Parshat VaYera
Yitzchak and the Akedah
I’m not the first to notice the name Akeydat Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac, for the events at the end of our parsha, although the text gives Yitzchak a minor role. Ibn Ezra takes up the question on 22;5, where Avraham tells his servants he and Yitzchak will return after ascending the mountain and bowing to God.
Some wondered how Avraham could lie, when he knew Yitzchak would not be returning. Ibn Ezra cites those who thought he meant to bring Yitzchak’s remains, refrained from telling them so they (and Yitzchak) would not leave. Once on the topic, he notes Chazal’s view that Yitzchak was thirty-seven. While he declares his readiness to accept the idea if it is authoritative tradition, he wonders why the text would not stress the greatness of a thirty-seven year old’s willing submission to a father who planned to sacrifice him!
As Ibn Ezra put it, he should have double his father’s reward, for readiness to be sacrificed. To avoid the problem, some had suggested Yitzchak was only five, to which Ibn Ezra objects that the verse tells us carried the wood for the sacrifice. Logic dictates, therefore, he was about thirteen, old enough to carry wood, young enough that his father could still force the issue. Although Ibn Ezra seems to think Yitzchak could have outrun his father, in his view the reason Avraham did not answer directly when Yitzchak asked where the sheep was for the offering, the second time Ibn Ezra had Avraham fudge an answer to avoid others running away.
Yitzchak was bound, but Avraham did the hard work, according to Ibn Ezra.
Rule of Law Might Have Been Enough
After Hashem warns Avimelech to return Sarah, the latter complains to Avraham about his having endangered him. In 20;11, Avraham says he saw a lack of yir’at Elokim/Elohim in the place, then adds he hadn’t fully lied, Sarah is in fact a paternal sister. I think most commentators read Elokim as a name of God, Avraham was saying he saw no fear of God in the place, and therefore bent the truth, referring to Sarah as his sister/female relative, to avoid the question of whether she was also his wife.
Sforno reads the words as chol, mundane, elohim in the sense of judges. With those adjustments, he thinks Avraham replied to Avimelech that he saw no rule of law in the place, the “kings” of the Philistines having too little power to enforce moral behavior. In a wild west, Avraham had to save himself. His next words prove his point: while she is his sister, the king (Avimelech), the most moral man in the area, jumped to take her rather than ask if she was also his wife.
[Where “sister” means relative, where paternal relatives have different incest implications than maternal, Avimelech’s superficial investigation of Sarah’s status are a mark against him.]
Avraham indicted Avimelech here more fundamentally than we usually realize, Sforno is saying. Forget fear of God, a veritable pipe dream, he couldn’t trust there was rule of law, couldn’t even trust the king to ask all the needed questions before jumping to grab Sarah.
Susceptible to, Although Not Yet Liable
Or HaChayyim wonders what Lot means by asking the angel to spare Tzo’ar, 19;20. After all, either the city had to be punished or not, what would Lot’s request change? [While he asks it here, this is a fundamental question about prayer in general, and Or HaChayyim’s answer seems to me part of any proper understanding of requests in prayer.]
He points us to Shabbat 10b, Lot calls Tzo’ar “close” because it was more recently settled (a year later), and had fewer sins. Lot argued the city was not yet doomed to destruction because of its own failings. It was slated to be wiped out, caught up in the troubles coming Sodom’s way.
As Bava Kamma 60a says, the Destroyer, given permission to destroy, does not distinguish the righteous from evildoers. Or HaChayyim narrows “righteous” to those who don’t yet have enough guilt to be punished directly, but are not innocent enough to merit protection from the force of the world.
[Note his perspective: there are those who deserve punishment, those who have so much merit, Hashem will protect them from any problems coming their way, and those in the middle, would not yet be punished on their own, but also have no claim on Divine protection from punishment.]
Lot argued that the angels therefore had leeway to grant his request, to spare what would ordinarily have been collateral damage. And so it was; for Or HaChayyim, in other words, sometimes God has decided we will be punished, and we will be; sometimes (or some people) have enough merit to be protected from even the effects of others’ punishments; and sometimes, maybe most of the time, we are in between, we don’t have to be punished, but the presence of punishment might catch us up in it.
What does it take to avoid catastrophe? For Ibn Ezra, being older than thirteen would have let Yitzchak run away; for Sforno, had Avimelech and Plishtim adhered to the rule of law, Avraham would not have been within his rights to lie to them, and they could have avoided some trouble; where Or HaChayyim helped us understand the difference between implicated, immune, and in between.
Ways to avoid hard times, from each of our three commentators.
