What Does the Akedah Teach Us About Mitzvot?

On the second day of Rosh HaShanah it is customary to read the story of the Akedah (עקדה), the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–19), which is included within Vayeira (וירא). According to the story, G-d commands Abraham  to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, Abraham obediently takes Isaac to Mount Moriah (later the site of the Jewish Temple) and binds him on an altar, but an angel of the Lord appears at the last moment to stay Abraham's hand.

What was the purpose of the Akedah? In accordance with Gen. 22:12 ("now I know that you fear G-d"), it is traditionally understood as a test of Abraham's obedience to divine commandment. But this reading is troubling because, as Søren Kierkegaard pointed out, the test seems to require a "teleological suspension of the ethical." In other words, in order to obey G-d's command, Abraham must apparently renounce his ethical duty to nurture, protect, and care for his own son. Divine command and ethical duty are thus counterposed.

On Rosh HaShanah 5771, I learned that the Hebrew word mitzvah (מצוה‎), commonly translated as commandment, means "connection" in Aramaic. This opens up the possibility of finding a different meaning in the Akedah. What if Abraham is seeking not to obey, but to connect with his G-d?

As Rashi points out, G-d never instructs Abraham to "slaughter" (לשחוט) Isaac, but rather to "bring him up there" (העלהו שם) to Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:2). The Hebrew verb  "to bring him up" (להעלותו) shares the same root as olah (עלה), the "ascending offering" described in Leviticus chap. 1, which is completely burned up by the fire on top of the altar. And G-d does indeed instruct Abraham to give Isaac the status of an עלה. But these words also share the same root as aliyah (עלייה), "ascent," as in spiritual ascent to the bimah or the Land of Israel. What kind of ascent is intended here and by what means?

Perhaps Abraham mistakenly thinks that the only way to connect with his G-d, to ascend spiritually, to return the divine spark in his son to its original root and source, is through the annihilation of his son. This would make the Akedah akin to the religious suicides once practiced in India. Emile Durkheim, in his classic sociological study of suicide, described such suicides this way: "We actually see the individual in all these cases seek to strip himself of his personal being in order to be engulfed in something which he regards as his true essence." To be sure, the Akedah is a story of sacrifice, not self-sacrifice--but if Abraham's love for his son causes him to identify so strongly with him that he cannot lose Isaac without losing some part of himself, this may not be a significant distinction for him.

If this reading is correct, Abraham's mistake is to think that connection with his G-d requires complete self-abnegation (or abnegation of others). The purpose of the Akedah may not be to test his obedience so much as teach him that connection with his G-d be cannot come at the expense of his connection with his son (and, by extension, his connection with other human beings). On the contrary, as the Hassidic tzaddik Mendel of Kosov preached, love for one's neighbor (or son) is only another side of the love of G-d. "If a man loves his fellow," Mendel taught, "the Divine Presence rests with them." In this way, they ascend together. The Akedah is therefore indeed instructive, but its purpose cannot be to provide an omniscient G-d with knowledge that G-d must already possess; rather, it is instructive for human beings.

Give It a Rest: The Social Significance of the Shmitah Year (פרשת בהר)

This week's double Torah portion, the first part of which is פרשת בהר (Lev. 25:1 - 26:2), includes the instruction to keep the שמיטה (shmitah) (Leviticus 25:2-4):

When you come to the land that I am giving you, the land shall rest a Sabbath to the Lord. You may sow your field for six years, and for six years you may prune your vineyard, and gather in its produce, but in the seventh year, the land shall have a complete rest, a Sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field, nor shall you prune your vineyard.

This institution now finds a distant echo in the sabbatical, a period of paid leave granted to a university professor for study or travel, traditionally every seventh year. Professors are often asked by those who work outside the university to justify the practice of the sabbatical. In the same way we might ask, what is the reason for the shmitah?

While a variety of answers have been given, some of the rabbis stress the social significance of the shmitah year, seeing in it an institution of solidarity and mutual responsibility. Maimonides, for instance, argues that "this law was given in order that we may show sympathy for our fellow men who have neither land nor vineyards, and that they may be happy in the shmitah year, as the rich are happy every year." This explains the obligation to renounce ownership of all agricultural produce and declare it public property (Lev. 25:6-7), but what about the obligation to suspend agricultural work? What is the social significance of this part of the mitzvah?

Both Abraham Ibn Ezra and Abraham Isaac Kook provide insightful answers to this question, anticipating respectively Karl Marx's critique of alienation and Emile Durkheim's conclusions about the rhythm of social life.

Ibn Ezra writes: "The suspension of work in every seventh year causes us to realize that our mission on earth is not to be slaves to the soil but a much higher and nobler one. Work should only serve the purpose of providing food and other needs, while our task is to attain the supreme end; the purpose of giving this land to this people was not to be brought into the land in order to be enslaved by it.... Their purpose is to accomplish themselves and seek perfection, according to the will of their Creator, while satisfying the needs of their sustenance." Here Ibn Ezra recognizes the possibility and danger of inverting the normal subject-object relationship, such that production becomes the objective of man rather than man the objective of production.

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel makes an analogous point about Shabbat. He criticizes Philo for representing Shabbat “not in the spirit of the Bible but in the spirit of Aristotle. According to the Stagirite, ‘we need relaxation, because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end’; it is ‘for the sake of activity,’ for the sake of gaining strength for new efforts. To the biblical mind, however, labor is the means toward an end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. ‘Last in creation, first in intention,’ the Sabbath is ‘the end of the creation of heaven and earth’” (Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [1951] 1979], 14).

Both Karl Marx and Max Weber would later point to the inversion of the normal subject-object relationship as characteristic of modern capitalism. Capital, which for Marx is nothing more than congealed, objectified, or accumulated labor, should serve as "a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer." Instead, Marx wrote, "bourgeois society" inverts the relationship: in a capitalist mode of production, "living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour." Likewise, Weber noted that the spirit of capitalism made "the earning of more and more money" an "end in itself": "Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship ... is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence." Ibn Ezra implies that such a reversal was possible in precapitalist agrarian societies too, and he points to the shmitah as a way to periodically restore what Weber calls the "natural relationship." Without this restoration, Ibn Ezra suggests, social and spiritual ends tend to be subordinated to material production, which is contrary to the Torah's intent. (This point is worth remembering today, when the ends of education are defined less and less in terms of self-development and increasingly and narrowly in materialistic and economic terms.)

Kook, noting that "what the Sabbath achieves regarding the individual, the shmitah achieves with regard to the nation as a whole," adds to Ibn Ezra's interpretation: "The treasure of the nation, the Divine blessing that is implanted in it, the order of the world, the righteous and good life, lived in harmony with justice and honesty, peace and tranquility, grace and courage ... none can be activated in the day-to-day life. The very nature of this life obfuscates the spiritual majesty of the Divine soul (which dwells in the nation) and prevents its bright and shining light from penetrating the profane reality. Life can only be perfected through the affording of a breathing space from the bustle of everyday life.... The periodical suspension of the normal social routine raises this nation -- when morally settled -- spiritually and morally, and crowns it with perfection." Kook's point was not to draw a sharp dichotomy between the profane and the sacred--a viewpoint he implicitly rejects with his reference to the penetration of the profane--but rather about the proper relationship between them. The satisfaction of physical needs is a necessary means to the attainment of spiritual perfection, but it must not be allowed to crowd out or obscure spiritual aspirations.

If Ibn Ezra brings to mind Marx and Weber, then Kook brings to mind Emile Durkheim. Like Kook, Durkheim associated the profane and the sacred with variations in the rhythm of social life. Durkheim found that life among Australian aborigines also alternated between two different phases: a "dispersed state" of "low intensity" in which "economic activity predominates," and periodic moments of "collective effervescence" when the community congregates for intense religious ceremonies. "The first is the profane world," Durkheim wrote, "and the second, the world of sacred things." Sacred time, Durkheim concluded, is essential for the solidarity of the community: "There can be no society which does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality. This moral remaking can be achieved only through meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which the individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments." Interestingly, Kook and Durkheim arrived at these strikingly similar ideas at about the same time; Kook wrote Shabbat ha-Aretz prior to the shmitah year of 1910, and Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was published in 1912.

In light of this remarkable convergence of thinking, perhaps we are justified in asking whether there is not a close connection between Marx's vision of an un-alienated social world and Durkheim's notion of a "moral remaking." Can it perhaps be said that the sacred is not just the product and representation of the society as it is, at a moment of collective effervescence, but an anticipation of a morally remade society, a world that is no longer inverted, in which the realization of the human being is no mere fantasy but a living reality?

The Fetishism of the Golden Calf (פרשת כי תשא)

Last week's Torah portion, כי תשא (Ex. 30:11 - 34:35), includes the infamous incident with the Golden Calf.

Robert Alter, in his translation of the Torah, asks why the people say "these are your gods" (Ex. 32:4) even though the calf is singular. He answers: "The gods are plural while the calf is singular because ancient Near Eastern people were polytheists, not fetishists: the golden icon was conceived as the terrestrial throne or platform for the deity (singular or plural), having precisely the same function as the cherubim over the Ark," upon which the Divine Presence was to rest. "The Golden Calf," Alter reasons, "is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark, meant for the same end of making the divine dwell among the people but doing it in a prohibited fashion." (The episode in which the people give their gold jewelry to make the golden calf may thus be seen as a sort of negative parallel to the subsequent moment in which the nation’s women contribute their mirrors for the building of the Mishkan [Ex. 38:8].)

Alter's reading is similar to the interpretation of the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi. In his book The Kuzari, Halevi suggests that the Golden Calf was not an idol but simply a material symbol that the people constructed to facilitate their worship of G-d. For Halevi, the only difference between the creation of the Golden Calf and the creation of the cherubim is that G-d did not command the calf. "They themselves had no right to determine the mode of worship and make an altar and sacrifices in accordance with it." In other words, it was not the fashioning of material symbols that was problematic--after all, what were the Ark and the throne of the cherubim if not material symbols?--but the fact that the Golden Calf was not made in accordance with G-d's wish. In support of this view, Halevi notes that G-d says "they have quickly turned from the way I commanded them" (Ex. 32:8), not "they have turned aside from Me."

Alter and Halevi thus raise an interesting question: Was the Golden Calf a fetish? While they both answer negatively, the conventional view--that the Golden Calf was an instance of idolatry--suggests the possibility of an affirmative answer.

To determine whether the Golden Calf was a fetish, we have to answer a more fundamental question: What is a fetish? I always ask this question to the students in my social theory class when we turn to Karl Marx's famous discussion of the "fetishism of commodities." My students are typically uncertain, but when pressed for an answer they can usually articulate (with a considerable amount of giggling) some version of the Freudian conception which has entered into popular culture. This provides a good teaching opportunity as we compare how Marx and Freud used the notion of a fetish.

A fetish, in its original religious meaning, is an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is thought to be animated or inhabited by a spirit. Freud and Marx built on this original meaning and extended it in creative and insightful ways.

For Freud, a fetish is an object that a person endows with sexual significance and without which he or she is incapable of sexual excitement. The Freudian fetish is unconsciously associated with a person without being one, and it appears to have power over you because it gives you the (sexual) potency you otherwise lack. The Golden Calf fits this Freudian conception in interesting ways. The Torah indicates that after making sacrifices to the calf, the people "rose up to play," "sport," "make merry," or "revel" (Ex. 32:6). The Hebrew verb used here (לצחק) has sexual connotations, as many commentators have pointed out, which are usually lost in the various English translations. Furthermore, as many commentators have noted, when Moses burns the calf, grinds it into dust, scatters it over water, and makes the people drink it (Ex. 32:20), his actions parallel the ritual procedure for a woman suspected of adultery (Numbers 5:11-31). In addition, the language that G-d uses later in the portion is clearly sexual: the people are warned not to whore after other gods (Ex. 34:15-16). As Robert Alter suggests, "the God who has chosen Israel implicitly represents Himself as Israel's husband and lover (a metaphor that both Hosea and Jeremiah will make explicit)." Lastly, it's interesting to note that the calf is associated with a person; namely, it is a substitute for Moses (Ex. 32:1), which may be why G-d pointedly tells Moses that Israel is "your people," not "My people." (Ex. 32:7). (Interestingly, it should be recalled that Moses was instructed to be "like a god" for Pharaoh [Ex.4:16, 7:1], not for the Jewish people.) In sum, the covenant at Sinai is akin to a wedding, but the bride (Israel) is incapable of excitement without an object (the calf) which is associated not with her Husband (like the Ark) but with His rivals ("other gods") or her tutor (Moses).

For Marx, the fetishism of commodities refers to an inversion of the normal relationship between subject and object. The product of labor, "as soon as it assumes the form of commodities," appears to have an intrinsic value, independent of human beings and their activities, when in fact its value derives from human labor. As a result, social relations (the exchange of labor among producers) are disguised as relations between things (products). Just as in the religious world "the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life," "so it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands." While Marx focuses on labor relations rather than sexual relations, his conception of fetishism has much in common with Freud's: both emphasize the apparent domination of human subjects by the objects they produce while insisting that fetishism disguises human agency and interaction by transposing them to a realm of things. Not surprisingly, then, the Golden Calf exemplifies the Marxian conception of fetishism as well as the Freudian conception. The Torah emphasizes the role of human labor: in response to the people’s demand to “make us gods,” Aaron “fashioned” their gold jewelry “in a mold and made it into a molten calf” (Ex. 32:1, 4). (Where did the gold come from? The Torah tells us that the people took it from their Egyptian neighbors on the eve of the Exodus [Ex. 3:22; Ex. 11:2; Ex. 12:35-36]—an act sometimes understood, Robert Alter notes, as “restitution for the unpaid labor exacted from the Hebrew slaves.” So what we have then is an exchange of labor among producers, for the gold which the people give to Aaron, no less than the calf he gives to them, are both in some sense products of Jewish labor.) But if in a normal relationship the product serves the needs of the producer, this relationship is now inverted as the producers bow down before the product of their own hands (Ex. 32:8), which appears to them as an independent being with a life of its own. When Moses asks Aaron why he "brought a great sin" upon the nation, Aaron answers: "I flung [the gold] into the fire, and out came this calf!" (Ex. 32:24). Aaron's language is telling: downplaying his own agency, he suggests that the calf emerged and formed on its own.

When the Golden Calf incident is read via Freud and Marx as an instance of fetishism, the dramatic smashing of the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai makes more sense. What did Moses hope to achieve by breaking the tablets? In Meshekh Hokhmah, R. Meir Simhah suggests that it had the educative aim of combating idolatry: "He feared they would deify them as they had done the calf. Had he brought them the Tablets intact, they would have substituted them for the calf and not reformed their ways." By smashing them, Moses sought to demystify the fetishism that gripped the people: "Even the Tablets--'the writing of God'--were not intrinsically holy, but only so on account of you. The moment Israel sinned and transgressed what was written thereon, they became mere bric a brac devoid of sanctity." As R. Meir Simhah points out, this also explains why the broken pieces of the Tablets were placed in the Ark: "It was the first Tablets which were the work of God that were broken, not the Tablets hewn by Moses, which remained whole; demonstrating that no holiness resides in anything created other than that invested in it by Israel's observance of the Torah in accordance with the will of the Creator and His holy name." Just as sexual significance and economic value are not inherent in objects but derive from human action, so too for holiness. Smashing the tablets and placing them in the Ark may thus be seen as a means of liberating the people from the fetishism that gripped them, for as Marx put it, "every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself."

Moses the Marginal Man (פרשת שמות)

The marginal man ... is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two not merely different but antagonistic cultures.

Robert E. Park

Why did השם choose Moses to take the Jewish people out of Egypt? What made Moses especially suited for this undertaking? Perhaps Moses was best qualified for this task because he was what the sociologist Robert Park called a “marginal man.”

For Park, the “marginal man” was a distinctive personality type produced by contact and communication between peoples. He was a “cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now sought to find a place. He was a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.” In his 1928 article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” Park identified the Jew in the modern era, “when … the walls of the medieval ghetto were torn down and [he] was permitted to participate in the cultural life of the peoples among whom he lived,” as the marginal man par excellence.

In this week’s portion, Moses appears as just such a marginal man. He is Jewish, descended from Levi (Ex. 2:1), but cut off from his people when his mother places him in a basket afloat in the Nile. This is a highly symbolic act. As Robert Alter notes, “Egypt is associated with water, almost everything there being linked with its central waterway, the Nile,” which is “an Egyptian deity, as Rashi notes, and the very source of life in Egypt.” Pharaoh’s daughter finds the baby and gives him the name Moses, “for I drew him from the water” (Ex. 2.10), again symbolizing his immersion in Egyptian culture and society. Indeed, the boy Moses grows up in an Egyptian household as a son to Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex. 2:10). However, as befits Park’s notion of the marginal man, Moses doesn't break with his Jewish past: he “went out to his brethren and saw their burdens” (Ex. 2:11). This means, according to Rashi, that Moses did not merely observe but “directed his eyes and heart to share their distress.” And when Moses sees “a Hebrew man, of his brethren,” struck by an Egyptian taskmaster, he leaps to the defense of the Jewish slave with deadly force (Ex. 2:11-12). As a result of this act, Moses finds that he is no longer accepted in the Egyptian society in which he was raised: “Pharaoh heard about this matter and sought to kill Moses” (Ex. 2: 15). As this conflicted upbringing demonstrates, Moses was “a stranger in a strange land” (Ex. 2:22) even before he left Egypt.

While Moses certainly fits the profile of the marginal man, how did this prepare him to take the Jewish people out of out of Egypt? Robert Park suggests that the marginal man is characterized by two related personality traits: he is both “enlightened” and “emancipated.” The marginal man is enlightened insofar as “he learns to look upon the world in which he was born and bred” with less prejudice and more objectivity. He is emancipated insofar as “energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition are released…. [H]e is not bound as others are by the local proprieties and conventions.” In contrast to Moses, both the Egyptians and the Jews were bound by customary modes of action and thought. While the Egyptians were unable to see the injustice of their ways, the slave mentality of the Jews deprived them of the courage to resist injustice. As a marginal man, Moses was liberated from both constraints. His ties to the Jewish people freed him to “see” the injustice of their burdens (Ex. 2:11), while his princely Egyptian upbringing (as Ibn Ezra pointed out) gave him the courage that Jewish slaves lacked.

These leadership qualities are most evident when Moses flees from Egypt into the wilderness (Ex. 2:15), undertaking on a personal level what he must later lead his brethren to do collectively. The wilderness, as Robert Alter notes, is a “liminal space” between Egypt and the Promised Land, “where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred.” Moses does not fear to journey into this symbolic space. Indeed, herding the sheep of his newly acquired father-in-law Jethro, Moses “led the flock to the farthest end of the wilderness” (אחר המדבר) until he arrived “at the Mountain of God, toward Horeb” (Ex. 3:1). Horeb, as Ibn Ezra noted, means “dryness” or “parched place”; it is thus the antithesis of watery Egypt. Here in the wilderness Moses is free from the fear of Pharaoh’s death sentence, which was a reiteration of Pharaoh's previous genocidal order to drown every Jewish son in the Nile (Ex. 1:22), and Moses incurs new obligations (“you shall take My people, the Children of Israel, out of Egypt”), prefiguring the receiving of the Torah by the Jewish people.

When an astonished Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should take the Children of Israel out of Egypt,” השם answers cryptically, “this is the sign” (זה–לך האות). To what does זה (“this”) refer? Perhaps to the marginality that has brought Moses to Horeb and prepared him for the task ahead.