Miller's Musings Parshas Vayero: Homeward Bound

בס''ד

Tests come in all shapes and sizes, but the one that Avrohom faced in this week’s Parsha, to sacrifice his own child, was surely one of the greatest ever faced.  This almost unsurmountable mission, to take the child that he had been promised and who he had longed for, the child that he was told would be the progenitor of a great nation, and offer him as a sacrifice to G-d, was a test that defied reason, feelings and everything he had stood for.  The question that is to be addressed is why it is referred to as Akeidas Yitzchok, the binding of Yitzchok?  What is it about the tying of Yitzchok down that is so fundamental to the essence of what took place?

Avrohom was a man that stood for compassion, empathy and benevolence.  To murder his own child went directly against everything he believed in and everything he had preached for so long.  He had taught that human sacrifice was morally reprehensible and incompatible with an ethical life and here he was ostensibly acting in the most hypocritical manner possible.  And then we have Yitzchok, a man that represented absolute strength and power, to persevere with life no matter what is thrown at you, allowing himself to become a sacrificial gift.  To truly grasp the crux of what took place, the word that is perhaps most appropriate is submission.  Submission to the will of G-d no matter how hard the task, submission to His will no matter what consequences there may be and submission to His will no matter what personal sacrifice it entailed.  Perhaps the binding is both literal and metaphorical, in that the nature of the impossible act they performed was one in which they bound themselves to G-d’s plan, willingly foregoing their own personal needs for the highest purpose of submission to His.

There is no end to the trials that we face along our mortal journey.  Many require overcoming our desires and defects and some require us to see G-d’s plan when it is so desperately obscured from view.  But if we are to try and somehow encapsulate all of these, submission may be the best place to start.  It is something that goes against a person’s innate desire for autonomy and the ego that tells us we are the ones who decide our fate.  Yet if we truly seek the ultimate good of closeness to  G-d, we must be willing to submit ourselves to the fact that only He knows what is truly best for us, both in what we should do and what should happen to us.  This is no easy task, but by binding ourselves to His will, we are simultaneously binding ourselves to the infinite pleasure of being in His presence, back home where our soul belongs.

*May the sanctity of Shabbos help us bend our will towards His*

לעילוי נשמת לאה בת אברהם 

לעילוי נשמת שרה יעל בת גרשון