This is such a terrible story that one has to ask what is the purpose of keeping its memory alive. And from all places, nowhere else but in Israel’s formative literature: the TaNaKh.
There are two possible answers to this question:
Traditionally, Jews have been highly conscious of their behavior as a group, as “am Israel,” as the people of Israel. Unity and solidarity have been distinctive aspects of that behavior.
If the idea of “Jews don’t do this” doesn’t keep on coming up every time Jews misbehave among themselves and toward others, Erich Fromm’s rumination that we will still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent could become true.
Even though I approached chapter 26 with an open mind and wide eyes, I had to ask why this particular sentence was written. Surely, the author must have understood that for a story to be passed down through the generations, it needed to be current.
If we were a normal nation, when a visitor arrived here, we would take him not to Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem] but rather to Hebron. We’d take him to where our roots are
Genesis 22. When carefully reading what the text says, the message of this chapter is that God does not want Isaac to be sacrificed. God’s love and mercy are available to humanity without having to be earned by sacrificing another human being.
an estimated 54% of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people, revere the patriarch Abraham as the common ancestor of all religions of Semitic origin. An authentic Abrahamic tradition, Jewish, Christian or Islamic would be one that would follow the reason given in the Torah for Abraham’s preeminence
The flood was caused by “hamas,” the Hebrew word used by the Torah to refer to “violence.”
“Hamas” is the same word the Scriptures use to describe the sin for which Nineveh was to be destroyed in the book of Jonas and for which “sulfurous fire” rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah.
The miracles reported in the Bible were supposed to strike the reader as miraculous. Even if some natural phenomena can be found at the heart of the Ten Plagues, the theology rather than the natural history of the plagues intrigued the biblical authors and inspired them to tell the tale of the plagues as they did.
all through Jewish history, from the Exodus to the Maccabean Revolt to the rising from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust to the creation of the modern State of Israel, the end result was not the to-be-expected consequences. It was something that surprised even the most optimistic speculations about human capacity.
