Like flame in a burning coal. The Ultimate Sacrifice part 2

“It seems to me that I have not drunk from the cup of wisdom but have fallen into it”

- Kierkegaard

“My soul is crying. God needs a proof of my loyalty. He, the almighty, needs something from me. Needs. He.

My son. The light of my life as a burnt sacrifice. Tears are trickling down my sunken cheeks. I cannot breath. Pain, made worse by my silence, tears me up inside. Why this suffering? Shouldn’t I be happy, proud to serve, anxious to prove my love to Him? I feel no doubt. Faith is my destiny. Pain is my salvation.”

On the judgment day of Rosh Hashanah at the beginning of the year, God is entreated to show mercy to His people in the merit of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. A prayer of the day reads: “Remember unto us, O Lord our God, the covenant and the loving-kindness and the oath which Thou swore unto Abraham our father on Mount Moriah; and consider the binding with which Abraham our father bound his son Isaac on the altar, how he suppressed his compassion in order to perform Thy will with a perfect heart. So may Thy compassion overbear Thine anger against us; in Thy great goodness may Thy great wrath turn aside from Thy people, Thy city, and Thine inheritance.”

The binding of Isaak is a metaphorical projection. It never happened. God has no needs, feels not, wants not. He is void of quality and quantity. He is absolutely simple, containing no plurality whatsoever. He is the most absolute unit imaginable. Pure consciousness.

In traditional Jewish thought, the Binding of Isaak (Akedah) is used as a paradigm for Jewish martyrdom, implying that Jewish people are ready at all times to give up their life for the sake of the sanctification of the divine name. (Kaddush Ha-Shem). There is ample literature scrutinizing God’s intentions. As if there could be such. Many pages are filled with attempts to illustrate that, despite what appears to be a contradiction, divine foreknowledge is compatible with human free will.

This divine, that exists in the realm above time, where past, present and future are one, is the ultimate cause of anything, while the physical world is the ultimate effect. It may be presumptuous for us to think that this divine has an intention or is concerned with our well – being, why, with our being at all. It is more probable that it just exists and we, if we take time to contemplate, make efforts to connect, to interact and to reach out.

There is a parable in Genesis (28:12) that describes the dream of Jacob so: “A ladder, standing on earth, whose top reached the heavens”. Our ultimate dream is that of reaching the divine. For us, who are bound to a physical realm, it is only the earthly deeds that enable us to attach ourselves to God. This goal, this binding ourselves to God, is attempted on many levels. On a metaphysical level, by use of Kabbalistic diagrams, endless combination of letters and representations of Sefirot, which are in parallel to the divine names, creating the 32 paths of Wisdom along which an individual, who wishes to attain a mystical experience, must travel. On a mental level there is a prayer, or meditation. On a physical level, it is following the commandments and performing good deeds.

Zohar describes this relationship between physical and spiritual in a following way:” If one wishes to know the wisdom of the holy unification, let him look at the flame rising from a burning coal or from a kindled lamp. The flame cannot rise unless it is unified with something physical.” The burnt offering can be seen as a symbolic attempt to come closer to God, to be “bound” with the divine.

Faith, not religion in itself, is a major building block, with which thinking and contemplating person today, may start constructing his own bridge to God.

"Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.", - writes Kierkegaard. This resignation is what is so intensely symbolised by the Akedah.