This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored by Rabbi Shari Chen in honor of the new students beginning their learning at Hebrew Seminary.
* * *
“Through the blood of the martyrs and the pain of the injured, we create hope; we create the future,” declaimed the patriarch. “The blood of my children is not more valuable than the blood of the children of the Palestinian people.” These words, spoken by Ismail Haniyeh after the Israel Defense Forces had killed his three children and at least three of his grandchildren, affirmed the very ideology Haniyeh had touted immediately after the massacres of October 7, 2023. In that very month, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Haniyeh, had announced on television, “We need the blood of women, children, and the elderly of Gaza so it awakens our revolutionary spirit.”
Haniyeh, not only not Jewish but undoubtedly an antisemite, shared few values espoused by Jewish tradition. Nonetheless Jewish wisdom has previously entertained Haniyeh’s notion that no single life is greater than another—and subsequently questioned the usefulness of such a belief. For this reason, in the 5th century C.E., the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 74a, quoted Rabbah’s disappointment upon encountering a man whom a local authority had instructed to kill preemptively some murderer-to-be. Rabbah, suggesting that this unnamed acquaintance had all the logic wrong, replied:
לִקְטְלוּךָ וְלָא תִּיקְטוֹל. מִי יֵימַר דִּדְמָא דִּידָךְ סוּמָּק טְפֵי? דִּילְמָא דְּמָא דְּהוּא גַּבְרָא סוּמָּק טְפֵי.
Let him kill you! You shall not kill! Who could say that your blood is redder [than his]? Perhaps the blood of that man is redder [than yours]!
Though our tradition preserves Rabbah’s concern about who the most red-blooded human could be, our tradition does not stop there. Had the Talmud submitted here to Rabbah’s words, an utterly pacifist anxiety would have conquered a defenseless Jewish people, a people who would have gone extinct by now. Rather, the text of the Talmud proceeds by sharing that Rav Dimi heard his teacher Rabbi Yochanan teach that life-threatening circumstances permits us to commit certain transgressions—even ending the life of someone with murderous intent.
It is true that all human life has the potential to be treated equally, but we know that, just as there are people who go out of their way to hurt us, there are those who deserve more of our love and attention than others. We (hopefully) have friends, relatives, partners, or neighbors who make the extra effort to help us or to demonstrate their love for us, and we in turn should do the same for them. Rabbi Dr. Shai Held has questioned philosophers who insist that our sense of wrong and right must be so impartial that we would never favor a friend or a loved one above a stranger or an enemy. But, as Rabbi Held has taught:
A significant part of what it means to have relationships with particular people is precisely to be partial toward them. Parents, for example, are obligated to be partial; if they refuse to favor their own children, they are derelict in the duties of parenthood… Partiality, after all, is not just integral to being a self; it’s also fundamental to living a good life. If love is essential to the good life… and part of what it means to love someone is to be partial toward them, then some degree of special concern for those we love seems permissible and even required. (Judaism Is About Love, pp. 139–140 and 142.)
Despite whatever sympathy Hamas has gained since the tragedy of October 7, Jewish ethics cannot resonate with Haniyeh’s willingness to discard love owed to his very own family. To preach that the life of a child or grandchild or anyone amounts to nothing more than another coal that stokes the fire of either nationalism is to endorse human sacrifice. Amidst the strong passions a Jew may feel when committing to a better life of better behaviors or of better faith as the High Holidays accompany us in greeting the Jewish New Year, the temptation of sacrifice looms large. Could we not more fully remove ourselves (or others) from the flaws of this world if we were to dedicate life wholly to the service of something greater? Would God not benefit? Would the Jewish people not appreciate the virtue of our sacrifice?
To answer this question, Jewish mythology has long tethered Rosh Hashanah to the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, assigning this story to be read on the second day of the holiday. Doing so allows us to reenact this drama, which the early medieval collection of rabbinic mythology Pesiketa Rabbati, chapter 40, appears to assert largely occurred during Rosh Hashanah. Amidst the anniversary of this moment when Jewish history could have ended before it truly began—we return to Abraham being tempted by God’s command to bring his child up to Mount Moriah as a whole-burnt sacrifice.
The text we have in our Torah appears to be corrupted by the ways in which the story has evolved over time. It is true that Genesis 22:11–18 tells of a Divine messenger imploring Abraham not to sacrifice his child, Abraham sacrificing a ram instead, and the Divine messenger promising Abraham a blessed and numerous array of descendants. I understand these 8 verses to be an insertion into a story that otherwise would have wrapped with the tragic ending of Genesis 22:19, teaching that Abraham alone returned from the mountain.
With time, child sacrifice became abhorrent to the Jewish religion. Thus, our Hebrew Bible attributes to God several condemnations or prohibitions on child sacrifice (such as in Leviticus 20:2–5, Deuteronomy 18:10, or Ezekiel 16:20.) Similar moves away from child sacrifice began taking hold in ancient Greece around the same time that our ancestors first circulated the story of Isaac’s near sacrifice. In his book The Last Trial, the Romanian, Austrian, Israeli, and American scholar Dr. Shalom Spiegel (1899–1984) recounted several similar tales in Greek culture. Although the (mythological) King Agamemnon of Mycenae, in the Trojan War (circa the 12th century B.C.E.), prepared his daughter to be sacrificed, the goddess Artemis had mercy and accepted a hind instead of the princess. Likewise, in a legend predating the 6th century B.C.E., when the people of Boeotia wished to sacrifice the prince Phrixus in a year of draught, the local god delivered a ram, whom Prixus sacrificed as a thanksgiving offering in his own stead. The Greek historian Plutarch (c. 40–c. 120 C.E.) similarly recounted in his book Parallel Lives the tale of Thebes’ General Pelopidas (who died circa 364 B.C.E.), who heard a god promise him a military victory if he would sacrifice a virgin with dark hair. As Pelopidas hemmed and hawed, the legend goes, a mare leapt towards him, and a seer foretold that, should the general sacrifice the mare, he could still emerge victorious—and he did!
As the religion of our ancestors matured, it became prudent to emphasize that Isaac survived the binding atop Mount Moriah; no good religion would ask us to throw away our lives for some greater good. What good could be greater than life itself? Evidently, for a few of our spiritual forebears, it was clear that sacrifice manifested some pietistic ideal, and they could never forget that Genesis 22:19 never acknowledges that Isaac ever departed from the altar. In the rabbinic anthology Midrash HaGadol—edited in Aden, Yemen, around the 14th century C.E.—one Rabbi El’azar ben Perat taught:
אף על פי שלא מת יצחק מעלה עליו הכתוב כאלו מת ואפרו מוטל על גבי המזבח, לכך נאמר וישב אברהם אל נעריו.
Even though Isaac did not die, Scripture considers him as if he had died and his ash were upon the altar. Therefore, it is said [that only] “Abraham returned to his youths” (Genesis 22:19).
Elsewhere, Midrash HaGadol highlights the author’s excitement over the possibility that Isaac approached a sacrificial state. As Midrash HaGadol imagines (not in the biblical text) Abraham crying upon discovering that Isaac understood Abraham’s intentions to sacrifice Isaac, Midrash HaGadol records Isaac trying to calm his father, reassuring Abraham that this sacrifice would really be worth it:
עשה בי רצון אביך שבשמים, יהי רצון שיהיה רביעית דם שלי כפרה על כל ישראל.
Perform through me the will of Your father in Heaven. May it be willed that a quarter of my blood may be an atonement for all of [the people] Israel.
Given that only a fictional version of Isaac ever said such words, one can imagine medieval Jews had some sort of respect if not envy towards those who had been sacrificed. Martyrs, after all, have so often been held up as exemplars of the faithful. But, just as the neighbors of the Jews and the Jews were largely coming to realize, to be sacrificed meant becoming divorced from life and, therefore, holiness. There is nothing enviable about that. Those who perished in the Crusades did not actually help us or save us. No violent act of antisemitism appears to have ever satisfied the antisemites of the world. Why should we feed the insatiable beast of hatred?
Although American or Israeli Jews might not be in the habit of burning people and calling them sacrifices to God, American and Israeli Jews inhabit cultures that nonetheless believe that certain causes are worth the risk of our entire beings. Faith in the nobility of the United States leads young people to sign up for the United States Army, and almost the entirety of the Jewish population of Israel either has served or expects to serve in the Israel Defense Forces to protect the Jewish homeland. Military service does not emerge from the Bible or some other Judeo-Christian tradition, but those among us who have served in a military have done so because we believe that we will be found one day on the right side of history—and that these cultures depend on the tragedy (not the blessing) of accidental sacrifices. As a believer in American democracy and as a proud Zionist, I see both faults and blessings in the two nations with which I most closely identify. I am privileged to have never before felt a need to fight as a soldier, and I cannot imagine I ever would fight. Truthfully, I believe that Jewish wisdom beckons us to judge moderately (as per Mishnah, Avot 1:1), especially when determining the causes for which we would ever put our lives on the line.
In 2023, the political activist Charlie Kirk (1993–2025) proclaimed, “It’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”—but did he really believe in these sacrifices? Did the unholy gun death that Charlie Kirk tragically suffered somehow tighten or expand Americans’ or the American government’s commitment to the preamble, articles, or other amendments of the United States Constitution? Inasmuch as, within less than a week after Kirk’s murder, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission and the Executive Branch of the United States expressed their intentions to limit freedom of speech (protected under the First Amendment)—Kirk’s math about sacrifices appears to have been wrong.
Few, if any, are the sacrifices worthy enough for us to transform ourselves into whole-burnt offerings. If we ever should find ourselves to be tempted like Abraham, to give up our loved ones (or even ourselves) so that someone else can live life, let us remember that we cannot foresee the aftereffects of our sacrifices. Would God or our people truly appreciate us—or would we have merely squandered life itself, God’s greatest gift to us?
We should stop ourselves before we turn ourselves into memories of the past. Rather, following Abraham, we must stay attuned for the divine messages that guide us directly towards our future.
* * *