Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity
I started by reading the banner headline
The way you read the big print at the eye doctor’s.
It said I AM THE LORD GOD
ALMIGHTY AND I LOVE YOU ESPECIALLY.
No problem. Very Good.
One line down it said, PACK UP, I’M SENDING YOU
OVERSEAS. It said
YOU WILL HAVE AS MANY CHILDREN AS
THERE ARE SANDS IN THE SEA AND STARS IN THE SKY.
THEY WILL POSSESS THE LAND AND
I AM PERSONALLY GOING TO BLESS THEM.
The smaller print said: I am going
To bless them as long as they obey me.
Otherwise there may be
Certain repercussions. The even smaller
Print explained how we needed
A memorable logo for our organization
And he had just the ticket, a mark of absolute
Distinction, it would only hurt for a minute.
The print kept getting smaller and blurrier,
The instructions more bizarre.
Hold on, I interrupted. I’d like to check
Some of this out with my wife.
NO WAY. THIS IS BETWEEN US MEN.
AND IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE THINKING
ABOUT LOOPHOLES
FORGET IT, MAN. It said they preferred
Not to use strong arm techniques. It said
I am already signed on.
The Story of Abraham
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
The Sacrifice of Isaac and the Religious Foundations of Patriarchy
1 The story of Abraham and Isaac, the “double gift of death” between Abraham/Isaac and God/Jesus, is crucial to an understanding of the patriarchal nature of the sacred and the role that death came to play in defining Western masculinity. Abraham is symbolically the first father; his name means “father of nations” and “father of all people.”[1]See also Hunter, A. "Father Abraham". JSOT 35 (1986): 3–27. His story begins what are aptly called “patriarchal narratives.” It is a foundational story of the world’s three dominant monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Delaney calls it appropriately “the center of gravity, the pivotal story” (21). It is through Abraham that the divine enters human society. Delaney continues: “Abraham is imagined as the vehicle for revealing God’s splendor to the world” (21). It is with him that God makes covenant, “a sign of which is engraved on the male flesh: circumcision.” “Although the Bible begins with Creation, the narrative of Western cultural origins begins with Abraham” (Delaney 21). He is the first patriarch in a social sense as well, and his story is the first narrative to connect death with the language of the sacred in a larger socio-political context: it creates the fraternity of faith that demands and gives death as a price of belonging. Abraham’s story provides a framework for the Western understanding of the sacred, but also the performative establishment of patriarchy as a vehicle for the divine: “The story is performative, for it is Abraham’s action that gave shape and substantive reality to the God to whom the action was directed” (Delaney 21).
2 The point of the story is, on the one hand, to validate the existence of God with the gift of death (the ethical responsibility and faith interchange in the image of God who demands and man who obeys) and, on the other hand, to define an ethics that relies on the logic of sacrifice to maintain the secrecy of its sacred (and gendered) dimension. The sense of the communal is structured around the patriarchal axis—man, his son, and his male god. “Is their gender merely accidental, or is it precisely the point?,” Delaney asks (19).
3 The woman (Sarah, the mother) is absent; God speaks to Abraham alone. Since no ethical demands are made of her, she is not defined as an ethical subject. She is that which is not. Her death cements the patriarchal contract (the covenant) that marks Abraham as the one who hears the voice of God and executes God’s will. Sarah’s body, hidden “out of sight,” is the secret that binds the sacred to the language of death. The story creates God, whose laws then create human community. The familiar story, from Genesis 22, goes as follows:
After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.” And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham. “My father!” And he said, “Here am I, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together. When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, The-LORD-Will-Provide; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.” (Genesis 12–50: Genesis 22, line 1–14: 101)
4 In the Jewish conception of guilt and punishment, no one can be the sin offering of another, nor provide absolution for the other. To wipe out sin there is no go-between, forgiveness does not come via agencies” (Spiegel 86). Wiesel summarizes this view: “Had he killed his son, Abraham would have become forefather of a people—but not the Jewish people. In Jewish tradition [. . .] every man is an end unto himself, a living eternity” (qtd. in Berman 76). No person can mediate between God and the other; thus, Isaac’s death cannot be a source of redemption for all Israel. Some scholars who argue against the theme of redemption do suggest that even though Isaac does not represent all of Israel, he is a substitute for Abraham. This patriarchal interpretation assumes that the child is a mini-version of the father. Landy writes: “Abraham is sacrificed in Isaac, who transmits his seed; he is identified with God, the created image with its source, through dissolution in the flame at the sacred place” (29). Sacrificing his son, Abraham is sacrificing himself, his immortality, and his future. He is also sacrificing God’s promise that “through Isaac shall his descendants be named.”[2]Many scholars point out that the discrepancy between God’s promise to make Isaac the son of a future Jewish nation and God’s demand to sacrifice him is the first paradox that Abraham must face.
5 The religious traditions of all three monotheistic religions ask one to love God more than anything else and to sacrifice, if God asks, whatever one loves most. Delaney notices that “that idea is at the heart of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is the standard of faith” (59). Faith, obedience, law, and responsibility converge under the umbrella of a sacred exchange: God exists insofar as he is obeyed. Thus, one thing that most religious scholars agree on is that the purpose of the Akedah is a declaration of faith, “sanctification of the divine name (Kiddush Ha-Shem),” through absolute obedience (Jacobs). Jewish scholars argue that Abraham’s actions are incomparable with previous human sacrifices (such as those described in Greek mythology) because the latter were performed either “for the good of their nation, or to appease the gods, or in times of wars, of draughts and flood and pestilences, to make atonement for their countries” (Spiegel 9), whereas “Abraham did what he did not out of conformity to ancestral practice, or under some pressure to relieve public distress, or out of running after glory [. . .]. No, Abraham served his Creator out of love, with his whole heart, not with part of it—not as though in part his heart went to Isaac and in part yielded only out of fear of Heaven” (Spiegel 12). Because it was done out of free will, and for no other ulterior motive but love of God, these scholars believe, the binding of Isaac is the ultimate, the purest, and the original declaration of man’s faith: it is an account of unrelenting obedience and “implicit faith, of a test in submissiveness to God” (Polish, "Akedat" 21). In Talmud, “like fear, love is defined not as a spontaneous emotional expression, but as a moral obligation that leads to worship and keeping of the commandments” (Berman 29). The fear and love of God manifests itself in obedience. “[O]bedience to God’s commandments [ . . .] is an expression of faith” (Berman 115). It is his unquestionable obedience that marks Abraham as an ethical person, and it is his unquestionable obedience that shows God he can enter into covenant with Abraham and bestow his laws and blessings upon him. As Westermann (1981) notices, “It is only in Gen 12–25, [. . .] and so only with Abraham that God ‘concludes a covenant’” (204).