Dvar Torah for Second Day of Rosh Hashanah 5772 (September 30, 2011)

The Akedah is one of the most famous parts of the Torah portions read on the High Holiday service, so no doubt some of you have heard the story before. But to briefly recap the story, God tells Avraham to sacrifice his son Yitzhak on a mountain in the Land of Moriah. Early the next morning, Avraham, Yitzhak, and some servants set out for the mountain where the sacrifice is to take place. When they get near to this mountain, Avraham and Yitzhak go up the mountain without the servants. At the place of the sacrifice, Avraham was ready to sacrifice Yitzhak, with his knife raised, when an Angel of God called to Avraham and told him not to sacrifice his son. Avraham ends up sacrificing a ram in place of Yitzhak. Although the Torah records no protest from Avraham or Yitzhak about the sacrifice, most commentators on the Akedah usually focus on the personal struggles that we imagine Avraham and Yitzhak would have had. Given the way that we look at the world today, Avrahams apparent willingness to kill his son and Yitzhaks apparent willingness to be killed cause us great discomfort. I would like to focus on a different aspect of this story, on what we can learn about the implications of blind obedience. We usually only think about blind obedience in terms of obeying commands given by authority figures or by God. But all of us follow many of the dictates of society without giving it the slightest thought. This has implications not just for us as individuals but also for the planet we live on, since some of these dictates of society affect the way we treat our environment. Avraham was able to fathom sacrificing his son because he felt that he owned his son. In the ancient world, children were the property of their parents (and some people still feel that way!). We are able to manipulate and even abuse things because we feel they are totally ours. Today, humankind treats the world as if we owned it. In fact, as human civilization developed, we measured how civilized we became by how completely we could change our natural environment to suite our needs. As we got even better at changing this environment, we called that progress. The irony is that, if we continue making progress in the way that we have, we will continue to make the world less habitable for future generations. Just as Avraham appears to have been certain that he had no choice but to follow Gods command, most of us believe that we have no choice but to continue making what we call progress. In the Akedah, God intervened to prevent Avraham from killing his son. However, God plays a much more subtle role in our world. Perhaps when we study the Akedah, we need to learn not to unconditionally obey, but to question that which seems unquestionable. In this case, we need to learn to question the commands that we take as given, including the commands from society that we endlessly consume. God sent an angel to save Yitzchak but where is the angel that is going to save our children from destruction? That angel needs to be us, in our actions, in our decisions. We cannot depend on an act of God to spur us to action, to stop us from leaving an uninhabitable world to future generations.

I dont know all of the questions that we have to be asking much less the answers that we will require. However, I can certainly say with confidence that nobody here wants to leave all the advantages of progress behind and go back to living in caves! To increase the chances to solve this complicated and multi-layered problem, everyone must contribute to the solution in the most creative way possible. As Jews, we have something unique to contribute, namely the wisdom in our Torah. We have texts that we regard as holy, that embody some element of the divine, however you envision that. For thousands of years, the best and brightest in our community have tried to assemble elements of wisdom that can help us answer basic questions: How should we live in order to live a good life? What is the right thing to do in lifes many complicated circumstances? The wisdom that came from various interpretations of our holy texts was inspired in many different ways. And we need to be creative in finding and applying the wisdom we have to help us deal with these problems affecting all humanity. I dont pretend to know all of the places in the Torah, Talmud, and other sources of wisdom that are directly relevant to this problem. But I know that the commandment to avoid tsar balei chayim (the pain of living creatures) means that we are commanded not to cause unnecessary pain to animals. We could interpret Avrahams sacrifice of a ram as a way that Avraham expressed his appreciation to God for stopping the sacrifice of Yitzhak. Although sacrificing a ram would have been common in Avrahams time, from our point of view, Avraham did not follow the commandment to not cause unnecessary pain to animals. Today we will undoubtedly have to do what is unusual in our times. In Parasha Shoftim, the baal taschit commandment tells us not to destroy fruit trees when besieging a city during a war, which is interpreted as a commandment to prevent needless waste or destruction. We may have just as difficult a time defining needless as Avraham would have had deciding not to demonstrate his gratitude to God by sacrificing the ram. So we have a responsibility to do our best to contribute to the solution to this problem by applying the unique source of knowledge that our teachings provide. From the Akedah, we could learn the perils of unconditional obedience, of doing whats expected without questioning. In order to have a sustainable future, were going to have to think of whats best for our children in the long term, just as we in modern times wish Avraham had been able to do without Gods intervention. It wont be easy for us to be a light unto the nations. But if we fail, over time we may be killing our children as surely as Avraham was going to kill Yitzhak.