We all know that when G-d told Abraham, “Bring your son up for an “olah,” Abraham’s test was to disregard the very lessons about G-d that he was preaching to the world his entire life—that G-d was a G-d of mercy Who desires only loving kindness and abhors bloodshed; and Abraham was to disregard the obvious contradiction—that G-d had promised him that from Isaac will come a nation devoted to G-d, and now He is telling Abraham to put Isaac’s life to an end before he had any offspring at all. It was only when Abraham was about to put the knife to Isaac’s throat that G-d told Him to stop, and that this had just been a test.
And we all know the question, how could G-d contradict Himself, first telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, and then telling him not to. And we all know the answer: G-d did not actually say to be makriv Isaac, to sacrifice him, but merely to “bring him up” to the mountain.
The question presents itself: Abraham was just as intelligent as we, even more so. When faced with the contradictions of understanding G-d’s command to “bring up” Isaac, with the fact of G-d’s loving kindness and promise of Isaac’s raising a family, why couldn’t Abraham reconcile the contradiction as we have? Why didn’t Abraham reason, G-d can’t possibly mean I should sacrifice Isaac, He must mean He wants me to take Isaac up to the mountain, and then bring him down! Why, and how could, Abraham insist on nearly killing his beloved, long-awaited-for son, without compelling reason?
The Malbim (19th century commentator) provides us with a key that unlocks this problem as well as others in the Bible. He explains that there is a principle that when a person receives a prophetic command, he is obligated to understand it in its simplest way—without embellishment, deliberation, inference or other scrupulous analysis (--although Torah is indeed learned through such rigoruous investigation, for the reason forthcoming).
Therefore, it was part and parcel of Abraham’s test to understand G-d’s command to “bring up Isaac as an ‘olah’” in its simplest meaning.—He had to refrain from analyzing the command and from reasoning that the G-d of mercy, G-d, Who abhors bloodshed, G-d Who promised that Isaac, for whose birth Abraham prayed and waited, would grow to be the progenitor of a great nation teaching the way of G-d, G-d in Whose name Abraham preached the concepts of loving-kindness throughout his life—G-d obviously cannot mean that Abraham should kill Isaac. He had to understand the command in its simplest way, and bring Isaac as a literal sacrifice.
This principle, the Malbim explains, clarifies the sin of the first man, Adam. He was told not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, yet when Eve offered him the fruit, he took it. How could he disobey the command? Because he analyzed it: G-d said (Genesis 2:17), “from the tree Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you shall not eat from it.” “I’m not eating from the tree,” Adam reasoned. “I’m eating from Eve’s hand!” But despite the extra verbiage which Adam otherwise would have been justified in analyzing, since this was a direct prophetic command from G-d, he was expected and obligated to take it in its simplest form.
We learn from the account of the near-sacrifice of Isaac that one cannot question G-d. G-d is so beyond our understanding, so above our puny minds, that to hold him to our logic and value-systems is the highest effrontery and chutzpah. Yet at the beginning of this very same parshah, we find just the opposite: G-d tells Abraham that He is going to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Ammorra, and Abraham declares that if there be but ten righteous individuals in these cities, then Sodom and Ammorra should be totally spared! This is amazing! For Sodom and Ammorra, those vicious, perverted, sinful cities, Abraham confronts G-d with his own sense of morality, but for his own son’s life he does not express a peep of incredulity!
So which is it? Do we say that we can hold G-d to our sense of logic and values, or do we say that G-d is so beyond our understanding that it is audacious for us to do so?
Rav Shimon Schwab, zt”l, gives a brilliant answer to this quandary which is again a key to understanding several accounts of the Bible.
The truth is that technically G-d’s thoughts are beyond us. The deepest, most complex, and even most beyond-us kinds of thoughts are elementary to His mind. His thoughts are way above ours, and it is foolish to hold Him to ours. However, there are times when He reveals that He desires to descend to our level of understanding, when He wants us to understand him according to our perception of logic and morality. And this is indicated when He reveals to a prophet that He is “descending” into our realm of thought.
When G-d told Abraham about Sodom and Ammorra, He said that He is now “going down to see” the situation:
I will now go down and see if they did as [the cities’] cry of destruction coming to me…
This was Abraham’s cue that Hashem desired Abraham to understand His actions according to his world of thought. But when G-d told Abraham to sacrifice his son, it does not say this. Nor when G-d told Abraham to exile in son Ishmael from his home.
Likewise, when G-d appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, He declares that He is “coming down” to save the Israelites from the Egyptians. So when G-d then continues that Moses will be the one to confront Pharaoh, Moses is able to object that he is not suited for the job. And similarly, Moses is later able to complain that his dealings with Pharaoh had only made things worse, so why was he sent?
And this explains how we are able to learn Torah as we do. It is normal that when we learn the Torah, and here it says one thing, and there another, we come up with solutions to conform the contradictions, saying here it’s talking about this, and there it’s talking about that. How are we permitted to do this? So what, if we can’t understand G-d’s mind, and how both this and that can be true in their literal and unmodified senses? G-d’s thoughts are beyond us!
But the answer is that when G-d gave us the Torah, He declared that He is “coming down” on Mt. Sinai. He wants us to understand the Torah according to our realm of thought and logic. “Lo BaShammayim Hee,” it is not any longer in Heaven. It is subject to our world of time and space and logic.