Abraham: the first enemy of idolatry. The first angry young man. The first rebel to rise up against the “establishment,” society and authority. The first to demystify official taboos and suspend ritual prohibitions. The first to reject civilization in order to form a minority of one. The first believer, the first one to suffer for his belief. Alone against the world, he declared himself free. Alone against the world, he braved the fire and the mob, affirming that God is one and present wherever His name is invoked; that one is the secret and the beginning of all that exists in heaven and on earth and that God’s secret coincides with that of man.

And yet. Notwithstanding his total faith in God and His justice, His kindness as well, he did not for a moment hesitate to take God to task as he tried to save two condemned cities from destruction: How can You—who embody justice—be unjust? He was the first who dared query God. And God listened and answered. For unlike Job, Abraham was protesting on behalf of others, not of himself. God forgave Abraham everything, including his questions. God is God and Abraham was His faithful servant; one was sure of the other. To test his will and vision, God had made him leave the security of his father’s home, challenge rulers and engage their armies in battle, endure hunger and exile, disgrace and fire. His trust in God was never shaken. So loyal was he to God that he was rewarded with a son who became symbol and bearer of grace and benediction for generations to come.

Then one day God decided once more to test him—for the tenth and last time: Take your son and bring him to Me as an offering. The term used is ola, which means an offering that has been totally consumed, a holocaust. And Abraham complied. Without an argument. Without questioning or even trying to understand, without trying to stall. Without a word to anyone, not even his wife Sarah, without a tear; he simply waited for the next morning and left the house before she awakened. He saddled his donkey, and accompanied by his son and two servants, started on the road to Mount Moriah. After a three-day journey—which according to Kierkegaard lasted longer than the four thousand years separating us from the event—father and son left the servants and donkey behind and began their ascent of the mountain. When they reached the top they erected an altar and prepared for the ritual. Everything was ready: the wood, the knife, the fire. Slaughterer and victim looked into each other’s eyes and for one moment all of creation held its breath. The same fear penetrated the father and the son. A Midrash describes Isaac’s fear. Stretched out on the altar, his wrists and ankles bound, Isaac saw the Temple in Jerusalem first destroyed and then rebuilt, and at the moment of the supreme test, Isaac understood that what was happening to him would happen to others, that this was to be a tale without an end, an experience to be endured by his children and theirs. Never would they be spared the torture. The father’s anguish, on the other hand, was not linked to the future; by sacrificing his son to obey God’s will, Abraham knew that he was, in fact, sacrificing his knowledge of God and his faith in Him. If Isaac were to die, to whom would the father transmit this faith, this knowledge? The end of Isaac would connote the end of a prodigious adventure: the first would become the last. One cannot conceive of a more crushing or more devastating anguish: I shall thus have lived, suffered and caused others to suffer for nothing.