• • •

Another text, even more cruel, goes further yet. It hints that the tragic outcome could, after all, not be averted. Hence the use of the singular verb: Vayashav avraham el nearav. Yes, Abraham did return alone. One does not play such games with impunity.

Of course, this hypothesis has been rejected by tradition. The ancient commentators preferred to imagine Isaac shaken but alive, spending the unaccounted-for years at a yeshiva or perhaps even in paradise, but eventually returning home.

Yet popular imagination—collective memory—adheres rather to the tragic interpretation of the text. Isaac did not accompany his father on the way back because the divine intervention came too late. The act had been consummated. Neither God nor Abraham emerged victorious from the contest. They were both losers. Hence God’s pangs of guilt on Rosh Hashana, when He judges man and his deeds. Because of the drama that took place at Mount Moriah, He understands man better. Because of Abraham and Isaac, He knows that it is possible to push some endeavors too far.

That is why the theme and term of the Akeda have been used, throughout the centuries, to describe the destruction and disappearance of countless Jewish communities everywhere. All the pogroms, the crusades, the persecutions, the slaughters, the catastrophes, the massacres by sword and the liquidations by fire—each time it was Abraham leading his son to the altar, to the holocaust all over again.

Of all the Biblical tales, the one about Isaac is perhaps the most timeless and most relevant to our generation. We have known Jews who, like Abraham, witnessed the death of their children; who, like Isaac, lived the Akeda in their flesh; and some who went mad when they saw their father disappear on the altar, with the altar, in a blazing fire whose flames reached into the highest of heavens.

We have known Jews—ageless Jews—who wished to become blind for having seen God and man opposing one another in the invisible sanctuary of the celestial spheres, a sanctuary illuminated by the gigantic flames of the holocaust.

• • •

But the story does not end there. Isaac survived; he had no choice. He had to make something of his memories, his experience, in order to force us to hope.

For our survival is linked to his. Satan could kill Sarah, he could even hurt Abraham, but Isaac was beyond his reach. Isaac too represents defiance. Abraham defied God, Isaac defied death.

What did happen to Isaac after he left Mount Moriah? He became a poet—author of the Minha service—and did not break with society. Nor did he rebel against life. Logically, he should have aspired to wandering, to the pursuit of oblivion. Instead he settled on his land, never to leave it again, retaining his name. He married, had children, refusing to let fate turn him into a bitter man. He felt neither hatred nor anger toward his contemporaries who did not share his experience. On the contrary, he liked them and showed concern for their well-being. After Moriah, he devoted his life and his right to immortality to the defense of his people.