Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Isaac is the first Biblical character whose prayer is answered. He's also the first Biblical character who is said to love. In contrast to Abraham and Jacob, Isaac has only one wife. I connected these dots for my weekly #Torah commentary.

etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/private-gran…

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. His raw cry IS the appeal. Intended or not, this is a breakthrough in the history of religion, an opening for that which truly is, as Marx favorably called it “a haven in a heartless world.”

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 expectations, 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, 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.

For 100 tweet re-cap on Arendt. See here:

https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1358822158466711558

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.

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. It is on account of Isaac’s love, not Abraham’s brilliance, that God reverses our plight, turns our obstacles into openings.

Shabbat Shalom