The metahistorical legends of the Jews are endlessly fascinating, not least because they provide a glimpse into the minds of Ezra and his cohorts as they labored over the canonical redaction of Torah (D.W. Halivni, Revelation Restored ). Historiography has always played at best an ancillary role among the Jews, and often no role at all (Y. Yerushalmi, Zachor ). Rather, collective memory is the central component of the Jewish experience, a reliance on the truth of the matter more than the fact of the matter. Still, our metahistorical legends (Torah) are not merely metaphors but social realities transmitted and sustained through the conscious efforts and institutions of the group (M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory ).
In this context, it is interesting to contemplate three successive events in Vayeira: Sarah presented to Avimelech as Avraham’s sister; Akeidah Yishmael; Akeidah Yitzhak. Despite countless post-Biblical rebbe meysehs , the transparent raison d’etre of juxtaposing these tales is to underscore Avraham’s willingness to ignore moral correctness for personal utilitarian ends. When faced with the Platonic choice of suffering an injustice as opposed to committing an injustice, a tzadik would select the former, but Avraham selects the latter. As such, Avraham, human and flawed, presents a heuristic mirror image to our mind’s eye.
Avraham sojourned in Gerar where he encountered Avimelech. Fearing he might be harmed, perhaps murdered, so that the king might take Sarah for his own, " Avraham said of Sarah his wife, ‘ She is my sister’; so Avimelech, king of Gerar, sent, and took Sarah." Hashem saved the innocent Sarah by causing Avimelech to be impotent (Rashi) and revealing Avraham’s deception to Avimelech in a dream.
Not long after, Yitzhak was born to the 90 year old Sarah. As Yitzhak grew, Sarah became less and less tolerant of Avraham’s other son, Yishmael: "Drive out this slavewoman [Hagar] with her son, for the son of that slavewoman shall not inherit with my son, with Yitzhak. The matter greatly distressed Avraham…" Above all, he wanted to preserve shalom bayit. He tossed and turned that night and eventually became certain of of Hashem’s whispered advice: "Whatever Sarah tells you, heed her voice." It was settled: "Avraham awoke early in the morning, took bread and a skin of water, and gave them to Hagar…and sent them off…into the desert of Beer-sheva." Hashem took note of the injustice and saved Hagar and Yishmael from certain death.
Avraham was not without a conscience. Over the next half dozen years he went to visit with Yishmael in the wilderness of Paran, even after swearing to Sarah that he would never do so (Pirke d’Rabbi Eliezer, 30). On each occasion Yishmael had taken leave from his encampment. Avraham’s depression deepened and once again, in the black of night, he heard Hashem’s whispered command: "Please take your son, your only one, whom you love---Yitzhak---and go to the land of Moriah; bring him up there as an offering upon one of the mountains which I shall tell you." The need to surmount his "fear and trembling" transcended a moral response: " So Avraham awoke early in the morning and he saddled his donkey; he took his two young men with him and Yitzhak, his son; he split the wood for the offering, and stood up and went to the place of which God had spoken to him." At the last, Hashem rescued Yitzhak, not Avraham.
As a survivor, Elie Wiessel "has always felt closer to Isaac than to his father": "Here is a story that contains Jewish destiny in its totality…In Jewish tradition man cannot use death as a means of glorifying God…For the Jew, all truth must spring from life, never from death. To us crucifixion represents not a step forward but a step backward…" (E. Wiesel, Messengers of God). There is no greater evocation of this than Marc Chagall’s depictions of the Shoah, crucifixions of shtetl Jews in the streets of Vitebsk, painted in the 1940s before and after his flight from Paris to New York. Looking at Jews crucified wearing tallit and tefillin, surrounded by murderous chaos, there is but a single message: habitual teleological suspension of the ethical has always to come to this. Avraham is our warning!