Dennis Prager dissects Genesis 22, arguing the Binding of Isaac is a rational test of faith rather than literal child sacrifice. He analyzes Hebrew terms like "Elohim" and "Lishchot" to highlight the moral repugnance of the command while noting Abraham's potential psychological denial. The discussion contrasts Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions regarding the victim and explores why Sarah was excluded from the vision, suggesting men are more prone to such extreme tests. Ultimately, Prager concludes that this narrative defines the depth of faith within dysfunctional family dynamics, marking a permanent separation between Abraham and his wife. [Automatically generated summary]
Dennis Prager says your answer reveals everything about how you define right and wrong.
In his new book, If There Is No God, Prager exposes the danger of emotion-based morality and why, without objective truth, society descends into chaos.
This isn't a religious book.
It's a rational case for moral clarity in a confused age.
If There Is No God from Dennis Prager.
Order now at PragerStore.com.
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
I teach the Torah, which is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, or the five books of Moses.
I teach them as objectively as I can.
I try not to look at them through the eyes of a religious person, A, or the eyes of a Jewish person, B, but the eyes of that plus an objective reader of the text.
I approach the text as what does it really want to say, even if I'm not happy with what I conclude.
In other words, intellectual honesty comes before my other commitments.
But my other commitments are part of it.
Okay?
I want you to understand how I approach this.
Part of that other commitment is it is to me a religious work.
And in Judaism, the most religious act you can engage in is the study of Torah.
It is much greater than prayer.
So for that reason, when I teach and study Torah, I wear a Yamulka.
So you will understand why I put it on.
It renders the act more than an academic study.
It is to me much more than academic, and so you'll understand.
That's why.
Okay, having said that, I don't want that keep making noise.
I am now up to, and you're very lucky you're here tonight, because it's about as dramatic as you can get in the Bible.
I'm up to Genesis 22.
Just to recap the story, up until now, God created the heavens and the earth.
I was very disappointed after he created man, decided to destroy him, start all over again with Noah, started with Mr. and Ms. Noah, was very disappointed with them too.
And we are now up to the first Jew, Abraham, the first, not the first ethical monotheist, though that was Noah.
But Abraham is chosen, and we have seen his life now, and as important, the life of Sarah.
One of the themes that I have tried to show, not because of feminist sensitivity, but simply because it's a fact of the biblical record, is how critical Sarah is to the entire process.
In fact, Sarah really is the ensurer of the continuity of Abraham more than Abraham himself, who was very happy to do things through Yishmael, the other son that he had through Hagar, the concubine.
If that's all relatively new to you, just review or pick up one of the tapes of my previous sessions.
We now go to what is the ultimate story of Abraham's life.
And that is what is known, unfortunately, as the sacrifice of Isaac.
Of course, it's only known as the sacrifice of Isaac to those who know the Bible solely through English.
In Hebrew, it's Achedat Yitzchak, which means the binding of Isaac.
Isaac's never sacrificed, and that's the whole point of the story.
So when people speak about the sacrifice of Isaac, they have undone the story terribly.
He's not sacrificed.
It's a reverse of exactly what it wants to say.
What I am doing incidentally in the course is verse by verse, so that you get an insight into really, you will learn it.
You will actually, you attend this, you will learn the Torah.
And it's not an often possible thing to do.
And I really love this.
As difficult as it is time-wise for me, it is something I love immensely because, among other reasons, it forces me to learn it verse by verse and learn it through adult eyes rather than through the kids' stories or just the kids' eyes, the way we all, or at least those of us who ever went to religious school, were taught it.
I want to deal first with one quick issue in chapter 22, and that is the notion of faith.
The notion of faith is something that overwhelmingly is a subject of much greater comfort to Christians than to Jews.
Jews don't talk about faith nearly as much as Christians do.
And there is a reason for that, incidentally.
One of the things that I like about life is, difficult as it is, it makes sense.
There is a reason why Christians talk about faith more than Jews do.
And the reason is overwhelmingly this.
Faith is everything to normative Christianity.
If Jesus is not the Messiah, if Jesus is not one of the Trinity, then one no longer has, in effect, I'm sorry, is there talking that I...
Yeah, do you know what that is?
Is it feedback coming back?
Anybody know what it is?
Oh, okay, sorry.
You keep hearing it down here, guys.
Sorry.
Okay.
That's right.
I always start with, sorry, guys.
Then we get to that afterwards.
Okay.
Darry, they're stopping.
For Christians, generally speaking, everything resides in faith.
Jesus' resurrection, the Trinity, etc.
For Judaism, there is a great deal more aside from faith.
You have, for the religious Jew, forget the ethnic Jew, the religious Jew, you have the commandments, which are so overwhelming that they are really the core of his or her religiosity.
Now, that's really a separate subject unto itself, but what I want to say is really directed here towards Jews.
Faith is not only not a stranger to Judaism, it is the essence.
A lot of Jews, in some reaction, I feel, toward the majority religion among whom so many have lived for nearly 2,000 years, sometimes think that if Christians emphasize X, well, then Jews have to emphasize not X or Y.
And it's a very foolish thing to do.
When Christians point to Abraham's act of faith that you will encounter now, they are talking about a quintessentially Jewish story.
Faith is critical.
Without faith in the final analysis, what is life?
What do we have?
If ultimately God is not the source of it all, what do we have?
We have a journey through this life.
Some of us are luckier than others.
And then we all enter oblivion, and that's it.
So the concept of faith is very critical to Judaism.
It is critical to the Torah.
It is central to this story.
And here you see the epitome of faith.
Take your child, kill him for me.
Now, of course, it raises immense other questions.
Does faith, can there be such a faith that you would kill your child for it?
Let me address that for a moment before we get to the text sentence by sentence.
I suspect looking around is a very, very widespread age divergence here, but there are certainly some of you who recall World War II.
Some of you may have fought in World War II.
If your child, or if you were a child who went to fight in World War II for the United States, for the Allies, your parents, unless they objected, your parents were willing to sacrifice you for something.
They were willing to sacrifice you for an ideal, for freedom, for democracy, for the liberation of conquered nations, whatever it might have been.
Don't look at this chapter as bizarre.
The idea of sacrificing one's child is one that returns in every age.
Any parent willing to let a child go to fight in a war is willing to sacrifice his or her child.
So we're not all that removed from the question that God is saying giving to Abraham here, which is, are you prepared to sacrifice your child for me?
They are prepared to sacrifice their children for Baal, or Baal, as people say in English, for false gods.
Are you prepared to give your child for the real God, the creator of heaven and earth?
When you put it that way, and you understand that the end is that God doesn't want it, it makes a great deal of sense.
And it's much less jarring morally, I think, when you understand it that way.
There are things we have to be prepared to sacrifice our life or our children's life, or at least enable them.
That last part, enable them as opposed to sacrifice them, is another issue before we go on that before we get to the text that I want to deal with.
Do we sacrifice our children in the same way that Abraham is asked to sacrifice Isaac?
Obviously not directly.
We're not asked to kill our children.
But whenever an adult generation declares war and certainly drafts children to an army, it's not all that different.
It is different, certainly.
But it isn't that different.
We adults in the collective are taking our children and asking them to potentially die, and some definitely die for us.
It is something that adults do ask of children.
However, there is one big difference between now and Abraham's time, which I have alluded to previously, but it's such an important theme that needs to be stressed again.
We don't own our children today nearly as much as parents owned their children in the past.
And for which, by the way, all I could say is thank God.
I consider that an absolutely, it's one of the few developments in life that is entirely positive.
Most things come with a price.
This one, there is a price, but it's so minimal that it's like getting a gorgeous home for a dollar.
There is a price, a dollar, but it's minimal.
That's how I would have to speak about us and children today.
The idea of take your child and give him over to the gods, or give him to me, God, in this case, made perfect sense.
A parent owned a child.
Today, it doesn't make any sense from that perspective.
We don't own our children.
I might add, though, that we, when I say we don't own our children, I'm speaking of a very small group of humanity.
The great majority of people still believe that they own their children.
Westerners, particularly secularized, and that's a positive aspect of secularization, in my opinion.
Secularized Westerners are very different from the vast majority of mankind, where the child is the property of a parent.
We don't have that anymore.
And it is a good thing we don't.
Your child is an independent creature.
And by the way, as I taught in the beginning of Genesis, the Torah wants it that way.
And if you remember this, I feel gratified.
If not, then I'm just happy I'm mentioning it again.
At the end of the creation of the world, God says, or the Torah says, therefore, a man shall leave his mother and father, his father and mother, and cling unto his wife, and they shall be as one flesh.
And I taught what, in fact, the rabbinic tradition had taught.
You can't cling unto your wife until you've left your mother and father.
You can't be a grown-up until you've left home.
And what is Abraham told by God in the very beginning when God first appears to him?
Go out from your father's home.
You cannot be an ultimately mature adult and found what I need founded in this world if you don't, if you don't leave your parents.
That's what growing up is about.
That doesn't mean you don't call.
All right?
I always have to make that clear.
I sometimes fear that some children my age, younger, will hear that and go, wow, that's great.
I have a green light to ignore them.
It doesn't mean not calling or not visiting and not loving, none of that.
It just means going on your own.
You have to grow up.
You have to leave.
And there is part of that in today as well, but in today's chapter, as you'll see.
But ultimately, we don't own our children.
So that part is jarring.
Take your child.
And by the way, at this point, we don't know how old Isaac is in this story.
I'm trying to figure it out, but I'm not sure it's figurable.
He's clearly, though, he's not a little kid.
He's a lad, but he's not a little child.
Dysfunctional Families and Faith00:09:29
He knows what's happening.
That's all we can say.
There are even traditions that he's actually 30 years old or so.
I mean, so I don't know exactly what it is, but whatever it is, children in those days expected to be done with what a parent wanted.
Okay?
Nevertheless, the question is, what effect did this all have on Isaac?
I called a psychiatrist about that today.
I did.
I called a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist, and I asked him, who has also studied this tremendously, and I said, what effect do you think this had on Isaac?
And I will tell you later, because just think if your husband took your kid and went to sacrifice him, A, what effect it would have on the kid, and B, which we will come to next week, what effect would it have on you?
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Here's something most people don't know.
When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account.
While other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put $114 into a little-known investment.
Today, that $114 would be worth over $15 million.
And it wasn't a risky trade.
It wasn't even insider knowledge.
It was an account that's been around since 1888.
And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year.
That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound.
Compare that to today's savings accounts, paying less than half a percent, while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power.
Buffett understood early.
Banks are great businesses, just not for savers.
If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to secretaccount29.com.
That's secret accounttheumbers29.com.
SecretAccount29.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
Part of Genesis, a big part, may be called dysfunctional families.
It is.
Every family in Genesis is not dysfunctional in the way we use it.
Everybody, you know, it's like you're not in if you don't claim you come from a dysfunctional family.
You know, there are no functional anymore, the way people walk around talking.
But these are honest to goodness dysfunctional.
Okay?
I think if the father wants to sacrifice the child, it's fair to say that there are problems in that family.
Okay?
It's just, I don't want to overstate the case, but it's, you know, you have to read, that's what I meant.
You have to read this as real people, not just people of faith and not just skeptics.
But it is telling you about family life.
Family life is tough.
Marriage, at least in those days, was not a particularly romantic affair, as described here.
And parent-child relations were wrought with difficulties, and siblings was just the worst.
I mean, the first two siblings in history, one murdered the other.
Okay?
Remember, Cain and Abel.
It starts off and never gets better for a very long time.
By the way, in that regard, as I have said before, it should be of some consolation to you.
Next time you have family problems, just pick up Genesis and you'll see, compared to them, we got it great.
Okay?
And I mean that sincerely.
I've often thought about that.
That you have to start sitting back and go, wait a minute, look at that.
Even the Bible.
That is why I could relate to it so well.
If they depicted one perfect, loving, great, healthy family after another, how could any of us relate?
It's precisely because they have problems and still retain faith.
Then I can relate.
Then I understand what faith is about.
If everything is unknown-dory, big deal.
So they had faith.
If they had my problems, they'd lose faith.
But that's not what happened.
By the way, I saw a hand up and let me explain something.
What I try to do, otherwise, given the numbers, I could never get through the material is ask, please, that you do save it unless it's a specific thing.
Like if you know Isaac's age, tell me.
You know Isaac's age.
There you go.
Is that great?
I love it.
I'm sorry?
Because you know how old Sarah is when he's morning?
You know how old Sarah is in?
Sarah dies right after that day.
Yeah, I'm not sure it's right after it.
That's the problem.
Anyway, so what age based on that?
38.
38.
Okay, that's why that is what some of the traditions hold on the assumption that Sarah dies right after.
Okay, that we don't know for sure.
That's because time periods in the Bible are not clear in that way.
There are collapses of 20, 30 years at some time.
But if it is true, then he would be in his 30s.
And that's, I thank you for how we got to it.
Otherwise, please do just jot it down.
And then I will leave time before, in other words, at the beginning of my sessions and at the end of the sessions.
But I feel that I cheat you if I take questions when I could be giving more material.
Okay, what I do is I read it and take it verse by verse, except when we have genealogies or just the tales that demand no commentary.
I'm not going to give commentary for its own sake.
One final word.
No translation that you are using is literal.
And that's a problem because I believe that only if we know what it literally says can we really have an insight into what it says, at least on the surface, which is very important.
So sometimes I will translate awkwardly, only that you know what the original Hebrew actually says word by word.
Okay.
Chapter 22, verse 1.
And it came, and it was after these things.
I'm doing the literal translation for you.
Immediately, there's a question: what things?
Okay, that's the way I read it with you.
I want to know what each verse says.
What things?
It says, and after these things, what things?
Well, right before this, you will recall that Sarah had sent out Hagar and Yishmael.
Recall that?
And he nearly died.
He was saved by God, by an angel of God, and she was saved as well.
And so it's after these things that the following happened.
Now, that alone is a very interesting thing.
Some thoughts on this.
There is one Hasidic thought that now Sarah will know what it's like to lose a child, as Hagar almost had to learn.
There is in Genesis a very deep, constant thread that how you act comes back to you.
You cheat, you get cheated.
It's very basic to all of Genesis.
Whether that really happens in life is another question.
I think it often does.
I can't make an ironclad rule.
It generally does.
But that is what is certainly at the basis of much of what happens in Genesis, as we'll see much more vividly with the ensuing families of the patriarchs and matriarchs.
But it is interesting.
Sarah nearly caused the death of the child of Hagar.
And now Abraham may cause the death of the child of Sarah.
That could be, I don't say it's definite.
We just don't know.
It could be one of the subtle links between the two stories because you have the linkage of these words and it came to pass after these events.
In other words, these events are linked in some way to God's demand that Abraham kill sacrifice Isaac.
So you, Sarah, got rid of this woman's child, and now he will get rid of your child.
Who knows that that might be part of it in that language?
There is one other thought on that particular one.
And that is this.
After Sarah had caused the loss of Yishmael to Abraham, was there resentment of Sarah on the part of Abraham?
Remember, Abraham was very attached to Yishmael.
We do not have a very strong sense that there was an overwhelming preference for Isaac.
There might have been because this was the promised one through Sarah, but we don't, Sarah who is the mover and shaker to get rid of Yishmael as the heir, the spiritual heir, the moral heir, as well as the financial heir of Abraham.
It's Sarah who's moving.
Who knows if there is not some resentment on the part of Abraham?
That too might be part of what is going on here in the linkage of the two stories.
A lot of commentary for the first four words.
No?
Not done.
Listen to this part.
Now, you probably have God, God tested Abraham, right?
Or put Abraham to the test.
The Personal God in Hebrew00:14:48
The word God here is extremely important.
Here we have, there are two words for God, generally speaking, in the Bible, and especially in the Hebrew Bible, and especially in Genesis.
One is Adonai, which is written out as Jehovah, and the other one is Elohim.
What is the difference between the first and the second?
There is no absolute answer, but I think a very logical, the most logical one is this.
Adonai, or Jehovah, is referring to God who is personal.
The God you can relate to, talk to, pray to, complain to, argue with, as we'll see in a moment.
Elohim is the God of nature.
The God who you don't relate to.
The God who created the world.
Think about it.
Aren't there two aspects of God?
The God of nature, the God who built a world where, in fact, cells can metastasize and little kids get leukemia?
There is that God, the God who created a nature with volcanoes and tornadoes and earthquakes and diseases and Anopheles mosquitoes that bring malaria.
There is that, as well as the God who created the incredible ability of nature to produce everyone in this room.
Now, I only gave you the ugly stuff, but there is also, of course, the beautiful stuff.
But the God of nature is not the God you pray to, because nature goes in its own way.
You cannot pray, oh, change nature.
At least not in Judaism.
You cannot pray for changes of nature because you cannot pray for miracles.
That's what a miracle in essence would be, change nature.
They may occur, but you can't pray for them.
It's just that, at least in the theology, in normative rabbinic theology.
Nature is nature.
The God of nature is the God who created the world.
The other God, the other name of God, it's all one God, that is the God you can talk to, you can relate to as the personal God.
So I have the God of nature and the personal God, juxtaposed.
It's the same God, just two aspects.
That's why I think there are two names.
Which God do you think told Abraham, not which God, which name of God do you think or which aspect told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?
You would think, one argument would be the personal God, because nature doesn't demand that.
Nature, you would think, the creator of the universe, that is not its business.
But you will learn from Abraham's response which one did the speaking.
Because it is here not only the God of nature who told him, who put him to the test, but it is written in the most abstract and definitive way the Hebrew can do it.
Veha Elohim and the God.
It is relatively rare that God is called the God.
It's usually God.
In Hebrew here, it is the God.
And that is who told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.
And he says, and he said, Abraham, this is the God, the God of creation and nature, said to him, Abraham, and he said, Hinay me, here I am.
I'm ready for whatever you want to be done.
Abraham's response to God, which you will see in a moment, which was no response.
He just did exactly what God wanted.
What is Abraham's response when God says to Abraham, I'm going to destroy the people of Sodom and Gomorrah?
He argues with him.
Remember, a protracted argument.
Here's the proof of what I said earlier of why it's important to know which God's name.
Here, Abraham is utterly silent when told to sacrifice his child.
When it came to the strangers of a miserable, evil city like Sidom, he argues.
Which God do you think, which name of God is used in Sidome?
Hmm?
Right, the personal God.
The personal name.
That's the God you can argue with.
God appeared to him as the personal God.
When God came to him as the creator of the universe, folks, when the creator of the universe tells you something, you do it.
You have to understand that.
There's no arguing.
It's like arguing with a tornado.
Tornado, why are you coming to my house?
I'm a nice person.
It's absurd, right?
You are.
You don't argue with tornadoes.
When God, the creator, tells you, here I am, that's all you can answer.
It's very important to understand the hint that the text is giving by using the term, and the God, the creator God, tested Abraham.
Now, why is it important that it says tested Abraham?
First, let's get something totally clear.
God needs a test of you or anybody else, like God needs a shoeshine.
Okay, to make an idiotic analogy.
God doesn't need to test.
God knows whether or not Abraham believes in him.
The purpose of the test is for us, the readers.
It's not for Abraham, and it's not for God.
It's for us, the reader.
Look, reader, look, future human beings.
I test Abraham and look how he passed.
It's for you to understand what faith is, not for Abraham who had it, and certainly not for me, God.
You get that?
I am testing him for your sake to know what absolute faith is like.
Second reason why it says God tested Abraham is so that everybody knows the second they open the chapter that God doesn't want child sacrifice.
You know at the outset we are going now through a test.
It's like on the radio when this is now a test, they tell you in advance.
If they didn't, you'd think it was real.
It's not good to tell you later.
That is exactly what is happening here.
I'm making an announcement to you at this moment.
This is a test, reader.
Don't think for a second that the God of the Torah wants children sacrificed.
It's the last thing I would ever request or want.
Okay.
Abraham says, here I am.
22, 2.
And God said, Take please.
Do any of you have please?
Okay.
Nah is a request.
It softens it.
It's not an order.
It's please take.
Kachna.
Take please.
Your son, your, it says here favored one, I think it's an incorrect translation.
It's really your unique one, or your only one almost.
The one you loved, Isaac.
Now, why doesn't it just say, remember how I told you how you have to study text?
Always ask, why doesn't it say in another way?
Why doesn't it say, take Isaac?
Why?
There are two possibilities.
One, to rub it in.
To make it more difficult to test.
Take your son, your only son, the son you love, Isaac.
All right?
I mean, it had to be Isaac anyway.
Ishmael was gone.
All right?
So it really could have been any one of those.
There is another reason, though, that there is a Jewish tradition that holds why all of these were announced, and it's very interesting.
First, God says, take your son, to which Abraham responds, I have two sons.
Which one?
Okay?
Your unique one, to which Abraham responds, I have an only one, and Sarah has an only one.
Which one?
Is this interesting?
So then God says, the one you love, to which Abraham says, I love them both.
Which one?
And then God says, Isaac!
And that's how it develops all of these things, because Yishmael could have fit any of the other descriptions.
At any rate, it's also for us to understand, and that's, I think, the major point here, for us to understand the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded of Abraham.
It's to rub in to you, the reader, not just Abraham, what is being asked here of him.
Okay, so it says, and take and then go to the land of Moriah, which we don't exactly know what that is.
The tradition holds it's around Jerusalem.
But what is important is the wording in Hebrew, lechlecha, which really means go, you go, or go for yourself.
The first words God spoke to Abraham originally were lechlepha.
Go from your father's land, from your father's home, and so on.
And said, to the land that I will show you.
This is the end of the Abraham story has the same wording as the beginning of the Abraham story.
And it's a very beautiful, beautiful linguistic thing that's done here.
I begin by telling you, Lechlecha, go out from your father's house to the land I will show you.
And now I'm telling you, go out to the land that I will show you all over again.
But here is the interesting thing.
Look at the juxtaposition.
Abraham is told originally, go out and leave your father.
And now he's told, go out and leave your son.
You see that?
And I believe that what is being said here is that just as I told you to leave your parents, I am now telling you to leave your child.
Even Abraham, whose whole life is bound up in his children, cannot live for his children.
I think there is a statement here for us as well.
In the final analysis, the one rock that the human individual can rely on is God.
It's tough.
It's difficult to say that, given all the love relationships that most of us have, family and otherwise.
But nevertheless, I think there is a statement here.
I get your first allegiance.
I am the one that in the final analysis you can rely most on.
And so, as I told you to leave your father, I'm telling you to leave your son.
What I have with you is unique.
That's what's being said.
You can certainly take issue with it.
And as I say, it is difficult to assimilate.
But on the other hand, for those of you, or those of you, those who are not here who are alone in this world, it should be a comforting thing that children or no children, parents or no parents, spouse or no spouse, friends or no friends, there is God.
Now, that is hardly a plea to any of you to abandon family or friends and just travel through life with God.
God knows that would be terrible.
But it is a statement for those who are lonely that they're not alone.
I think that there is that statement here, and I don't try to read stuff into it.
I think it can be extracted from a fair reading of the text.
Anyway, he tells him to take this beloved child, Isaac, to go out to this land and there to offer him as a burnt offering.
Okay?
On one of the mountains that I will tell you.
Remember, that I will tell you, just like in the beginning, when Abraham is told that he should leave his parents.
What is Abraham's response?
Abraham got up early in the morning.
Not a word.
By the way, what do we learn from the fact that the next sentence is, Abraham got up early in the morning?
That this message came to him in a dream.
That it came to him at night.
In fact, the only, according to the, I believe to the Torah itself, and certainly to the tradition later, but I believe, I know that, yes, the Torah itself says that only Moses was spoken to by God face to face.
Of course, it doesn't literally mean face to face because God doesn't have a face, but those are the terms that are used.
In other words, the wide-awake revelation is reserved for Moses.
Visions and dreams are left for all the others, including Abraham.
Now, Abraham gets the message at night.
Now, here's my question for you.
If you got a message tonight, take your child and sacrifice him, and it seemed that it was God, what would you do?
Nighttime Revelation for Abraham00:15:26
I think that what you would all conclude is, it can't be God.
I thought it was God speaking to me, but it can't be.
Now the reason though that you would conclude this is because we now know that part of God's nature is that he would never demand evil.
He would never demand that you do something that is against his own teaching.
So you would know it's not God.
So then why didn't Abraham say, wait a minute, you can't be God.
You seem to be God in my dream, but you can't be God.
The God I know wouldn't demand that.
And the answer is that the God that an Abraham knew at that time in human history would demand that.
That's the point I was making earlier.
There was nothing odd about it at all.
It wasn't odd that God demanded a child sacrifice.
It was odd that God demanded Isaac be sacrificed, given all the promises he made.
It wasn't easy either because he loved him and so on.
I'm not saying that, oh, well, well, I knew it was going to come.
All the gods want kids.
I don't want to imply that at all.
It doesn't make it easy, but it doesn't make it morally jarring.
To you, it would be so morally jarring because your concept of God, the God of the Ten Commandments, the God who said to Abraham, don't give me your child, would render this impossible.
It was clearly a bad dream.
All right?
Unless your kid is doing really bad in school, and then who knows, you know, maybe it was just wish fulfillment or something.
But whatever it was, you would assume this is not God.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Here's something most people don't know.
When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account.
While other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put $114 into a little-known investment.
Today, that $114 would be worth over $15 million.
And it wasn't a risky trade.
It wasn't even insider knowledge.
It was an account that's been around since 1888.
And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year.
That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound.
Compare that to today's savings accounts, paying less than half a percent, while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power.
Buffett understood early.
Banks are great businesses, just not for savers.
If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to secretaccount29.com.
That's secret accounttheumbers29.com.
SecretAccount29.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
He assumed it was God and it was the Creator God and so said nothing.
Verse 3, he gets up early in the morning and he saddles the donkey and he takes two lads with him and Isaac his son.
It could have, of course, said an Isaac, but it adds to the drama to keep mentioning an Isaac his son.
And he split the wood of the offering and he got up and he walked to the place where God had told him.
Then it's interesting what happens in verse 4.
All you know is on the third day, Abraham lifts his eyes and he sees the place from afar.
Number one, what happened during the two days of going together?
A friend of mine who is a distinguished rabbi and author, David Walpy, we study this together and he had an interesting thought.
It said, it said, let's look at this literally.
It says on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place.
So he answered the question, what did Abraham do for two days?
Was look down on the ground in depression.
It's very, do you all have he lifted his eyes?
Because that's literally what the Hebrew does say.
And you know, when you're depressed, you just walk along, you look down, right, you kick a pebble and so on.
That's probably what he did.
Anyway, what are you going to say to your son when you're going to sacrifice him?
Hey, what a great weather.
I tell you.
What do you think of that donkey we're taking?
Isn't he great?
The new model.
I just got him.
I mean, you know, there's nothing to be said in effect.
And so he just walks.
And it's this terrible little journey he has with his child.
For any of us, I get the chills when I read it again because we are all children.
So it gives you the chills if you're a child.
And most of us are parents, and it gives you a chill if you're a parent.
There's no one who can read this and not get chilled.
It's a chilling story.
A father who loves his child out of obedience to a God, to God, walking with the child and knowing he's going to kill him.
It's overwhelming.
Next problem in verse 4 is it says he saw the place from afar.
I don't know the answer to this, so I'll openly tell you, if you know an answer, you will help me.
And I could not find in any of the commentaries how did he know the place since God didn't point it out to him.
Remember, God said, go to the, and I will show you which mountain to do it on.
But it doesn't say which.
That's why the tradition is that there was a cloud that descended on this particular spot.
Who knows?
Verse 5.
This is a very interesting puzzle.
This is one of the great puzzles of the Torah.
And Abraham said to the lads, you sit down here with the donkey, and I and the boy will go over there.
Okay?
And we will worship and will return to you.
What do you make of that?
No, he's talking to the two lads who came with him.
He says, we're going to return.
What does that mean we're going to return?
That means I and Isaac are going to come back to you.
We're just going over to that mountain.
We're going to worship and then we're going to return to you.
Question.
Did he really think God would demand that he slaughter his son?
If you think not, you've got good basis with this sentence.
He tells the lads who came with him, we're going to come back.
Or, what else is he going to say?
Hey, you wait here and I'll be back alone.
He'll be in flames.
Right?
There is yet a third possibility that he was denying it.
One is, deep down he didn't think he would do it.
Two, he was denying it the whole time for the sake of Isaac.
Three, he was denying it for his sake.
Maybe there was a smidgen of hope that we'll be back.
Who knows?
And by the way, there is no answer.
I'm giving you three possibilities, and there is no definitive answer to why he said, we'll be back, knowing what he is asked to do and where he's going.
Who knows?
My own instinct is that it's a combination, in a sense, of all three.
One, clearly to spare Isaac the pain till the last second.
Two, to spare himself the pain to the last second, almost a denial thing.
And three, maybe there really was a sense of hope that God won't go through with this.
So those are the possibilities.
And although the third part would seem then to knock out a little bit of the heroism, to some it might, not to me.
After all, he's still human.
He is a man of faith.
He's not an angel of faith, right?
He's still a father.
He's still a human.
But it is a very powerful sentence when he tells the lads, we're going to come back.
All right, verse 6.
And Abraham took the wood of the offering and he put it on Isaac, his son.
And he took in his hand the fire and the knife.
Now, the word for knife here is unique in the Torah, to the best of my knowledge.
It literally means the eater.
It's ma'achelet, and ochel is to eat.
It's like that, it's a consuming knife, almost like a slaughtering knife, a butcher knife.
And I have a basis for that.
You'll see the verb used for what he was about to do to his son, and you'll see why I say that.
Anyway, he takes the fire and the knife, and these words are so famous to anyone who ever studied it in Hebrew.
And the two of them walked together.
It is so touching, those words.
When you think of a father and son walking together is always a touching sight, isn't it?
No matter what the circumstances, when you say, and the father and son, and they walk together, and I think of my son, well, the other one doesn't walk yet.
Beautiful bonding thing of a father-son walking together.
But look at where they're walking.
And there is an interesting statement of the Maharal of Prague, a great Jewish thinker, where he takes that phrase, but I'll show you because it's used again right away, what he thinks.
But listen to this part.
What imagery does it raise to you when it says, and he put the wood of the offering on Isaac?
Who carried wood to his own destruction?
Jesus.
You see, it's interesting.
You always will think of that as a Christian imagery, but it is a very powerful Jewish imagery.
And for all we know, there is a parallel desire in that within Christological thinking.
Here is again the sacrifice, in this case, for the Christian godson, for the Jew, Abraham's son.
Both a sacrifice, both carrying the sacrificial material to their own death.
Verse 7, and Isaac said to Abraham his father, and he said, my father.
And Abraham said, Hinani.
Abraham gives the same answer to Isaac that he gave to God.
Here I am.
But he says, Hine bene.
And here, here I am, my son.
It's the first loving or the first affectionate comment that we see coming out here.
Here I am, my son.
And the son says, Here are the fire and the wood.
So where is the sheep for the offering?
Get the chills?
Imagine a kid saying that to you, how Abraham must have felt.
And Abraham said, God will see, he will see for himself.
Again, I'm doing it literally, the sheep for the slaughter, my son.
He adds it, do you have my son there?
Yeah.
You see that?
It's just, it's like these last moments.
He wants to be as warm and connected as possible to my son.
And what are the next words?
And the two of them walked on together.
Exactly, exactly like you had two sentences ago, the same exact words in Hebrew.
The Maharal of Prague said, in the first case, the two walked together as one, which is really what it is, not together, they walked as one.
It was to Abraham's credit.
The reason, what is the natural tendency when you are, well, it doesn't happen very often, but if you were about to hurt a loved one or anyone, wouldn't you want to distance yourself?
It's very hard to be that close to someone you're about to hurt.
And so the first time it says they walk together, the Maharal of Prague says, it's to the credit of Abraham.
The second time, it's to the credit of Isaac.
Isaac now knows what's going to happen to him, and he still walks as one with his father.
I think there's a lot of profundity to that, how in one case the credit goes to Abraham, and in the other, it goes to Isaac.
Verse 9.
And they came to the place which God had told him, and Abraham built there the altar.
And he spread out the wood, and he bound Isaac his son.
Always adds his son to make it more powerful.
And he put him on the altar on top of the wood.
Notice the number of verbs here.
Abraham built an altar, laid out the wood, bound his son, laid him on the altar, and then picked up the knife.
You have, what, five verbs.
I had a debate in studying this.
Five Verbs on the Altar00:15:52
What do you think it implies?
Listen, I'll read it two ways to you.
You are about to slaughter your son.
Will you do what you have to do as quickly as possible or as slowly as possible?
So, and there are two ways, and it all depends, I realized, on how you read it.
Here is if you believe that he wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Abraham built an altar, laid out the wood, bound his son, laid it on the altar, and picked up the knife.
Or you can read it as as deliberate as possible to make as many tasks for himself to delay it.
Abraham built an altar there.
He laid out the wood.
He bound his son.
He laid him on the altar.
He picked up the knife.
Which do you think it was?
That all of these verbs imply that he tried to do it as fast as possible or as deliberately as possible.
As fast as possible, raise your hand.
Almost nobody.
As slowly as possible?
Right.
That's very interesting.
The tradition held it was as fast as possible.
And I said, I didn't agree with that at all.
I said, no, it seems most logical that he did his, you know, it's almost like, oh, and he saw a butterfly and he decided to check it out.
It really does seem that, because words are not wasted in the Torah.
I mean, you know, if they didn't say anything that happened to them in the two days they're walking together, you clearly have here very, very understated use of language, right?
It's like the opposite of American advertising hyperbole.
You have here a totally economical use of language.
So if it's going to tell you all the things that he did, you have to believe the following.
He was delaying as much as possible, and there was still that hope in him it wouldn't take place, which is the way I read his statement to the two servant boys, will come back.
That there was this ongoing hope that it really wouldn't take place.
Verse 10.
And he sent forth, Abraham sent forth his hand, and he took the knife.
And now it's very interesting.
Again, I'm so unhappy about the English translations.
Do any of you have to slaughter his son?
All slay.
It's so unfortunate because slaughter would give you a much better idea of what the Torah is in fact talking about.
The word that is used here is the same exact word that is used with regard to the slaughter of animals for meat.
Okay, and it's very rarely used.
In fact, I would like to check a concordance to see if it's ever used with regard to people in any other time in the Hebrew Bible.
The word here is Lishchot.
Some of you who don't even know much Hebrew may have heard of the word shitah, which is animal slaughter.
And that's the word that is used here.
I am convinced that it was used as a way of the Torah saying how disgusting child sacrifice is.
He went to slaughter his son.
Reader, that's what we think of child sacrifice.
It wasn't to slay him.
It wasn't to offer him as a sacrifice.
That's what the word was used the whole time, right?
The entire time it was, and you will bring him as an offering.
But when it finally comes to doing it, the language is the language of animals.
And he went to slaughter his child.
Because there is no difference.
It is not morally possible to slay your child, to raise him for an offering.
If you think you're raising him for an offering, let me, the Torah, tell you what you're really doing.
You're slaughtering like an animal.
See?
How the language conveys an idea?
It's a reprehensible act.
That's what's being said here with all of what was said, and it's dramatic.
Made an altar, laid out the wood, got the fire, got the thing, and then to slaughter his son.
It shows you, alter smalter, this is slaughtering.
That's the message here, and it's a powerful one.
By the way, it is a debate of scholars whether or not this story is a polemic against child sacrifice.
And it's something I'd like you to bear in mind just reading this story.
Is that how you would read it?
It's something to think about we can perhaps discuss a little later.
Verse 11.
And an angel of God called to him from the sky or from the heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham.
And he said, once again, Hey Nami, here I am.
Now, there's another interesting thing here.
Number one, why an angel?
Why didn't God, who had told him originally to kill a son, why isn't it God who told him not to kill a son?
I think here that there are a few possible answers.
One answer is that it took God himself to command him to kill a son.
An angel he wouldn't have listened to.
But to stop killing his son, an angel would suffice.
You don't even need God.
Okay?
That's an answer that is, of course, to the credit of Abraham, and which makes some sense.
Another possibility is, how would God have appeared to him to stop him?
God only appears to him in visions and he's awake and he's about to commit the act.
It could only have worked with the physical being and God isn't physical.
So a physical being needed to call out his name and, as it were, almost stop him physically.
Those are the possibilities.
At any rate, it is also interesting that the angel calls his name out twice.
Why didn't it just say Abraham?
I think the obvious answer is because of the urgency of the matter.
Abraham, Abraham.
You know, I mean, you would call somebody's name, right?
If they're about to fall in the pool, you'd call your kid's name a lot of times.
Hey, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, right?
That's what is going on here.
There is a sense of urgency.
Abraham, Abraham, stop, stop.
Don't do anything.
And he said, don't send your hand.
I'm doing the literally, don't send your hand at the boy and don't do a thing to him.
Because now I know that you are literally, you are afraid of God.
You are in awe of God.
How do you folks have it?
Okay, so you fear God and that you did not withhold to me your one or your unique child you have not withheld from me.
Of course, God knew this again earlier, but this is for us to understand how he had passed the test.
And Abraham lifted his eyes.
Once again, he lifted his eyes, and this gives credence to Rabbi Walpi's idea that he was looking down the whole trip because he was looking down now to get the, to kill his son.
Anyway, he lifted his eyes and he saw that there was a ram behind.
That is one way of translating it.
There's another way, which I have not seen.
There was another ram.
His child was a ram, and now there was another ram.
If you read it as a char, it's behind.
If you read it as a cher, it's another one.
You understand what I'm saying?
And since there were no vowels in the Torah text, it could conceivably have been an implication, not that ram, but this ram.
Not ram Isaac, but this ram.
And that was caught in the thicket by its horns.
And Abraham went, and he took the ram, and he sacrificed It for us for an offering instead of his son.
It's pretty dramatic.
And Abraham called the name of that place Donayir Eh, which means God will be seen or God is seen.
And because it is said to this day, that is the mount of God where God would be seen or where there was a vision.
And then the angel of God called to Abraham a second time from the heaven and said, I swear myself, God says,
because you did this thing and did not withhold your child, your only child, I will bless you and I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand on the shore of the sea,
on the seashore, and your seed will inherit the gates of its enemies.
By the way, this is the first time that his seed is promised to be as numerous as sand.
Until now, it was only as numerous as stars.
So this was to really make it clear because I guess you see more sand than stars.
Certainly out in Los Angeles, that is very true.
And through your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
Again, that universalist thing of the Torah, the universalist aims and desires, because you listen to my voice.
And sure enough, just as he said he would, verse 19, Abraham returned to his lads, who, of course, knew nothing.
They just simply thought that dad and son went to do a little worshiping and returned.
And they got up and they walked together to Beersheva and Avraham and Avraham settled in Beersheva.
Notice anything dramatic about the last words of 19?
Where is Sarah is one, and where is Isaac is the other?
My dear friends, it appears pretty clear from the text that this was the end of Abraham's family.
It's like, all right, Father, I will go with you to be killed, but past that, I think I'd rather be on my own now.
That does appear to be what is implied here very clearly, and we will see later that there is no question that Abraham and Sarah split.
Did they get divorced?
We don't know.
Oh, the first divorce.
Oh, I see.
Well, the first split.
We don't know if it was a divorce.
The rest of this chapter, I will just read to you only to follow the pattern of every sense very quickly.
After these things, then I'll take your questions because this ends 22.
This is more genealogy, and I'll just read it straight.
Sometime later, Abraham was told, Milka too, was born children to your brother Nahor, Uz the firstborn, and Booz.
I love, by the way, I love these names.
You know, it's just, I always wondered, by the way, when I read some biblical names, how come people took some and not others?
Like, you never meet a kid named Booz.
No, I mean, but that would be, that would be great.
My son Booz, my son Ooz.
You know, it's really, it's too bad.
There are some really great ones.
And Kimuel, the father of Aram, and Kesed Chazo Pildash, there's a great name, my son Pildash.
It's just, I don't even know if Pildash is a male or female, it's probably a male.
And Yidlof and Betuel, Batuel gave, but it's important, Batuel gave birth to Rebekah.
Okay?
And these eight Milka bore to Nachor, Abraham's brother, and his concubine, whose name was Ri'umah, also bore children, and they were Tevach, Gatham, Tachash, and Ma'achah.
Gorgeous names, all.
All right.
I'm not into a genealogy, but I did want to be on record as having read the end of 22.
Questions about Abraham's sacrifice, excuse me, near sacrifice of Isaac.
There is a comment in Muslim religion that they believe that it was Ishmael who was sacrificed.
And they definitely believe that they relate all those words that you mentioned, your son, your only son, and the one that you love.
They say, Ishmael.
Here they say Isaac.
Then they related to the last verse that you mentioned.
I give you the generations to run.
So many people like the number of sons.
And for us, it's one of those things I lived among Muslims for many years.
How to prove to them that they are wrong and we are right.
By the way, they believe also that the Torah both born right.
Every single word is correct, except this one.
Except this Isaac and Ishmael.
And they do believe in this.
Every year, you know better than I do that they go to Mecca, they do their sacrifice, they have the festival of sacrifice.
Millions of them, they must go once and they do the tradition there, they sacrifice a ram.
He notes, he said he has lived most of his life among Muslims, and for them the story is that this happened to Ishmael and not to Isaac.
And of course it's Ishmael being the father, as it were, of Islam or of the Arabs, but basically of the Islamic people and so on.
And they certainly outnumber.
They're much closer to the stars of the heaven and the grains of sand than the Jews are.
It's a very interesting thing.
There are two daughter religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
A big difference, however, is that Christians, from left to right, acknowledge that Christianity emanated from Judaism.
But Muslims do not acknowledge that Islam emanates from Judaism.
And it is a very important distinction between the way in which the religions therefore view Judaism and Jews and of course the Jewish scripture.
Daughter Religions of Judaism00:04:48
The Jews are regarded by Islam as having corrupted the original message and therefore necessitated the coming of Muhammad.
So that what we are reading here is not the word of God in this story, as you point out, but rather a Jewish corruption of the original text which in fact Muhammad came to set aright.
And so when you said you couldn't prove to them, of course it's not an issue because it is a matter of faith and faith cannot be proven in any direction.
It's a matter of faith for them.
It is a matter of incontrovertible history that Judaism precedes Islam.
But when it comes to faith, and in that instance, a fundamentalist faith, which I don't use across the board as a pejorative term, there's nothing you can say to a Muslim.
Just, you know, let us live in peace and know that we are cousins and move on.
But that difference that I noted between the way Christians look at Judaism and Muslims look at Judaism is a very important distinction.
Yes?
He kind of sneaks out of the house with Aboriginal without saying a word to Sarah.
Yeah.
Yes, that is very, yes, his point is, he sneaks out of the house and doesn't tell Sarah what he's planning to do.
That's absolutely right.
And you point out, she was deeply involved, well, she was deeply involved with Isaac too.
She's deeply involved with both.
But she's not involved at all in the sacrifice.
And there's a very good reason.
She'd have said no way.
God schmawed, you don't kill my son.
And it's just the way it would have been.
And by the way, that does raise interesting things about the differences between men and women.
Men tend to be the vision-oriented ones, and women tend to have their feet on earth.
And this is a classic example.
Men have these visions.
Religion, it's very funny, for some reason, and this is really something I've had to learn, because I used to believe this too, that religion was more naturally a female thing, and that it's the men who had to be coerced to go to church or synagogue, but that women were much more naturally attuned to it.
I don't believe that at all any longer.
It's part of the reason I, religiously, I tend to be a feminist.
Not obviously very moderate feminist, for those of you who know any of my views, but nevertheless, I very much understand that fact.
I don't believe religion is very, at least the religions that we know of in the world, is very male-oriented, and I don't say that at all negatively.
I mean, it's a great credit to male some of the astounding things that they have come up with here.
I mean, I wouldn't be religious if I didn't think it was a very positive thing.
But the whole vision orientation, women, generally speaking, all these are generalities with the understanding that there doesn't mean for a moment that every single woman falls into the female or every male falls into the, every man falls into the male.
But the female woman is more grounded.
What do you mean?
You're taking my son.
Religion schmeligion.
What are you doing?
That would have been her reaction.
And so, and men, but men soar with their imaginations and soar with their visions, and this is one of them.
And if God had appeared to Sarah, wouldn't that be an interesting thing to know?
If God had said to Sarah, take your son, the one you love, the only one, and it really is for her the only one.
I mean, there, she wouldn't have said, well, I have two.
She didn't have two.
She had one.
And God said, take your only son and bring him to an offering.
She probably would have said, get the hell out of here.
Bug my husband, because I don't go in for this stuff.
I have a son, and I am going to put my body over that altar.
It probably, it's, remember, God appears to those who can know that God appeared to them.
God does not compel himself onto recipients of God's messages.
You have to go halfway to get a message from God.
He doesn't come.
Atheists don't get messages.
Why not?
Messages to Mothers Only00:02:44
They're nice people.
A lot of nice atheists.
You have to be a receiver.
You need antennae.
Women don't have the antennae for messages of getting rid of their kids.
They may have had other awkward antennae.
They were certainly happy to engage in cultic prostitution.
But that was more fun than killing kids.
I mean, there's just no comparison.
So I'm not saying women are nobler and men are worse, or men are nobler and women are worse, because men do have these visions and messages.
I'm merely saying it's very interesting the difference.
The message could not have been received by Sarah and would not have been received by Sarah is my gut reaction.
And when it says he got up early in the morning, he got up early in the morning not just to do God's will, but to get up before Sarah got up.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Here's something most people don't know.
When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account.
While other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put $114 into a little-known investment.
Today, that $114 would be worth over $15 million.
And it wasn't a risky trade.
It wasn't even insider knowledge.
It was an account that's been around since 1888.
And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year.
That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound.
Compare that to today's savings accounts, paying less than half a percent, while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power.
Buffett understood early.
Banks are great businesses, just not for savers.
If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to secretaccount29.com.
That's secret accountthenumbers29.com.
SecretAccount29.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Lady back there.
Excuse me.
I'm reading into it, what?
My life experience.
No, I know.
That's okay.
No, that's a fair statement.
Mental States of Patriarchs00:06:32
She says, you know, if she had children, she doesn't know how she'd respond.
A, if you had children, I think you might more strongly know how you'd respond.
But B, a woman of faith exists.
I don't denounce that.
Women have just as great a faith as men.
I do think, though, that God would simply not have asked that of a woman, of a mother.
That is just my sense of it.
And that's not where it would almost, I would almost have to say to you, it would be an unfair request, an unfair test of a woman.
It would be as if God would say, listen, woman, I make your nature thus, and now I want you to violate your nature for my sake.
No, I wouldn't feel differently, but I wasn't living 3,000 years ago when people did this as a matter of course.
And I would be very curious, very curious to know, even among pagans, if women did it to kids as opposed to men.
I'd be very interested to know that.
Yes.
I want to ask you a comment.
It seems that it's already a greater impact when they're listening to it seems like she already had better connection with God.
It didn't mean that all the other words were all spoken.
The second question is in chapter 20, verse 1, it said that it is to pass after these things that God etc.
And in verse 20, it said, and if he needs to pass after these things that it was supposed to offer, why would he read anything into what these things are there?
Okay.
Let me answer the second one.
First, the reason that I'm not reading, I'm not saying it can't be read, things into, and it came to pass after these things.
First of all, very often it may just mean that it's an entirely separate story.
Secondly, though, because what follows it is not as significant as what followed the other one.
That's all.
I was more curious to find out what the connection might be between the two, because the binding of Isaac is so much more important than the children of Nachor.
Okay, that's all.
It's a very subjective response to that.
Your first thing was that Sarah is already more in tune with God as we saw.
She's on a higher level, you claim.
I don't know if she was on a higher level.
What I did claim earlier was that it was she, much more than Abraham, who understood that his ideals will be transmitted through Isaac rather than Ishmael.
And in that sense, she was, I don't know if she was more in tune with God.
If she was more in tune with God, why would she have laughed so much when the angel said she'll give birth?
So I'm not sure that she had more faith or more in tune with God.
What I do think is that she was more aware that Isaac was the vehicle, or, if you will, just more selfish, because Isaac was her son and Ishmael was Hagar's son, and therefore more protective of that particular lineage.
Lady over there?
Why the writer did not give us the state of mind of Avraham at all?
I mean, he tells exactly what he does, and he hasn't been a lot of sentimental state that people earlier on in the Bible find on there.
It's a good question.
Why does the Torah not tell us the mental state of Avraham, of Abraham, during this period, since mental states had been described a little earlier?
I tell you why I think, I mean, off the top of my head, is because it would have been almost blasphemous.
Well, because he was thinking terrible things.
He was probably angry.
How could he not be?
Even if he's obedient, he had to be angry.
I don't understand.
You led me to this.
This is what I lived my whole life for?
So I could finally get a child and now kill him for you?
Hey, listen, God, I'm willing to do it, but you can't ask me to be happy.
I mean, the Torah is going to give you a mental state of the patriarch, and it's a very negative mental state.
I think it does give you his mental state.
I think that Rabbi Walpy was right.
I think he looked on the ground for two days, kicking pebbles.
Okay?
That's the beauty of the Torah.
It doesn't give you, I mean, again, also, it's, of course, not a psychoanalytical book.
You know, it's like I say, you know, and had he been at a shrink, this is what he would have said.
Yes.
Why did he have to bind him?
So you've got a lamb that was not going to lie down quite here on the road, he was walking with him willingly, he obviously was younger and more smarter than anyone else, so he was willingly being planted and was willingly being lifted to the road.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Why was he bound?
Anybody have an answer?
Not a guess, just an answer that you're pretty certain is right, yes?
Okay.
Yeah, that's what I think.
Yes?
One of the things that a religious Jew does every day is he finds himself.
Yeah, well, you're speaking.
You're speaking from a very traditional viewpoint.
The idea is that this is something which is for the future.
And so that the idea of being bound with God doesn't be as a sign of hunger.
Okay.
I don't buy it, but it's a touching mystical explanation.
You are talking to the least mystical Jew in America.
Okay, I just have to tell you that at the outset.
I just, you know, it's not the way I would read it.
It's a lovely thought, though, but it's an ex post facto thought.
There are no tfilim at this time.
Tfilim come later.
Well, there was no droin, and there was no.
We didn't need to be able to tell the goim.
Hey, look, you don't kill people.
Look at us.
Okay, by the way, goim means nations in Hebrew.
Yes.
No, no, goim means nation.
In fact, it says here, and through you all the goyim of the world will be blessed.
Goyim means nation.
It's unfortunate that it sometimes has a pejorative term.
That's why I use non-Jew.
But all right, let me just, is this on that question that I'm just asking?
I don't remember.
I wanted to ask what's going to waste time.
Oh, wasting time, yes, that's right, yes.
I was 38 years old.
Shaping Judeo Morality00:02:17
That's okay.
I mean, including given Iron's father, well, yes, apparently they just walked together, and he said, okay, yeah, that's exactly the point.
Next time, I'm going to talk to you about what effect this had on Isaac.
Okay, and Sarah.
But we have more knowledge of Isaac afterwards than Sarah.
All we know about, and I will show you, and it will blow your mind.
And I remember the late Rabbi Pinflas Pelli showed it to me, how it's clear that they separated.
They never saw each other again.
According to a reading, a literal reading of the Torah.
Okay, you know what?
I'm sorry, my friends, but it's always better to follow you before you do.
See you in two weeks, and on your way home in 55 minutes, I'll be on radio.
Thanks, Emilian.
See you then.
At this time, they're totally different.
Right, I know.
And you know what?
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs and to purchase Dennis Prager's rational Bibles.
Your beloved dog and a stranger are both drowning.
You can only save one.
Who do you save?
Every time Dennis Prager asks that question, his audience splits three ways.
One-third chooses the dog, one-third chooses the stranger, and one-third aren't sure.
Why?
Because we live in an age where increasingly feelings define right and wrong.
But if morality is based on emotion, then murder, rape, and theft are just opinions.
And if people feel justified, why is rioting or destruction wrong at all?
In his new book, If There Is No God, Dennis Prager explains why civilizations cannot survive without objective morality and why Judeo-Christian values shape the moral foundations of the free world.
If you claim that certain things are good, certain things are evil, independent of how you feel about it, you are in effect affirming God.com. at PragerStore.com.