Private Grandeur
The Greatness of Isaac's Interior
Isaac pleaded [va’yetar] with the LORD before his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD responded [va’ye’ater] to his plea, and his wife Rebekah conceived. (Genesis 25:21)
And David built there an altar to the LORD and sacrificed burnt offerings and offerings of well-being. The LORD responded [va’ye’ater] to the plea for the land, and the plague against Israel was checked. (2 Samuel 24:25)
Rabbi Yehuda continued with the verse, "And Isaac pleaded with God for his wife" (Gen. 25:21). What is the meaning of “pleaded” That he offered a sacrifice and prayed for her. What offering did he sacrifice? A burnt offering. He sacrificed by studying the verses “and the Lord responded to his plea” (Ibid.), and “So the Lord responded to the plea for the land” (2 Samuel 24:25). There it means that a sacrifice has been offered, here too it means, a sacrifice has been offered. It is written, “And Isaac entreated” and the Lord responded” a celestial fire that came to meet the lower fire. (Zohar 1:137a)
Abraham does not pray on behalf of Sarah when confronted by the specter of childlessness. Instead, he takes a handmaiden in Hagar, and sires Ishmael. Abraham argues with God on behalf of the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, but never issues a prayer on his own behalf.
When he finds himself in difficult situations, like Odysseus, he uses his wit to maneuver. Abraham does not pray to God to help him in the battle between the four evil kings and the five evil kings. When, in Egypt, he tells Sarah to lie, he doesn’t call on heaven. When asked to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham complies. When asked not to, Abraham complies. If Abraham prays, his prayer is an inward one. Abraham welcomes the angels into his own home. He is a giver, an exemplary host. But what does he himself ache for? We don’t know. Abraham does not know how to be a guest; he is too busy being strong.
But Isaac, seemingly out of nowhere, discovers a new way of relating to God. Isaac doesn’t appeal to divine justice, but makes an appeal from human need, his own need.
The word used to describe Isaac’s mode of praying—atira—appears for the first time in this week’s parasha, Toldot (25:19-28:9). It appears nowhere else in Genesis. The next time it appears is in Exodus:
Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “Plead [ha’tiru] with the LORD to remove the frogs from me and my people, and I will let the people go to sacrifice to the LORD.” (Exodus 8:4)
If we track this term throughout Tanakh, we see that it is used with reference to plague, often of a national scale. It is a term of emergency. Atira is the mode of desperate prayer in the face of pandemic. Isaac introduces it to us, though, as a private man in anguish. The word also appears several times in the Book of Job. Job’s friends counsel Job to entreat God to heal him, to alleviate his affliction. Job, however, insists—and this is the sting of the book—that his prayers won’t make a difference. There is no entreating a God who is beyond scrutiny, beyond good and evil.
If we follow Rashi, Isaac is in anguish not because he believes his line will die out but because he desperately wants it to go through Rebecca. Isaac is also the first character in the Torah who loves. The Torah presents Abraham and Sarah as a “power couple,” but nowhere does it say that either loved the other. Isaac loves Rebecca. His entreaty is connected to this love. Isaac prays because he loves. He prays for his own—for his family—because his mode is the mode of cherishing what is ownmost. Love is selective, preferential. Abraham and Sarah are universalists. They make figurative children of their students.
According to a famous Midrash, Abraham responds to God’s command, “Take your son, your only son, the one whom you love”— “But I love both my sons.” In fact, the Midrash ironically highlights the possibility that Abraham loves neither of them. For while God says, “the one whom you love,” Abraham himself never admits to loving.
Abraham’s prayer on behalf of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah is arguably a morally superb one, as it is maximally disinterested, concerned with principled justice. But is it born out of love? Abraham read Rawls, as it were, and simply quoted God “the difference principle.” “Imagine, God, that you were standing behind a veil of ignorance, and that you yourself might end up in Sodom…would you want it to be destroyed if there were 50 good people there?” There is an Abrahamic defense of Sodom that continues to this day—not based in an emotional appeal, but based in the hypothetical logic that “it could have been any of us.” Just as Abraham fails to move God, this rhetoric often fails to mobilize the median voter.
Isaac’s prayer, by contrast, might be considered more self-interested, less pure. Even if Isaac is praying on behalf of someone else, Rebecca is now “flesh of one flesh” with him, and so his personal prayer is more presumptuous than Abraham’s. Isaac makes no appeal as to his deserts or Rebecca’s merits. His raw cry is the appeal. Intended or not, this is a breakthrough in the history of religion, as dramatized in the Torah, an opening for that aspect of religion which truly is, as Marx favorably called it “a haven in a heartless world.”
What’s surprising is that God responds affirmatively to Isaac’s prayer. In Cain’s case, God ignores the sacrifice. In Abraham’s, God hears the argument, but refutes it. The strength and shock of God’s response towards Isaac is evinced in the language of the text. The same word that describes Isaac’s prayer (va’yetar) describes God’s response (va’ye’ater). It seems, for the first time in the Torah, as if personal prayer can work, that the sheer use of words, uttered from the heart, can move God’s heart.
Classical commentary notes the greatness of Abraham as compared to Isaac, whose role, by contrast was simply to maintain and transmit Abraham’s foundation. As Toldot opens “These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son. Abraham begat Isaac.” (25:19-20) With blistering irony, the Torah reverses our expectation, telling us that the most important thing Isaac has done is be born to Abraham.
Abraham is the innovator, Isaac is the preserver. But that’s not quite accurate. It might be more precise to say that Abraham was the persona, Isaac the person. Abraham was a public figure, who put global mission first and family second. Isaac, by contrast, who was the sacrifice, reversed Abraham’s priorities. Isaac did not go around preaching and teaching. His tent was not open on all four sides. He went into his tent and communed with Rebecca and found solace there in the privacy and childhood he was denied as “the son of a preacher man.”
Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition that our ability to flourish was jeopardized by the loss of a distinction between the public and private sphere, a distinction kept by the ancients. The rise of the “social,” she claimed (decades before social media), threatened to make everything both personal and public, but therefore neither genuinely person nor genuinely public. In the figures of Abraham and Isaac, we have the two poles to which Arendt refers. We have a celebrated founder who is a less than exemplary husband and father. And we have a humble son, who boasts of no great public achievements, but who loves his wife, and speaks from the heart. In Arendt’s tragic conception—inspired by the Greeks, for whom all tragedies consist in the conflict between the personal (piety, the family) and the political (the state)—there is no synthesis between Abraham and Isaac. We are limited. And we must accept our limitations. The aspiration to do it all makes light of the choice.
Thus, Jacob, on an Arendtian (Greek) reading, will not be the best of Abraham and Isaac, but the tension between them. Jacob will not be a harmony, but a conflict. Jacob will be the conflict between principle and personality, between universal and particular, between public and private. Jacob will have two names because he will be both an individual and a persona. He will be the father of a nation and the father of a messed up family.
If Arendt is right, Isaac is not a preserver of Abraham, but an agent, even a counter-weight to Abraham. Isaac is defined by his father, but defined in reaction. The reason he is named son of Abraham is to teach us that he sought to go in different directions from his father, and that, paradoxically, even as he did, he remained essentially his father’s son. Even as Isaac rejects his father’s missionary position, turning inward, he furthers his father’s aim and continues his journey. Neither neutral principle nor emotive personality can suffice. The one threatens to turn the world into an empty procedure. The other threatens to reward with favoritism those who cry loudest, those whose sob stories happen to make for a good marketing campaign.
Yet if Abraham was a philosopher who understood the rational idea that there is a God who created the world, as Maimonides, following the Midrash, describes, Isaac is a poet for whom what matters is not the attraction of God, but the relationship with God. Isaac’s God is not the God of the cosmos, but the God of the moment, the God of need, the God for whom my own private plight is as urgent and beloved as a national plague.
The Zohar says that Isaac studied the verses in which the word atira appeared, and that this was itself the sacrifice that he offered. His study was itself a petition. Besides being delightfully postmodern in its self-reference, I find in this a subtle point about the nature of Torah study. Torah study often presents as an analytic exercise, a matter of applying principles and rules, of finding patterns. This is the Abrahamic way. But beneath this scientific sheen is another story, a story that has the capacity to move the divine heart. It is not the story of textual information, but the story of ourselves.
Abraham studies Torah to learn what is real. Isaac studies Torah to express his longing. Both are granted what they seek. But it is the latter mode which makes religion not just a matter of science, but a matter of art. Abraham’s way scales. But Isaac’s way is wholesome, personal, moving. Abraham and Jacob take handmaidens. Isaac, by contrast, has one love, which is all he needs, Rebecca. It is on account of Isaac’s love, not Abraham’s brilliance, that God reverses our plight, turns our obstacles into openings.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—You might enjoy my podcast interview with Rabbi Ari Lamm on Good Faith Effort.
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