, “Their flesh and blood does not reach God; it is your piety that reaches him.”

  But as specific as the Koran is about the details of the slaughter and the distribution of the meat, it is strikingly unspecific about the details of the event that inspired the feast. Stop a random pilgrim in Mina, do a simple search on the Internet, interview a deeply believing Muslim anywhere in the world and ask whom Abraham went to sacrifice that day, and the answer will invariably be the same. As The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam concludes, “It is usually accepted in Islam that the sacrifice was to be of Ishmael.”

  But the Koran is not so clear.

  The story of Abraham’s near sacrifice is known in Arabic as the dhabih, from the verb “to cut, rend, or slit,” and refers to both the method of slaughter and the victim. The event is described in sura 37, following the story of Abraham being tossed into Nimrod’s flames as a child. Abraham cries, “Lord, grant me a righteous son.” And the Lord complies. “We gave him news of a gentle son.” When the son reaches the age when he could work, Abraham says to him, “My son, I dreamt that I was sacrificing you. Tell me what you think.” The son replies, “Father, do as you are bidden. God willing, you shall find me steadfast.”

  Abraham lays the boy prostrate on his face, but as he does the Lord calls out, “Abraham, you have fulfilled your vision.” “This was indeed a bitter test,” God concludes. “We ransomed his son with a noble sacrifice and bestowed on him the praise of later generations. ‘Peace be on Abraham.’ ”

  The story ends with a first reference to a named son, “We gave him Isaac, a saintly prophet, and blessed them both.”

  The similarities with the biblical story are striking: Abraham receives a call to offer his son; he goes so far as to initiate the act; God intervenes and saves the boy. The similarities with biblical interpretation—both Jewish and Christian—are also notable: The boy is old enough to work and talk, Abraham actually consults his son, and the boy shows himself to be a willing victim.

  But important differences also appear. First, the event takes place in a dream, making it unclear if it ever actually occurred. Second, there is no mention of location, wood, fire, or a knife. Finally, and most notably, in the dream the son is not named. Isaac’s name appears only after the narrative ends.

  The lack of detail in the Koranic story is, in itself, not surprising. The Koran often excludes facts it assumes listeners already know and concentrates instead on the spiritual lesson of the events. And the message of this story comes through vividly: Abraham is a true believer, who submits to God’s will, however extreme, and is rewarded for his efforts. God wants all humans to sacrifice our profane desires—even parental love—to serve a higher calling.

  As Sheikh Feisal Abdul Rauf said, “The sense I get from reading the Koran is that the fundamental issue is that both Abraham and his son surrendered themselves to the ultimate sacrifice. When God asks you to do something, how far are you willing to go? Would you sacrifice as much as they did?”

  Yet despite the clear intent of the story not to name the boy, the Koran appeared in the volatile religious climate of the seventh century, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims were already beginning to wrestle over the ownership of the family of Abraham. As a result, Islamic interpreters felt the need to disentangle the ambiguity. The debate began immediately. The bulk of early interpreters examined the text and concluded that the son must be Isaac. They cited the fact that the sacrifice occurs relatively early in the life of Abraham, before he traveled to Mecca with Ishmael. Also, every time God promises Abraham a son in the Koran, the son is named as Isaac. Therefore, when Abraham prayed for a son at the start of the story, he would have been praying for Isaac.

  Early Islamic interpreters added details to make Isaac even more appealing. The writer al-Suddi says Isaac asked his father to tighten his bonds so he will not squirm, to move the knife quickly, and to pull back his clothes so no blood will soil them and grieve Sarah. Abraham kisses Isaac, then throws him on his forehead (an interesting Muslim addition, given that worshipers touch their foreheads to the ground). Finally God intervenes.

  The Isaac camp dominated in the early centuries of Islam, but in time it was matched by advocates of Ishmael. For their hook, these interpreters relied on the fact that God would not have asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac since God had already promised Abraham and Sarah in the Koran that Isaac would have a son. God, by definition, does not break promises. Also, one source of tension in the story arises from the idea that Abraham is being asked to sacrifice his son when he would seem to be too old to have another. This drama would apply only to the first son, who is Ishmael.

  As Sheikh Abdul Rauf put it, “There is no dispute among Jews, Christians, and Muslims that the commandment was to his only son. And there’s no dispute that Ishmael was the oldest son.”

  Supporters of Ishmael also stress another point, a geopolitical one. The dhabih occurred in Mina, they say, after Ishmael had moved to the desert, during one of Abraham’s visits. Jewish and Christian interpreters, they say, don’t want to acknowledge Abraham’s clear affinity for Ishmael. One interpreter, Tha’labi, in the eleventh century, tells of a Jewish sage who reports to his Muslim friends that Jews also know the real sacrificial son. “But they do envy you,” the sage said, “the congregation of Arabs, that your father was the one that God commanded to sacrifice.”

  Ibn Kathir, writing later, goes even further, accusing Jews of “dishonestly and slanderously” introducing Isaac into the story, even though the Bible says Abraham went to sacrifice his only son, his favored son. “They forced this understanding because Isaac is their father while Ishmael is the father of the Arabs.” As the commentator al-Tabarsi summarized the argument, “The proof for those who say that it was Isaac is that the Christians and Jews agree about it. The answer to that is that their agreement is no proof and their view is not acceptable.”

  Until the tenth century, Muslims debated the identity of the son, much as Jews and Christians scuffled over whether Isaac actually died. As another commentator, al-Tabari, said of the competing arguments, “If either was completely sound, we would not bother with any other.” But neither side prevailed. The scholar Reuven Firestone collated more than two hundred medieval Islamic commentaries and concluded that one hundred thirty named Isaac as the son, one hundred thirty-three named Ishmael.

  Yet over time Ishmael did prevail in the Islamic world, and the idea that Abraham may have taken Isaac faded into history. Firestone concluded that this has more to do with the struggle among the religions than with the struggle between Abraham and God. By the eleventh century, Islam preferred to rely on its own authoritative sources, and “as the genealogical connection with Abraham, Ishmael, and the northern Arabs became more firmly established, the Isaac legend was deemed increasingly suspect until it was eventually rejected.”

  For Muslims, Ishmael was the favored son, so he was the one Abraham took to sacrifice. What had been subject to debate became a matter of doctrine. And just as Christians believed their version of the story superseded the Jewish one, Muslims believed their version trumped both the Jewish and the Christian ones. A story nominally about submission to God had become the story of triumph in the name of God. As a result, the true victim of Abraham’s offering proved to be not his son, or even the ram.

 
It was accord among his descendants.

  AS I was preparing to leave B. Cohen & Sons, I asked Binyomin Cohen how many children he had. “Ten,” he said. And grandchildren? “Over fifty.” What about great-grandchildren? He began to count. “Nine, ten, I don’t remember.”

  “So would you sacrifice one of your sons?” I asked.

  To my surprise he didn’t hesitate. “Each of us performs our own akedah,” he said. “There are many things we do for God. He hasn’t given me the order yet. But if he does give me the order, I would do it.”

  For Binyomin Cohen, as for so many people today, the idea of the ultimate sacrifice for God is not alien, it’s immediate. It’s an expression of their selflessness, their godliness, their willingness not to be bound by the world around them. And this, I was realizing, was one of the more troubling legacies of Abraham’s life. Indeed, it may have been the one that set me off on this journey to begin with.

  Abraham, I was discovering, is not just a gentle man of peace. He’s as much a model for fanaticism as he is for moderation. He nurtured in his very behavior—in his conviction to break from his father, in his willingness to terrorize both of his sons—the intimate connection between faith and violence. And then, by elevating such conduct to the standard of piety, he stirred in his descendants a similar desire to lash out, to view pain as an arm of belief, and to use brutality to advance their vision of a divine-centered world.

  For all the differences in how Jews, Christians, and Muslims interpret the story of the offering, by far the deeper revelation, I came to believe, is how all three religions have chosen to place the narrative of a father preparing to kill his son at the heart of their self-understanding. This fact is so fundamental that it’s easy to overlook. But it shouldn’t be. All three monotheistic faiths force their adherents to confront the most unimaginable of human pains: losing a child. The binding, the crucifixion, and the dhabih—often viewed as distinguishing the monotheistic faiths—actually illustrate their shared origins.