If We Left Space for Wild Animals

An alternate reflection on the Binding of Isaac

I drew this. The Hebrew words are Abraham, Isaac, angel, and God, placed near the stars in the Aries constellation. There’s also the word for Aries the ram. I published this image in my memoir, Bad Fire.

The story in Chapter 22 of Genesis is often referred to as the Binding of Isaac. The “Sacrifice of Isaac” is a common misnomer.

(“And if you don’t know why it’s a misnomer, you get an ‘F’,” I can still hear my secular schoolteacher’s voice saying while we wrote in blue booklets during a class quiz.)

God tells Abraham to go up on the mountain and burn his young son Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham and Isaac walk for three days up the mountain with the sacrificial tools, and at least for a while, Abraham doesn’t tell Isaac what is about to happen, because Isaac asks where the sheep is. Next thing we know, Abraham ties up his son, lays him on the wooden altar, and holds out the knife. At that moment, an angel appears, commanding him not to hurt the boy after all. The angel praises Abraham’s piety for not having tried to withhold the boy. Just then, Abraham notices a ram, and he sacrifices it. The angel goes on: God will grant Abraham many descendants.

Thus it is a binding (“akedah” in Hebrew) and not ultimately a sacrifice.

Moreover, it is explicitly a loyalty test.

Taking this story on its own terms: If anything during these three days had gone differently, all of human history would have been profoundly changed. That’s because Abraham is considered to have been the father of all Jews. Had Abraham pled for his son Isaac’s life or hid him (in defiance of the first divine message), God would have given no blessing to Isaac’s descendants; had Abraham killed Isaac (in defiance of the second divine message), Isaac would have had no descendants at all.

I am thinking about this story again because I just read “Take Your Son…”, an essay by Abraham Socher, founder and editor of the Jewish Review of Books. The essay was published in his collection Liberal and Illiberal Arts (2022). Socher was reflecting on Aaron Koller’s book Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (2020). Koller, in turn, was thinking about the work of the 20th-century Orthodox rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and siding more with the 14th-century Joseph ibn Kaspi.

Which is to suggest that this story, the Binding of Isaac, has been discussed for quite a long time, and no one is ever satisfied with it. It’s a very short story, but it feels incomplete, and what little is there is disturbing. No one wants to revere a god who might give us cruel loyalty tests like asking us to kill our family members; no one wants to revere an ancestor precisely for being the sort of man who would have complied with a request to kill his own son; “and then they all lived happily ever after” feels like the wrong narrative ending; and so forth.

At the end of Socher’s essay, he expresses skepticism of “reassuring interpretations of the Akedah.” When we say, one way or another, that God doesn’t really or ultimately want parents to kill their children and that Abraham therefore made a “religious mistake,” we’re yarning a reassuring theology. The Binding of Isaac was all a misunderstanding! God was just fooling! But what if it wasn’t a mistake, Socher asks? In some Jewish interpretations, this ram, the substitute for Isaac, is eternal. Not sheep in general; this sheep. Doesn’t that interpretation mean to say that this whole episode — the loyalty test — was always part of God’s plan, and therefore also part of the religion? If so, what’s the teaching?

I don’t think it can be solved nor does it need to be solved. If you ask me, we don’t have to believe that anything makes sense or is beautiful: not in Genesis, not anywhere. If it doesn’t make sense and isn’t beautiful, we can just say that it doesn’t and isn’t. Nor do we need any theology at all. Atheism will save us a lot of time.

Instead, I make a more neutral observation about this story: wherever there’s a rupture in existing relations, something else can show up. As Leonard Cohen put it famously in “Anthem”: “Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

What shows up might not be good. You might not want this light, after all. But it can get in, once there’s a crack.

By the principle of “zimzum,” contraction, God withdraws from being “everywhere” so God’s got space to create the world. On the opposite side, when people break with each other and are no longer each other’s entire world, there’s space for — what? An encounter with God?

Do you want an encounter with God, if God’s just going to talk to you about why you’re knifing your family and tell you to stop it? And then zip up the sky and leave you with your family who you’re not going to knife after all (you’re not going to knife them, right?)? Well, maybe you didn’t want this encounter with God, but on the other hand maybe it was an important step in your growth so you can learn something from this situation and get past it, but on the third hand maybe you wouldn’t have been in this situation if you didn’t believe in God in the first place.

The ram is always winking in and out of existence, the eternal substitute, the “other option,” twinkling like a star, now you see it, now you don’t.

You are less likely to spot a ram today when you need one, as there are 70% fewer animals alive today than there were a half-century ago. Maybe if we humans withdrew just a bit more — from ourselves, from the horrible things we do, and from our conversations with God about our contradictory, invalid, and fickle reasons — we’d allow space for wild sheep to create more of themselves.

Tucker Lieberman’s occasionally Jewish themes show up in his books, specifically in his memoir Bad Fire and his novel Most Famous Short Film of All Time.