The Torah reading for the second day of Rosh HaShanah, the akedah, the Binding of Isaac, is horrifying no matter how many times I read it or I teach it.
We know that this is supposed to be a test, and when God tells Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering, I keep hoping that this time around Abraham will respond: NO. Absolutely not. I am not doing that.
Only that this is not what happens, and although Isaac’s life is spared through the intervention of God and God’s angel, we are left with an uncomfortable feeling. The seemingly blind obedience of our ancestral parent and the willingness to act although the action was blatantly wrong casts a shadow on Abraham’s character.
We look back at earlier narratives of his life and we wonder about the motivation behind other actions that he took. There was the lack of judgment of sending Hagar and Ishmael away without transportation, adequate food and enough water. There were the two times that Abraham tried to pass his wife as his sister. To whom is Abraham listening? Did he do what God was telling him to do or were these his understandings of what God said? Why didn’t Abraham wondered about the veracity of what he was hearing, and why was his reaction one of obedience and not one of curious questioning?
I know that the biblical text is a jumping board to teach us profound lessons, and that many of the questions, feelings, and motivations are not described so we can interpret the text with the tools and through the prisms of our experiences and our world. But I am puzzled by Abraham’s reactions to God’s commands when it came to his family. Hearing and heeding a command without questioning are anathema to being Jewish. As a rabbinic Jew,
I am very influenced by the Talmud in the way that I think—a statement is always an invitation for questioning. There are many ways to interpret what I hear or what I read, and I must look at every issue from different points of view before coming to my conclusion.
Abraham seems to have listened to only one voice, one extremely convincing voice, but one voice nonetheless, in the same way that most of us consume news, which is by listening to what is told to us based on an algorithm. It is easy to fall victim to what my colleague Rabbi Ari Margolis calls the idolatry of the algorithm. Based on our search history, our subscriptions, our questions and searches, and our opinions expressed on social media we end up with a very skewed view of world events. We have our bubble. There are things we do not find out about because when we open our computers the messages we get match our general worldview. We then form our opinions based on that information. It is a modern version of following in Abraham’s missteps – we act based on what we read and heard, and we take that voice as the only one that is true and right. We make an idol of the information we get.
Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote (God in Search of Man, pg 415) that an idol is “a thing, a force, a person, a group, an institution or an ideal, regarded as supreme. God alone is supreme.”
In other words, if we treat something that is important as though it is of supreme significance, we veer into the territory of idolatry.
If we think and act based on the belief that something which is important, deserves getting all our attention, we are committing idolatry. If we imagine that something is true and the only truth, we are committing idolatry. If we think that our interpretation of Torah is the only correct one, we are committing idolatry. If our understanding of the world is not open to discussion, we are committing idolatry.
When we think about the Akedah, we can see how Abraham veered into the territory of idolatry by accepting his understanding of God’s words as the only true interpretation, and that he must act according to his understanding.
Yet there is one other aspect of idolatry that applies to Abraham’s actions in this story.
Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book Man In Search of God, explains that idols are forbidden because we do not need another image of God. Since we were created in the image of God, we have an image of God in this world: it is found in every human being. Idolatry is less an offense to God than it is an offense to ourselves. Saying that something made of wood or stone can compare to the dignity and intricacy of the human being, fashioned in God’s image, is another aspect of idolatry. We must make ourselves worthy of being created in the image of God and we must treat every human being in the same way.
Abraham disregarded his son’s life and did not respect him as being created in the image of God. How can we avoid Abraham’s mistake? How can we consume news without making what we hear into an idol? The answer is found in the story of the Akedah. The angel shows Abraham a ram that will be the sacrifice to God instead of Isaac. Our tradition connects the sounding of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashana with the Akedah. Maimonides, in the Mishnah Torah (Repentance 3:4), explains that it is as if the sound of the shofar is saying:
“Wake up you sleepy ones from your sleep and you who slumber, arise.
Inspect your deeds, repent, remember your Creator.
Those who forget the truth in the vanities of time and throughout the entire year, devote their energies to vanity and emptiness which will not benefit or save: Look to your souls. Improve your ways and your deeds and let every one of you abandon evil paths and thoughts.”
The shofar is a spiritual wake up call. The shofar helps us shake the specter of idolatry and re-think our points of view. The ram was put in Abraham’s story to stop him from treating his understanding of God’s commandment into an idol, to treat his son as a human being created in God’s image. For us, the story and the shofar can teach us to stop the idolatry of the algorithm. We must bring to mind the sound of the shofar every time we read or hear any news source, especially the ones that were recommended by the algorithm, so we can discern what it is really saying and avoid making our interpretation of reality into an idol.
This year, let the voice of the shofar help you define who you are and what you think. Bring with yourself this sound to help you discern what makes sense and what is incorrect. Let the sound of the shofar push you to look at different perspectives and avoid idolizing the perspective you got on your feed.
I wish us all a year of thinking for ourselves. A year of growth, of self-determination, and spiritual development. Most of all, may this be a year where we free ourselves from the idolatry of our certainties.