The episode of the Aqeda culminates in God’s revelation to Abraham saying unto him: “for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man”. And we can’t but be surprised: was it really necessary to discover that Abraham is God-fearing? Indeed, Abraham was the first believer to announce God’s Name in the world; so what happened in the Aqeda that revealed that Abraham was fearing God?
Understanding this means understanding the meaning of fearing God, this issue being the leitmotiv throughout the whole parasha and it is even the line connecting the paracha to the haftara.
After Abimelekh discovers that Sarah is Abraham’s wife and not his sister, he asks him: “What hast thou done unto us […] that thou hast brought on me and on my kingdom a great sin?”, but Abraham doesn’t answer. Then Abimelekh goes on and asks: “What sawest thou, that thou hast done this thing?”, meaning what stands at the root of your deed. On that question Abraham answers: “Because I thought: Surely the fear of God is not in this place.” Abraham says: as I saw that the morality of Abimelekh and the habitant of Gerar is based on versatile human point of view, and not on the fear of God, therefore today morality can change from today to tomorrow, and that being the case, maybe murder is acceptable but taking one’s wife is not. That is the reason of the complexity of the verse describing the place of residence of Abraham “and [he] dwelt between Qadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar”, because in the political Gerar Abraham allows himself just to sojourn but not to dwell. (like Hazal say on the first verse of the Psalms: “Happy is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful” – this is said about Abraham at the time of the Tower of Babel, in relation to Sodom and Gerar). Therefore Abimelekh tells Abraham: “Behold, my land is before thee: dwell where it pleaseth thee”, meaning be a dweller and not just a temporary resident (in Hebrew the word גר means a stranger, or temporary resident).
And that was exactly what God wanted to “prove” Abraham for. Abraham’s virtue is grace. Is his grace just a matter of a sporadic ideology or is the essence of all his actions is the fear of God? That’s why in our Parasha Abraham has to go through three tests in which he is compelled to renounce his commitment to grace, in order to comply with God’s will. (the Hebrew word for this is נסיון, test, means also to elevate, because the point is not so much to check whether one will pass the test or not, than to elevate he who succeeded to a higher level). In Sodom, in casting out Hagar & Ishmael, and in the Aqedat Yitzhaq, Abraham has to set the path to Yitzhaq, his son and continuator, Yitzhaq whose virtue is rigor that manifests itself especially in the Fear of God and through it to reveal Jacob’s virtue, “give truth to Jacob”, because truth appears only when the apparently opposite virtues of Abraham and Yitzhaq are unified, testifying the unity of God.
And that’s also what the haftara comes to underline. In the beginning of the haftara we have a description of a situation where fear of God is absent, therefore the two sons of a widow can be taken into slavery without any regard to the commandment “thou shalt not be to him as a creditor”, the lack of any sign of grace reveals a situation where the exaggeration of law casts out any sense of justice.
Indeed, despite all that the whole sense of belief of the widow in God and his prophets allows the revelation of the infinite will of the Creator of the world to pay back grace to his creatures, with no extreme, and that only the capacity of the receptive vessel limits God’s abundance.
The “walk before Me and be whole” of Abraham is what allows the miracle of the birth of Yitzhaq, like the promise of a son in the haftara is parallel to the promise “and Sarah shall have a son.” And in the death of the child and his resurrection, there is a parallel to the Aqedat Yitzhaq, which Hazal call “a whole Holocaust,” and his resurrection with the commandment “Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him,” reveals us the essence of the Fear of God, which the recognition of the man himself as a creature of God, who as such testifies about his Creator.
“for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man,” reveals the grandeur of Abraham to himself and to the whole world, “seeing thou hast not withheld” any efforts so that everyone will know that your only child is from me, God.
Fear of God leads the human being to the understanding and the internalization of his relation and bound to his Creator and to the recognition of the need to bind the effect to its Cause – and through that to elevate oneself and reach the pure Fear of the Lord that endureth forever.
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