The paradigm test: the binding of Isaac

Avot 5:4 teaches that the patriarch Abraham faced ten tests and passed them all, to show how great was either his love for God or God's love for him (depending on which view one takes of the open weave of the text). This mishnah does not however say what the ten tests are. Browsing through the Torah, midrashim and commentators I have so far identified over 30 candidates for tests -- and there may be even more.

The paradigm test of Abraham is however God's command that he take Isaac to a place indicated by God and sacrifice him there. This is the only event in Abraham's life that the Torah actually describes as a test. It is therefore the test that is most frequently discussed and analyzed by Jewish scholars.

Being omniscient and beyond the limitations of time, God would have known the outcome of this test before it took place, which was why He made sure that the test was halted just before what would have been a tragic conclusion. The fact that Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son may not have been something Abraham needed to be told, since the Torah records his unswerving obedience to God’s commands. We could infer then that the function of this test was to show us, as Abraham’s physical or metaphorical descendants through Isaac, something of the quality, the steadfastness under stress and the deep love for God that the Patriarchs possessed. This demonstration of Abraham’s mettle would also act as a lesson for all subsequent generations as to how we should serve God, with love, fear and complete trust.

But there is more to this test than meets the eye. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and knows that Abraham will do so if God does not stop him first. However, God wants to establish why Abraham is prepared to carry out his instruction to the very end.

We have a tradition, enshrined in the Talmud, taught by Rabbi Chanina, that “everything is in the hands of Heaven—except for fear of Heaven" (Berachot 33b). This teaching appears to provide the key to Abraham’s test by giving it a clear and unambiguous purpose: to discover whether Abraham has fear of Heaven or not, this being something over which God has deliberately relinquished control. However, if Abraham was allowed to see the test through and kill Isaac because God told him to do so, this filial sacrifice would be viewed with horror by all right-thinking humans. They would not be wrong to ask: “why should we or anyone else want to know whether Abraham feared Heaven or not, if he commits such appalling and barbarous acts as this?”

The reason behind the reason

If the reason for testing Abraham with the sacrifice of his son was to establish that he was prepared to do so on account of his fear of Heaven rather than his love for God, we must ask a further question: what is the reason why we need to know why he was so motivated?

Each of the patriarchs is traditionally associated with a middah, a character trait, which became a byword for his conduct. Abraham is always associated with chesed (“kindness”) and his son Isaac with gevurah (“physical strength” but also “self-discipline”). Chesed is a by-product of love and relates to positive actions, while gevurah is a by-product of fear and relates to more negative ones. The issue to be resolved by this test was whether Abraham, whose very fabric was that of great kindness, would be able to overcome his own trait of extreme chesed and, drawing on his gevurah, steel himself to the task of killing someone as precious to him as the son whom God had promised him.

In the event, it is as a result of the test that we know that Abraham had sufficient gevurah to counterbalance his chesed and enable him to sacrifice Isaac. Since gevurah is an aspect of fear, we now have an explanation of God’s words at the very moment when He halts the test:

Don’t stretch out your hand against the lad and don’t do anything to him because now I know that you are God-fearing and did not withhold your son, your only son, from me (Genesis 22:12).

God left it to Abraham to feel the pull both of his chesed towards his son and his fear of God, and to demonstrate whether he had sufficient gevurah to carry out his task. This explanation has a take-away message for us too: we must take care to train our own characters so that we can draw on both chesed and gevurah when the need arises. It is not enough to say, “I’m a chesed man myself; I leave the gevurah to others who do it better.”