Parshat Vayera :: November 8, 2025

I dedicate this Dvar Torah to the upcoming wedding tomorrow of our son Oren to Fay Gamliel. We pray that Oren and Fay are embarking on the building of a Bayit Ne’eman b’Yisrael, a pleasant home among the Jewish people.

This week’s parsha of Vayera is chock-full of familiar stories and serious dilemmas: it starts with the visit of three angels to Avraham’s tent immediately following his brit mila at age 99, and their promise to him and to Sarah that despite their advanced age, they will soon bear a son, Isaac. Hang onto that; I’ll come back to it at the end. Then comes the story of the destruction of Sodom and Amorrah; then Isaac is born and Hagar and Ishmael are banished to the desert, which we recently read about on Rosh Hashana, and finally, perhaps the most distressing story in the whole Torah and the most debated, the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.

The most often asked question about the Akedah is, Why did Avraham argue and bargain so strongly with God when God told him His plan to destroy Sodom and Amorrah, and yet stay silent and apparently blindly obedient when God ordered him to offer Isaac up as a sacrifice to God? I began to look for commentary on this classic question in a book called Reading Genesis: Beginnings, edited by Beth Kissileff, and what did I find in it but a chapter called “The Binding of Isaac: the Arts of Resistance,” written by our own beloved questioner, Ron Krebs.  Ron’s essay was an expansion of a dvar Torah he gave from this bema 18 years ago. I didn’t remember it and I hope most of you don’t either. 

The traditional interpretation of the passages that describe Avraham’s rushing to fulfill this commandment, suggests that Avraham’s faith and trust in God are proven by his enthusiasm to comply with this commandment: he got up extra early, readied himself for the journey without help from his servants, and went alone with just Isaac up the mountain. But Ron’s thesis is that, contrary to the surface appearance or “public transcript” of the story as written, Avraham did not obediently or enthusiastically rush to obey God’s horrifying demand. Rather, what Ron calls the “hidden transcript” of the story actually shows Avraham’s real resistance to the command, but resistance of the kind that the powerless in a relationship must resort to: namely, procrastination. We see procrastination in the unusually drawn-out description of Avraham’s readying himself for the journey up the mountain, and his painstakingly-described preparation of the altar, which is in stark contrast with the Torah’s usually spare language. In addition, Avraham’s very silence, contrary to the popular saying, does not necessarily imply consent, among those who are powerless. Silence can sometimes be the only possible response, when outright refusal or rebellion is not permitted to someone without power.

In stark contrast to this drama, just three chapters earlier, when Avraham argued with God in the Sodom and Amorrah case, God had actually invited him to discuss the matter, saying to the angels, Shall I hide from Avraham what I do? God allows Avraham to act like a partner in the relationship, inviting Avraham to decide in partnership with God how much mercy to show to the people of Sodom and Amorrah. But in the case of the command to sacrifice Isaac, in spite of the words kach na, take please, it is an order, permitting no discussion. Avraham understands that unlike with Sodom and Amorrah, to refuse, or even to attempt to bargain this time, is not an option. 

But like other powerless partners in a relationship, Avraham’s silence and stalling are ample evidence of his reluctance to fulfill God’s command. Far from rushing enthusiastically to obey, he is dragging his feet. In fact, the entire narrative seems to occur in slow motion. Avraham is clearly willing to converse with God at other times. In fact, his bargaining with God about Sodom and Amorrah is totally chutzpadik: it resembles a transaction in a Middle Eastern shuk. But here, his silence, so clearly uncharacteristic of Avraham, can best be described as sullen reluctance. Ron gives an example in his essay of the aggrieved employee who, appearing to follow instructions, purposely spends so much time preparing to proceed that he doesn’t actually proceed at all. In today’s parlance, Avraham is slow-walking this order until the stalling eventually has to end and he picks up the knife. Even then, he moves slowly enough to allow himself to be stopped by the angel. Hidden resistance, but resistance all the same.

Another classic issue in the Akedah story is the legitimacy of the command in the first place. If this is a test of Avraham’s faith and commitment to God, what kind of God would put anyone, much less a chosen covenantal partner, to such a horrible test? Some commentators have suggested that without such an extreme test, it may have seemed that Avraham is really only “in it” for the covenantal promise: his apparent commitment to and faith in God is only because God has promised him a legacy in the form of Isaac. Some midrashim say that God was looking to demonstrate to Satan and the other nations that he chose wisely when he chose Avraham. So, this theory goes, the only way for God to prove Avraham’s true motivation is to threaten to take away that covenantal prize. Besides the cruelty and injustice implied by this theory, and its inherent counter-productiveness. Why did God promise it to Avraham in the first place? The whole idea of such a test goes against two of the most basic foundations of Judaism. 

• The first is that God is all-knowing. Doesn’t God know Avraham’s intentions and commitment, without needing to test them? Does God make such impulsive promises, that God then needs to verify the wisdom of His promises by testing the recipient’s worthiness? And yet, the chapter of the Akedah begins with the words v’HaElohim nisa et Avraham, And God tested Avraham.

• The second tenet of Judaism that makes this test unbelievable is that God says in Leviticus chapter 18, which we just read at Yom Kippur, Do not pass your children through the fires of Molech. In other words, God does not demand human sacrifice of us; rather, He specifically forbids it. We recognize this as one of the most basic distinctions between us and the surrounding nations. We can only conclude that God does not mean for Avraham to obey this commandment, at least not literally.

Finally, the question arises as to why we refer to the Akedah as the akedah at all. Akeda means binding, but the literal words used in the Torah are v’ha’aleihu sham l’olah: take him (Isaac) up there as an offering. Only one time, among so many other verbs, does the text say va’ya’akod et Yitzchak b’no, v’yasem oto al hamizbe’ach, and he bound Isaac his son and placed him on the altar. We should refer to it as the “sacrificing of Isaac”, or maybe better, the “saving of Isaac”. As Ron recounts in his essay, his daughter Yonit suggested that perhaps we call it the “binding of Isaac” because it resulted in Isaac’s being forever “bound” to the covenant. Or perhaps the word Akedah refers to the physical restraints that led to the permanent severing of Isaac’s relationship with his father. Avraham’s descent from the mountain doesn’t seem to include Isaac at all, and it seems that God never speaks to Avraham again after the Akeda. Sarah is said to have died from the trauma of the incident, so Isaac was essentially left orphaned after this trauma: psychologically orphaned from his father and literally orphaned from his mother. The outcome of this story is completely tragic, for Avraham, for Sarah and for Isaac. The silent Avraham may have passed the test and he gets the legacy, but he loses his entire family.

And what happens to Isaac? Much has been written about Isaac’s weakness in comparison to his father Avraham and his son Jacob, and Isaac is the only patriarch never to have left his homeland (inconceivable, for an Israeli). Much has also been written about how Rivka seems to have demonstrated more agency than her husband throughout their lives, and some have theorized that Isaac was mentally disabled, whether as a result of the binding or before. We don’t know, but certainly much less is written in the text about Isaac than about either his father or his son Jacob. The most complete story about Isaac, where he is tricked by Jacob and Rivka into giving Jacob the blessing that was meant for Esau, depicts Isaac as literally and figuratively blind to his family’s dysfunction. Isaac is passive, and Rivka again takes control of the situation and does her version of damage control: once again, they protect the legacy, at the expense of the family. The outcome of this story, for every participant, is tragic.

This story of the Akedah has disturbed our people for as long as biblical commentary has existed. All we can do is struggle with it ourselves, and remember that our patriarchs struggled with it as well, even as far back as the protagonists of the story in real time. 

If I would choose one aspect of this parsha to connect to our children’s wedding tomorrow, let it be the example I mentioned at the beginning, of Shalom Bayit. When Sarah heard the prophecy from the angel that a year from now she will have a baby, she laughed and said, After I am withered and my husband is old?  

But God preserved Avraham’s dignity and the couple’s Shalom Bayit. When God rhetorically asked Avraham why Sarah laughed, God said only that Sarah had said she was too old, not that Avraham was too old. Let that example of Shalom Bayit through kind and careful speech be the foundation upon which Oren and Fay’s marriage is built.