Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought

Abstract

Aaron Koller begins his rich transhistorical study of the Akedah and its reception with the trenchant observation that “Jews more often experienced the Akedah than contemplated it” (1). Koller presents this as an historical claim: Jews of past historical periods, especially during the crusades and the Holocaust, regularly faced the choice of whether to “sacrifice” themselves and their children; they described those sacrifices using the literary language of the Akedah narrative, or they interpreted the persecution and murder taking place around them as a kind of sacrifice. In the present day, though, the Akedah has ceased to be “lived” in quite the same way. Thus, Koller writes, “What is now a philosophical challenge was, over the last two millennia, primarily a story of faith and devotion. What is now a moral problem was a tragic and inspiring story of love and sacrifice” (1).Yet the central argument of Koller's book suggests that the Akedah, or at least the effects of some readings of the Akedah, continue be “lived” even in the present day. Koller presents the book as an antidote to a pervasive, but ethically deleterious reading of the Akedah. In the introduction, the author writes that he hopes that the book will help “readers who wish to take the Bible seriously in the modern world without abandoning the tenets of modern values … to turn the Akedah from a distorting set of lenses that leads some people to see ‘submissiveness’ as the dominant element in religious thought, to a pair of the clearest lenses possible, through which the centrality of interpersonal ethics will be plainly perceived” (xxxiv). Implicitly here, Koller suggests that at least some Jews are actually still “experiencing,” if not the Akedah itself, then the effects of a theology that misinterprets it.Koller blames this problematic use of the Akedah on a non-Jewish reading of the Akedah that, he argues, has begun to have an outsized role in Jewish thought and life: Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Koller argues that Kierkegaard's reading, in which Abraham is a “Knight of Faith” who “suspends” the ethical in order to give his sacrifice to God, leaves us with no moral recourse against someone who claims to hear the voice of God and hopes that that voice will exculpate them for what would otherwise be obviously morally problematic behavior. “To put the matter bluntly,” Koller writes, “Jews must avoid a reading of the Akedah that leaves no argument against the person of faith who slaughters an innocent other in the desert, or who massacres a whole community, and claims that although this is obviously unethical, ethics had to be suspended—teleologically, of course—by faith. How can we condemn such atrocities without condemning Abraham, as well? Kierkegaard leaves us little room to maneuver” (96). Having identified this problem in Kierkegaard's own treatment of the Akedah, Koller then goes on to argue that not only has this reading become prevalent in Jewish thought, but Jewish thought has also significantly expanded its scope. Koller helpfully observes that Joseph B. Soloveitchik “expands” the Akedah's significance beyond a single episode, turning it into a broader model for Jewish theology, and that Yesahahyu Leibowitz explodes the idea. Koller writes, “What for Kierkegaard was a one-time suspension of the ethical becomes for Leibowitz a permanent divorce from the ethical” (70). Koller offers a pointed rejection of this approach, arguing that this “divorce from the ethical” both “clashes with fundamental Jewish ideas of revelation and morality” because “The system of Judaism did not set itself up against the ethical intuition, but instead built on it, refined it, and extended it” (111, 110).In order to offer an alternative to this now pervasive reading of the Akedah, Koller figures “ethics” and “the ethical intuition” as a clearly consolidated unit with more or less clear, but largely unspecified demands; the real question, for Koller, is how much of a role ethics ought to play in our conversation about religion. Thus, his central debate with those who espouse what Ronit Irshai has called an “Akedah theology” is in the realm of ethical theory and not ethics itself.3 Koller takes the Akedah theologians at their word: he assumes that both sides agree with what “ethics” might demand, but they do not agree about whether “ethics” should be given some sort of deciding voice in the final calculus. The mistake the Akedah theologians make, Koller argues, is that they underestimate the centrality of ethics in Jewish thought and tradition. This is not the only way to interpret the debate. The Akedah theologian's willingness to “agree” about the substance of the ethical issue at hand has a specific rhetorical function: it minimizes the amount of time and energy we need to spend actually hearing from, and redressing the grievances of, the people whose needs are pushed aside in a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” If we already know that it is ethically problematic to exclude certain populations from religious communities, then we need not hear about the effects of that exclusion, since the Akedah theologians already grant its deleteriousness. It is, after all, supposed to be a “sacrifice.” This rhetorical move has an additional ethical effect beyond the ones that Koller identifies. Not only does Akedah theology leave us with little recourse to call out the ethical wrongs committed in the name of religion, it diverts our attention from the people who are harmed by those wrongs. This is in part made possible by what Koller correctly identifies as an individualistic approach to ethics espoused by the Kierkegaardian reading, and by its Jewish restatement in Akedah theology: if the ethical unit of consideration is the individual's religious experiences, then we need not worry all that much about the harm done to a broader religious community by this form of exclusion. A more communal approach, though, would not allow these wrongs to be ignored. In its most provocative form, Koller's rejection of Akedah theology amounts to a claim that we can't possibly avoid taking someone or other up the mountain but that we have some ethical responsibility toward the people who are forced, unwillingly, to participate in our religious quests.However, it is not clear that Koller wants to stick with this communitarian ethic in the long term; Koller's own reading of the Akedah, offered in the penultimate chapter of the book, relies on a liberal individualism that allows a contemporary knight of faith to pursue his individual religious project, provided that it does not affect anyone else. To do this, Koller argues that we ought to refocus our attention not on Abraham's relationship with God, but instead on Abraham's relationship with Isaac, arguing that by the end of the narrative, Abraham comes to understand that “children, like all other human beings, cannot be mere adjuncts in someone else's religious experience. And so this is the ethical teaching of the Akedah: as much as it is enticing to do so, one person's religious fulfillment cannot come through harm to another. The trial of Abraham cannot involve the murder of Isaac” (147). This emphasis on the child's identity and agency leads Koller to argue that “[a]s a society, we must allow knights of faith to ascend the mountain to be alone with God. But we must not allow them to bring Isaac along” (153-54). Here, Koller affirms a form of classical Liberalism, which views the individual's right to freedom of choice as the central category for navigating potential conflicts between religion and ethics (and, we might add, politics). According to this view, individual religious experience is permissible, even laudable—the knights of faith ought to ascend the mountain to commune with the divine—provided they do not impinge on anyone else's desire to either ascend their own mountain or remain in the profane world of the village below. A child, we are to learn, cannot be an “adjunct” in someone else's religious experience. Here, ethics looks a lot like standard Liberal notions of respect for persons; on this account, it does seem like it is possible to ascend the mountain alone. Even as he warns us of the importance of recognizing the ways that our religious experiences can implicate unwilling “adjuncts,” Koller does not specify who these adjuncts actually are in the contemporary debates. When these adjuncts do appear in the course of his analysis, Koller does not draw our attention to their experiences or ethical claims. For example, Koller quotes from Soloveitchik's essay “Catharsis,” which analyzes the experience of a husband who is required by halakhah to “withdraw” from sexual intercourse with his wife after the first marital sex act (Soloveitchik assumes that this is a cisgender, heterosexual couple). Soloveitchik's treatment describes the woman as a kind of “adjunct” to the husband's religious experience of pious withdrawal; while Soloveitchik acknowledges that she also participates in the “movement of recoil,” only the husband becomes a “chivalrous knight” who “exhibits paradoxical heroism.”4 The women who engage in this practice certainly relate to it in a wide range of ways, but none of them appear in Soloveitchik's analysis. Koller, too, does not explore the possibility that the woman might be an “adjunct” here, nor does he argue that the woman also has an important (though likely distinct) religious experience which also deserves to be theorized alongside the husband's. This elision of the experience of the contemporary Issacs is especially striking, given the public scholarship Koller has done about LGBTQ+ issues at Yeshivah University, which explicitly engages the deleterious effects of Akedah theology on LGBTQ+ people in Orthodox Jewish communities.5 In Unbinding Isaac, however, Koller leaves that direct treatment of the ethical questions at hand in the background. In leaving these stories out of his otherwise trenchant critique of Akedah theology, Koller allows the central move of the Akedah theologians to succeed at least in this round of the debate: the actual ethical concerns of those who are caught up in the religious experiences of the “knights of faith” are never fully thematized. Instead, these experiences are obscured by the metaethical debate about whether religion or ethics ought to have primacy. And, in this way, we are left with a tragically familiar version of the story: like their biblical forefather, the contemporary Isaacs both ascend and descend the mountain, but their voices never quite make it onto the page.