The Genesis of Justice

by Alan M. Dershowitz

  God said to Abraham, go kill me a son. Abe said, man, you must be puttin’ me on.

  But Kant and Dylan beg the critical question: What if Abraham believed it really was God and that He was not putting him on?

  Bodoff goes so far as to say that if Abraham had actually killed Isaac and received praise for that act, we would have had “a religion to which few and perhaps none of us could subscribe. … ” But this raises the disturbing question of why so many can subscribe to a religion in which Abraham is praised for his willingness to obey God’s immoral command. Here is where Bodoff’s interpretation is truly radical. He claims that Abraham never intended to carry out God’s unjust command. He expected God to countermand it at the last minute—he had empirical, not moral trust. He was willing to fall backward, confident that God would catch him before he hit the ground. He was not willing to accept God’s moral assurance that killing Isaac was the right thing to do. Bodoff argues that Abraham was resolved to violate God’s command if, at the last minute, God did not countermand it. In other words, as much as God was testing Abraham, “Abraham was testing the Almighty.” And the reason for the test is understandable: This is a God who swept many innocent along with the guilty in the flood but who acceded to Abraham’s moral argument over the innocents of Sodom. Which God was He, really? Had He learned the lesson of not condemning the innocent? This test would answer that question for Abraham. Had God failed the test—had he not stayed Abraham’s hand—Abraham would have broken the covenant and said, “If the God I have found demands the same kind of immorality that I saw in my father’s pagan society, I must be mistaken [in accepting Him and] I must look further.”

  Bodoff tells us that God passed the test by sending an angel to stay Abraham’s hand and in doing so told Abraham and the rest of the world that He does not demand blind obedience to immoral superior orders. His is a code of justice that eventually develops a process for deciding what is right and wrong. That process includes codification, as in the Noachide code, and argumentation, as in the Sodom narrative. But it does not include uncritical acceptance of the immoral commands of heavenly voices.

  This is a brilliant and positive interpretation that makes both God and Abraham appear just, but it is difficult to reconcile with the text. After all, God’s angel—purporting to speak for God—praises Abraham for his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. If God had really wanted Abraham to refuse His command, why does He have His messenger praise him for his willingness to comply? Here Bodoff is at his weakest, claiming that the angel—being only a messenger of God and not himself omniscient—was unaware of the true intention of God’s test as well as Abraham’s true intention to refuse God’s order. The following midrash is more faithful to the text:

  When God commanded the father to desist from sacrificing Isaac, Abraham said: “One man tempts another, because he knoweth not what is in the heart of his neighbor. But Thou surely didst know that I was ready to sacrifice my son!”

  God: “It was manifest to Me, and I foreknew it, that thou wouldst withhold not even thy soul from Me.”

  Abraham: “And why, then, didst Thou afflict me thus?”

  God: “It was My wish that the world should become acquainted with thee, and should know that it is not without good reason that I have chosen thee from all the nations. Now it hath been witnessed unto men that thou fearest God.” 33

  As this midrash points out, there is an even more fundamental problem with Bodoff’s fascinating interpretation. How does he know that Abraham intended to stay his own hand if God had not sent the angel?

  Abraham surely behaves as if he is ready to slay Isaac. Why should we not assume that he intended the natural consequences of his actions, which ended with him stretching out his hand and taking the knife to kill his son? Here an analogy to the law of attempted murder may be helpful.

  The law of attempts deals directly with the problem of ascertaining a person’s true intentions when he has not completed the crime but appears to have intended it. A vast literature has developed around this issue. 34 I recently argued a case that was similar, in certain respects, to the Abraham story. My client was accused of attempted murder after the police found him on top of another man, holding a knife over the other man’s body. The police drew their guns and ordered my client to drop the knife, which he did. My client claimed that he did not intend to kill the other man, merely to frighten him into submission. Even if the police had not intervened, he said, he would never have plunged the knife into the other man’s body. According to Bodoff, this was roughly the mind-set of Abraham at the moment the angel intervened.

  How should the law go about assessing a claim of this kind? We can never know for certain what my client would or would not have done had the police not intervened. The facts of the case were consistent with either possibility. The man my client was accused of attacking had been dating my client’s sister. Their relationship had been a troubled one, and someone burned down the sister’s house, injuring her severely. The prosecution argued that my client believed that his sister’s boyfriend had caused the fire and was trying to kill him in revenge. My client maintained that he had gone to see the other man to complain that he had not even bothered to visit the sister. A fight broke out, and my client was either holding the man at bay until the police arrived or trying to kill him. The jury believed the prosecution and convicted my client. Although we eventually won the appeal on an unrelated ground, the law of attempts supported the prosecution’s case.

  The law, in simplified terms, says that if a person changes his mind without the intervention of an outside force—the police or the angel—he is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. The law will presume that his change of mind was internally generated. 35 But if he withholds his hand as the result of an outside source—the police or the angel—the law will presume that he would have completed the crime but for the intervention of that outside source. It is, of course, possible that even in a case where the police stopped him, he would have stopped himself if the police had not been there. But we presume the opposite, because it appears—from the external evidence—that he had made the decision to proceed. We can never know for sure, since we are incapable of entering into his mind, but the degree of likelihood is deemed sufficient to overcome the general presumption of innocence and the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. (My ten-year-old daughter believes that Abraham was conflicted and that the angel represents his “better instinct” [yetzer ha-tov], which eventually prevailed. If so, the “angel” was an internal, rather than an external, source.)

  Applying these principles to the Abraham narrative, one finds it difficult to accept Bodoff’s interpretation. Both the text and general principles of law make it more likely that Abraham intended to kill his son.

  That is certainly the apparent message of the test, as even Bodoff concedes. Indeed, he characterizes his interpretation as “a coded countermessage.” And he has the right to his interpretation, since one of the glories of the Bible is its Rorschach test quality: its seventy faces and its amenability to multiple midrashim—interpretations.

  Bodoff’s analysis also suggests a somewhat darker interpretation—namely that Abraham failed God’s test. He would have killed his son had God not sent the angel, and God was upset at Abraham for his willingness to kill on command. There is textual support for this interpretation as well. After all, it is God who commands Abraham directly at the beginning of the story. If Abraham had passed God’s test with flying colors, we might expect God Himself to come down and praise Abraham. Instead God sends a mere messenger. In addition, when God first commands Abraham to offer up his son, He refers to Isaac as Abraham’s “only son, whom thou lovest.” 36 But after Abraham fails the test, the angel refers to Isaac twice as “thine only son,” 37 eliminating the description “whom thou lovest.” This suggests that the angel does not believe that a father who was willing to sacrifice his son can be said to love him. 38 Moreover, God Himself never speaks to Abraham again. 39 Sarah dies s
oon thereafter. Isaac emerges from the experience a shattered person, who rarely speaks until his deathbed (where he is tricked by his son). One can only imagine the trauma a son would go through upon learning that his father was prepared to kill him. I would have loved to overhear the conversation between Isaac and his father on the way down from the sacrificial mountain: “You were preparing to do what?” To be sure, Abraham is rewarded with long life, wealth, a new wife, more children, and patriarchy, but in some respects all this seems like a consolation prize for doing his best, but not quite enough in God’s eyes. 40 His personal relationship with God ended, because he disappointed his covenantal Partner. According to this interpretation, God used Abraham as an object lesson for future generations. People in those days sacrificed their children when the gods commanded it. Abraham was willing to do the same. But God’s angel stopped him, thus signaling that this God was different. Indeed, some modern commentators, noting Isaac’s silence and victimization by his father and son, as well as the advanced age of his parents when he was born, have speculated that he may have been retarded or emotionally disturbed. Throughout history parents have sacrificed retarded and disturbed children. This may explain Abraham’s willingness to accept God’s command. The message of this story is not in what Abraham did in setting out to sacrifice his son. It is in what God did in refusing Abraham’s sacrifice. Abraham passed the test of obedience but failed the test of moral self-determination. Like a good student who messes up one exam, Abraham learned a great deal from the experience and was able to teach future generations from his own mistake.

  An even more disturbing conclusion is offered by the writer and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, who argues that not only did Abraham fail the test, but so did God. No God should ever ask a father to kill his child, and no father should ever agree to do so. God may have eventually saved Isaac physically, but He crippled him emotionally, killing his mother in the process. A midrash recites how “Abraham returned home alone, and when Sarah beheld him, she exclaimed, Satan spoke truth when he said that Isaac was sacrificed and so grieved was her soul that it fled from her body.” 41

  Even Bodoff concedes that many wrong lessons have been gleaned from this story. Perhaps the most disastrous is the concept of “daat torah,” prevalent among some Hasidim, whereby the individual sacrifices his intellect on the altar of blind obedience to the words of the sages or a charismatic rabbi. The murder of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist who believed he was following God’s command may be the best known consequence of this know-nothing interpretation of the Abraham narrative.

  A more uplifting metaphoric interpretation, similar to my daughter’s, is offered by a contemporary Conservative rabbi named Harold Schulweis, who suggests that Abraham passed the test by refusing to kill Isaac. He sees “the angel who stays Abraham’s hand [as] a symbol of Abraham’s moral conscience”—an aspect of Abraham, rather than of God. “Abraham’s acceptance of the voice of the Lord’s angel over God’s commanding voice expresses his faith in a moral God who could not will the death of an innocent.”

  My own favorite interpretation is that by commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God was telling Abraham that in accepting the covenant, he was not receiving any assurances that life would be perfect. Far from it. Through that terrible test, God was demonstrating—in a manner more powerful than words could ever convey—that being a Jew often requires sacrificing that which is most precious to you—even children. The history of the Jewish people has certainly borne that out. During the Crusades, the Inquisition, and especially the Holocaust, many “Abrahams” made the decision to kill their own “Isaacs,” sometimes to prevent their forced conversion, other times to prevent their torture, rape, and eventual murder. The traditional view of the akeidah influenced the willingness of Jews “to turn the Biblical prohibition against murder into an act that became recognized as a legitimate form of kiddush ha-shem [honoring of God], when fathers killed their children and wives and then committed suicide rather than face forced Baptism during the crusades.” 42 Perhaps this took religious zealotry too far, but during the Holocaust even baptism could not save “genetic” Jews. Parents had to kill or abandon crying babies in order to prevent Nazis from finding Jews in hiding. In one poignant episode during the Holocaust, ninety-three teenage girls—students of a Jewish seminary in Cracow—reportedly took their own lives after learning that they were going to be forced to serve as prostitutes for German soldiers. Before taking poison, they collaborated on a poem, which included the following lines: “Death does not terrify us; we go out to meet him. We served our God while we were alive; We shall know how to sanctify Him by our death. . . . We stood the test, the test of the binding of Isaac.” 43 These have been the tragic realities of Jewish life, and God was warning Abraham that the covenant offered no assurances that such sacrifices would not be required. 44 Sometimes God would intervene. Sometimes He would not. That is the nature of a covenant. So if a Jew witnesses tragedy—even the worst of tragedies, as did Job and those who saw their children die in the Crusades and Holocaust—do not think that God has broken the covenant. Religion is not a panacea for all of life’s tragedies.

  An Israeli rabbi made a similar point in the context of his nation’s daily struggle: “Every parent in Israel who sees his son off to the army hears the divine command: ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love….’ ”

  I also have a favorite interpretation of why Abraham argued with God about the Sodomites but not about his own son. Good people are sometimes reluctant to argue for self-serving ends. They demand justice for others but are silent in the face of injustice to them. I have seen fellow Jews march energetically for the civil rights of others but sit passively when their own rights are violated. Many Jews who marched for the rights of blacks in the 1960s did nothing during the Holocaust. There is something more noble in advocacy for others than in self-serving advocacy. To be sure, some Jews speak up only for Jewish causes, not for others, but a great many are active in the struggle for universal human rights. The Bible instructs us not to “stand idly by the blood of your neighbors”; Hillel interpreted this to mean “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, [but] if am for myself alone, what am I?” The two apparently conflicting Abraham stories teach us to seek an appropriate balance between advocating for strangers and advocating for our own families.

  Even if one concludes that the two Abrahams are irreconcilable, this too makes an important point: Genesis speaks with multiple voices; it does not seek to convey a singular message. The Abraham who argues with God represents one voice, while the Abraham who places his complete faith in God represents another. The New Testament explicitly speaks in multiple voices—the Gospel according to Mark, Matthew, and so on, while the different voices of the Old Testament are implicit. Genesis—as contrasted, for example, with the Ten Commandments—is not written in the voice of God; the stories are not presented from His point of view; indeed, God is described as simply one of the actors. Multiple points of view assure multiple interpretations.

  Whatever interpretation the reader ultimately finds meaningful, one conclusion is clear: No one can read the story of the akeidah literally and accept it as a clear guide for human action. It cries out for explication, for disagreement, for reflection, and for concern. It provides no answers, only eternally unanswerable questions, and in that respect it is the perfect tool for teaching the realities, limitations, and imperfections of both divine and human justice. The story of Abraham and Isaac is real life writ large, with all of its tragic choices, ambiguities, and uncertainties.

  1. 22:5.

  2. Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1, p. 492, n. 6.

  3. Weissman, Moshe, The Midrash Says (Brooklyn, NY: Bnai Yakov, 1980), p. 205.

  4. Quoted in Leibowitz, Nehama. Studies in Bereshith (Genesis). 4th rev ed. (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Department for Torah Education and Culture, 1985), p. 189.

  5. See Dershowitz, Alan, “Good Character Without Threat or Promise,” in The Powe
r of Character, ed. Michael S. Josephson and Wes Hanson (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1998), pp. 268-75.

  6. Twersky at p. 83. It is interesting to contrast Maimonides’ sexism in comparing women to children with his progressive attitude toward a husband’s obligation to satisfy his wife sexually—except if he is a scholar!

  7. Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1, p. 376.

  8. This is one of the rare instances in which an angel of God appears to a woman, Hagar. A midrash draws interesting parallels between the Isaac and Ishmael stories:

  and the Lord’s messenger called out to him from the heavens. This is nearly identical with the calling-out to Hagar in 21:17. In fact, a whole configuration of parallels between the two stories is invoked. Each of Abraham’s sons is threatened with death in the wilderness, one in the presence of his mother, the other in the presence (and by the hand) of his father. In each case the angel intervenes at the critical moment, referring to the son fondly as na’ar, “lad.” At the center of the story, Abraham’s hand holds the knife. Hagar is enjoined to “hold her hand” (the literal meaning of the Hebrew) on the lad. In the end, each of the sons is promised to become progenitor of a great people, the threat to Abraham’s continuity having been averted. Alter, Robert, Genesis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 106.

  9. See Finkelman in Dershowitz, Alan, “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: A Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 112, no. 8, June 1999, p. 1906.

  10. Dershowitz, Alan, Taking Liberties (New York: Contemporary Books, 1988), p. 119, 271.

  11. New York Times, April 7, 1999, p. 1.

  12. Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 60.