Avraham: I Answer Ergo…wherein we discuss a fundamental difference between the Jewish and secular world-view vis a vis the human sense of self and being
I have long felt that our Achilles heel as a society is our assumption that we think therefore we are. According to Torah this is not so existentially but more to the point here, it is not even so psychologically. We of course manufacture our thoughts for the most part, but Judaism believes that God can send “awakenings” from above in the form of inspiration, which at all points along the human road of history has changed the course to serve His purpose.
From a Torah perspective it is simply not true on any level to say “I think therefore I am.” One might say, as Hillel did, “If I am here, than everything is here,” but the meaning is very different. The real answer to Descartes is what Avraham answered God, which Adam and Eve failed to do, when God called to them “Where are you?”:
Avraham answered: I am here.
In Judaism, I answer therefore I am. My existence is from God, and even my awareness of my existence as well, is the awareness I glean from my soul, which again is the breath of God, and my body as well, it is the earth that God made, so there is nothing of me that is mine, except for my answer to the question that God poses to me daily in everything He presents, where are you? With all that God gives me, both blessing and blessings disguised as challenges, are in order that I answer, I am here.
Let’s note that the curses from eating the Tree did not happen automatically, but that God gave Adam and Eve a chance to repent and admit their failing:
"And they heard the voice of the Lord God going in the garden to the direction of the sun, and the man and his wife hid from before the Lord God in the midst of the trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called to man, and He said to him, 'Where are you?'"
Rashi explains that since obviously God knew where they were, He was giving them a chance to come forward on their own. But Adam and Eve responded quite humanly from a feeling of fear and vulnerability. After all, they were deeply aware that to rebel and eat from the tree would mean death. The story continues:
He said, ‘I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.’
And He said, “Who told you that you are naked? Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”
The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me – she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”
And the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done!”
The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
There are two stages to the denial that Adam and Eve suffer on their way toward exile. One is the inability to face God after becoming aware of their physical vulnerability and moral culpability. And secondly, they deny their freedom of choice and the consequences that result from that freedom. They choose to blame circumstances for their actions instead of assuming responsibility, and by doing so negating their ability to learn from their mistake and do teshuva.
These two stages of denial correspond to two aspects of sin. On the one hand sin is a rebellion against God, starting with some malfunction in our awareness of the Creator. Either we imagine that we can’t turn to Him for help to overcome our desires, or that He doesn’t know or care about what we do. When God asked, “Ayecha” - Where are you? He was challenging Adam and Eve’s awareness of His reality. They should have said what Avraham would indeed say many generations later:
Hineini! Behold I am Here!
Instead Adam and Eve hid from God.
What a clever thing to do.
Avraham’s “behold I am here” begins Avraham’s trials, and appropriately climaxes again with the words “lech lecha” when God commands Avraham to bring Yitzchok up as a burnt offering.
As mentioned previously, Avraham and Sarah at the first lech-lecha command had to leave behind everything they knew and venture to a new land, and that was just the beginning. Now many years and adventures later, God calls to Avraham with the terrible task of the Binding.
After these events, God tested Avraham.
“Avraham!” He said.
“Behold I am here!”
“Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go away to the land of Moriah, and bring him up as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains I will show you.”1
Avraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey. He took his two men with him, along with his son Isaac. He cut wood for the offering, and set out, heading for the place that God had designated.
On the third day, Avraham looked up, and saw the place from afar. Avraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go to that place. We will worship and then return to you.”
Avraham took the offering wood and placed it on the [shoulder of] his son Isaac. He himself took the fire and the slaughter knife, and the two of them went together. Isaac spoke up to Avraham.
“Father?”
“Behold I am here, my son.”
“Here is the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for the offering?”
“God will see to a lamb for an offering, my son,” replied Avraham, and the two of them continued together.
When they finally came to the place designated by God, Avraham built the alter there, and arranged the wood. He then bound his son Isaac, and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. Avraham reached out and took the slaughter knife to slit his son’s throat.
God’s angel called to him from heaven and said, “Avraham! Avraham!”
“Behold I am here!”
“Do not harm the boy, and don’t anything to him. For now I know you fear God, as you have not withheld your only son, even your unique son, from Him.”
Avraham then looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. He went and got the ram, sacrificing it as an burnt offering in place of his son. Avraham named the place “God will See.” Today, it is therefore said, “on God’s Mountain, He will be seen.”
God’s angel called to Avraham from heaven a second time, and said, “God declares, ‘I have sworn by My own Essence, that because you performed this act, and did not hold back your only son, I will bless you greatly, and increase your offspring like the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your offspring shall inherit their enemies’ gate. All the nations of the world shall be blessed through your descendants - all because you obeyed My voice.’”
What did Avraham accomplish at the Binding of Isaac? Well, it is very simple really. As Adam and Eve had taken the reigns so to speak of what should be considered good and cherished, and what is bad and dismissed, the forward movement of humanity’s ambitions became extraordinarily subjective. So much so that one of their children, Cain, could exclaim to God after murdering his brother “am I my brother’s keeper?!”
What was Cain thinking? He had no shame, he almost sounds bewildered by God’s enquiry of Abel’s whereabouts. Am I my brother’s keeper? Is it thus written somewhere? Have You Almighty already told us this but I was not at the meeting? From my vantage point, says Cain, that pesky brother of mine was in my way. It annoyed me that his offering was accepted and not mine, whatever the reason, and so I got rid of him. Is that wrong? Not to me. You said “sin crouches at the door,” well ok, if you meant murder is out, then I guess I blew it, but you can’t blame a guy for trying, can You? So God gives Cain a mark to protect him. Odd story.
Strange as this story may seem, it’s a pretty literal reading of the original, and it also follows logically when the mind that decides good and evil is a newbie.
We are subjective, and our first instinct is that of survival. You may love your brother - but Cain felt that if Abel was in the way of God’s giving to Cain. So Cain up and killed Abel. And come on - it doesn’t say he was a back-shooter. Cain probably thought that if Abel wanted he could have killed Cain, and so be it. May the best murderer win. It simply doesn’t dawn on him the moral issue of the wrongness of murder, so God spells it out for him. The Earth, from which you were formed, must open it’s mouth so to speak to swallow back the blood you’ve spilt - you stupid little human. Now Earth much digest the body and let go the soul because you ripped it out… idiot. Still, God does not punish Cain more than the “natural” result of his murder’s effect on Earth; as Cain truly had a good defence, he did not intuit that murder was a no no.
At the opposite extreme of the human consciousness we find Avraham at the Binding of Isaac. Avraham has spent his entire life preaching against idolatry, especially against the brutal custom of child sacrifice. His message of a transcendental God who is One, who loves us and commands us to embrace life had thousands of followers, perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands. God promises Avraham that his offspring will become a great nation, and that through them will be blessed all the families of the Earth. To fulfil this God gives Avraham a miraculous child from his true mate, Sarah, and with great joy and public celebration Avraham and Sarah hold a feast on the day Isaac is weaned. Ishmael together with his mother are at this point sent away by the command of God at the demand of Sarah, who through the strength of her conviction regarding her child’s education and future inheritance, uses her “voice” to stand against her husband. This act of Sarah’s corrects the voice of Eve whose words led her man astray. And then, just when Avraham’s attentions are given fully to the development of this wonderful son whom he loves, God says to him:
"Take you son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and bring him of as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you."
There was no rational way for Avraham to process this commandment, and yet he rises early the next morning and begins the journey. The Midrash describes the many rational arguments Satan used to try and dissuade Avraham, as well as the physical hurdles before him. But nothing even slowed Avraham down. But what exactly was Avraham fixing by not listening to his “thinking/rational” mind?
Adam and Eve had assumed that the fact that they were divine souls would keep them in good stead as the new masters of Good and Evil, but were sadly deceived, because the body’s subjectivity makes true objective rationality impossible. They had existed before the sin in a state where the rational mind was a tool of consciousness, not the boundary of it. There was no way for them to imagine the small mindedness of being an “individual” human.
Avraham experienced the opposite extreme, through his many years of giving to, caring for, and loving humanity, he achieved a great expansion of his sense of self, until his humility as an individual was such that he called himself “dust and ashes.” This humility, which is the most necessary quality needed for receiving Torah, enabled Avraham to allow the Will of God in the form of His commandment to supersede his rational mind, all that he knew, and he therefore directed his action directly from his soul, from the saddling of his donkey to the tying down of his son, all in a state of transcendent motion.
This is not so far from our understanding as it may seem at first. Have you even heard of the “zone?” For example, a professional basketball player may have a fantastic night where the basket seems so wide and he can’t miss, and he says, I was really in the zone. When the mind is in the “zone” the time between perception and reaction is almost non-existent. The mind does not need to be aware of itself processing the calculations of the body’s muscle memory for a perfect shot, and the player has one fluid motion of will and execution, not hampered by too much thinking. What gets in between the steps of perception and reaction is our ego. This was a result of the Tree.
To be in the zone requires an act of will. As a ball player it wins championships. To be in the zone as a soul repairs the world. Avraham was in the zone regarding the ability to know right from wrong altogether. He bypassed his own ego and listened only to God. Even with all the marbles at stake, Avraham dispatches himself immediately and without hesitation.
Hineini: I am here.
When a person says “I am here” to God’s question, in doing so they attach themselves to God, through His mitzvos. The very word mitzva is related in Aramaic, language of the Talmud, to the word “tie.” Mitzvos are our attachments to our Creator. The more the better. When we say mitzvos are the purpose of existence, we don’t only mean in the long term, although it also true. But we also mean that today's mitzvah is the purpose of life right now in the here and now. Mitzvos fill a day in the life with life. This is because the mitzvos direct us to express our will in consistently positive ways. The mitzvos focus us on our actions, our decisions, on the very question of whether or not something is good. And remember the Torah’s math from Chapter 30 of Deuteronomy. Good = Life and therefore Life = Good.
Avraham’s journey from home to the Mount Moriah took three days. The Sages teach this was so no one could accuse him of being “confused” by God’s commandment and acting rashly. He had time to think about it, a lot more than the time between free throws. But he stretched the zone of his soul so that he was able to do what God had commanded even as he tenderly revealed the mission to Isaac, who then accepted his father’s level of commitment to God’s Will also as his own.
We think Avraham’s test was that he was losing his cherished son, and of course that’s true, but we miss part of the story if we forget what Avraham believed in. Once Isaac was a real boy, his soul had had entered the world and was therefore by default eternal. (Support for this logic from the Talmud can be found in Gemara Sanhedrin 91a in the discussion between Gavya ben Pasisa and the heretic, see there)
Avraham would never “lose” his son in the absolute sense, and even though he would be cursed potentially in the eyes of his beloved wife and certainly in the eyes of everyone else, I think even these things were not the real test. But that Avraham would lose his most beloved son who would also be the real vessel for his Torah, this is what pressed upon him, I think.
We know from the Torah (in Chapter 30 of Deuteronomy quoted earlier) that there is such a thing as a “bris milah” for the heart. I believe the Binding was how the Almighty circumcised Avraham and Isaac’s hearts following their recent bris on the body. He hollowed their hearts and thus made them hallowed.
Although we usually read the story of the Binding as a triumph of fear of God over human rationale (as the verses themselves indicate), let’s consider this. As Isaac was an olah temimah, a perfect offering who had not known sin, and as Avraham doesn’t need to be convinced of the eternality of the soul, well then would it be so irrational for God to say to His loyal servant: This cherished one, this only one, is perhaps too good for the world just yet? Heart rendering, devastating, unbearable yes, but irrational?
Again, this is no salve to the pain of heart that misses the sight, smell and touch of a loved one, but the issue is one of pain, not “rationality.” If Mr. Spock beamed down from the Starship Enterprise and was asked: Is it possible that God will have to provide a different son for Avraham to raise? I think he would have to say yes. Because what we really mean by “irrational” is irrational to the ego-mind. Indeed, to the body-mind who fears death God was utterly wacked (and not in a good way). For the body-mind the only way to do the act would be to become evil incarnate. To remain the person that Avraham considered himself and be sane, is not possible at the same time as he raises the knife, unless his concept of death was not as the end.
And indeed it was not the end, not by a long shot. Because this place, the rock upon which Isaac was bound by his father’s hand, is the very heart of the Temple, which is itself at the heart of the Land and the People, as we will next explore.
To sum up: The real test of consciousness is our ability to respond when called upon, not to “think” per se but rather to harness the will and be.
1 22:1-18 Translation from Living Torah with minor changes.
From a Torah perspective it is simply not true on any level to say “I think therefore I am.” One might say, as Hillel did, “If I am here, than everything is here,” but the meaning is very different. The real answer to Descartes is what Avraham answered God, which Adam and Eve failed to do, when God called to them “Where are you?”:
Avraham answered: I am here.
In Judaism, I answer therefore I am. My existence is from God, and even my awareness of my existence as well, is the awareness I glean from my soul, which again is the breath of God, and my body as well, it is the earth that God made, so there is nothing of me that is mine, except for my answer to the question that God poses to me daily in everything He presents, where are you? With all that God gives me, both blessing and blessings disguised as challenges, are in order that I answer, I am here.
Let’s note that the curses from eating the Tree did not happen automatically, but that God gave Adam and Eve a chance to repent and admit their failing:
"And they heard the voice of the Lord God going in the garden to the direction of the sun, and the man and his wife hid from before the Lord God in the midst of the trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called to man, and He said to him, 'Where are you?'"
Rashi explains that since obviously God knew where they were, He was giving them a chance to come forward on their own. But Adam and Eve responded quite humanly from a feeling of fear and vulnerability. After all, they were deeply aware that to rebel and eat from the tree would mean death. The story continues:
He said, ‘I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.’
And He said, “Who told you that you are naked? Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”
The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me – she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”
And the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done!”
The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
There are two stages to the denial that Adam and Eve suffer on their way toward exile. One is the inability to face God after becoming aware of their physical vulnerability and moral culpability. And secondly, they deny their freedom of choice and the consequences that result from that freedom. They choose to blame circumstances for their actions instead of assuming responsibility, and by doing so negating their ability to learn from their mistake and do teshuva.
These two stages of denial correspond to two aspects of sin. On the one hand sin is a rebellion against God, starting with some malfunction in our awareness of the Creator. Either we imagine that we can’t turn to Him for help to overcome our desires, or that He doesn’t know or care about what we do. When God asked, “Ayecha” - Where are you? He was challenging Adam and Eve’s awareness of His reality. They should have said what Avraham would indeed say many generations later:
Hineini! Behold I am Here!
Instead Adam and Eve hid from God.
What a clever thing to do.
Avraham’s “behold I am here” begins Avraham’s trials, and appropriately climaxes again with the words “lech lecha” when God commands Avraham to bring Yitzchok up as a burnt offering.
As mentioned previously, Avraham and Sarah at the first lech-lecha command had to leave behind everything they knew and venture to a new land, and that was just the beginning. Now many years and adventures later, God calls to Avraham with the terrible task of the Binding.
After these events, God tested Avraham.
“Avraham!” He said.
“Behold I am here!”
“Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go away to the land of Moriah, and bring him up as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains I will show you.”1
Avraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey. He took his two men with him, along with his son Isaac. He cut wood for the offering, and set out, heading for the place that God had designated.
On the third day, Avraham looked up, and saw the place from afar. Avraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go to that place. We will worship and then return to you.”
Avraham took the offering wood and placed it on the [shoulder of] his son Isaac. He himself took the fire and the slaughter knife, and the two of them went together. Isaac spoke up to Avraham.
“Father?”
“Behold I am here, my son.”
“Here is the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for the offering?”
“God will see to a lamb for an offering, my son,” replied Avraham, and the two of them continued together.
When they finally came to the place designated by God, Avraham built the alter there, and arranged the wood. He then bound his son Isaac, and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. Avraham reached out and took the slaughter knife to slit his son’s throat.
God’s angel called to him from heaven and said, “Avraham! Avraham!”
“Behold I am here!”
“Do not harm the boy, and don’t anything to him. For now I know you fear God, as you have not withheld your only son, even your unique son, from Him.”
Avraham then looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. He went and got the ram, sacrificing it as an burnt offering in place of his son. Avraham named the place “God will See.” Today, it is therefore said, “on God’s Mountain, He will be seen.”
God’s angel called to Avraham from heaven a second time, and said, “God declares, ‘I have sworn by My own Essence, that because you performed this act, and did not hold back your only son, I will bless you greatly, and increase your offspring like the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your offspring shall inherit their enemies’ gate. All the nations of the world shall be blessed through your descendants - all because you obeyed My voice.’”
What did Avraham accomplish at the Binding of Isaac? Well, it is very simple really. As Adam and Eve had taken the reigns so to speak of what should be considered good and cherished, and what is bad and dismissed, the forward movement of humanity’s ambitions became extraordinarily subjective. So much so that one of their children, Cain, could exclaim to God after murdering his brother “am I my brother’s keeper?!”
What was Cain thinking? He had no shame, he almost sounds bewildered by God’s enquiry of Abel’s whereabouts. Am I my brother’s keeper? Is it thus written somewhere? Have You Almighty already told us this but I was not at the meeting? From my vantage point, says Cain, that pesky brother of mine was in my way. It annoyed me that his offering was accepted and not mine, whatever the reason, and so I got rid of him. Is that wrong? Not to me. You said “sin crouches at the door,” well ok, if you meant murder is out, then I guess I blew it, but you can’t blame a guy for trying, can You? So God gives Cain a mark to protect him. Odd story.
Strange as this story may seem, it’s a pretty literal reading of the original, and it also follows logically when the mind that decides good and evil is a newbie.
We are subjective, and our first instinct is that of survival. You may love your brother - but Cain felt that if Abel was in the way of God’s giving to Cain. So Cain up and killed Abel. And come on - it doesn’t say he was a back-shooter. Cain probably thought that if Abel wanted he could have killed Cain, and so be it. May the best murderer win. It simply doesn’t dawn on him the moral issue of the wrongness of murder, so God spells it out for him. The Earth, from which you were formed, must open it’s mouth so to speak to swallow back the blood you’ve spilt - you stupid little human. Now Earth much digest the body and let go the soul because you ripped it out… idiot. Still, God does not punish Cain more than the “natural” result of his murder’s effect on Earth; as Cain truly had a good defence, he did not intuit that murder was a no no.
At the opposite extreme of the human consciousness we find Avraham at the Binding of Isaac. Avraham has spent his entire life preaching against idolatry, especially against the brutal custom of child sacrifice. His message of a transcendental God who is One, who loves us and commands us to embrace life had thousands of followers, perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands. God promises Avraham that his offspring will become a great nation, and that through them will be blessed all the families of the Earth. To fulfil this God gives Avraham a miraculous child from his true mate, Sarah, and with great joy and public celebration Avraham and Sarah hold a feast on the day Isaac is weaned. Ishmael together with his mother are at this point sent away by the command of God at the demand of Sarah, who through the strength of her conviction regarding her child’s education and future inheritance, uses her “voice” to stand against her husband. This act of Sarah’s corrects the voice of Eve whose words led her man astray. And then, just when Avraham’s attentions are given fully to the development of this wonderful son whom he loves, God says to him:
"Take you son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and bring him of as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you."
There was no rational way for Avraham to process this commandment, and yet he rises early the next morning and begins the journey. The Midrash describes the many rational arguments Satan used to try and dissuade Avraham, as well as the physical hurdles before him. But nothing even slowed Avraham down. But what exactly was Avraham fixing by not listening to his “thinking/rational” mind?
Adam and Eve had assumed that the fact that they were divine souls would keep them in good stead as the new masters of Good and Evil, but were sadly deceived, because the body’s subjectivity makes true objective rationality impossible. They had existed before the sin in a state where the rational mind was a tool of consciousness, not the boundary of it. There was no way for them to imagine the small mindedness of being an “individual” human.
Avraham experienced the opposite extreme, through his many years of giving to, caring for, and loving humanity, he achieved a great expansion of his sense of self, until his humility as an individual was such that he called himself “dust and ashes.” This humility, which is the most necessary quality needed for receiving Torah, enabled Avraham to allow the Will of God in the form of His commandment to supersede his rational mind, all that he knew, and he therefore directed his action directly from his soul, from the saddling of his donkey to the tying down of his son, all in a state of transcendent motion.
This is not so far from our understanding as it may seem at first. Have you even heard of the “zone?” For example, a professional basketball player may have a fantastic night where the basket seems so wide and he can’t miss, and he says, I was really in the zone. When the mind is in the “zone” the time between perception and reaction is almost non-existent. The mind does not need to be aware of itself processing the calculations of the body’s muscle memory for a perfect shot, and the player has one fluid motion of will and execution, not hampered by too much thinking. What gets in between the steps of perception and reaction is our ego. This was a result of the Tree.
To be in the zone requires an act of will. As a ball player it wins championships. To be in the zone as a soul repairs the world. Avraham was in the zone regarding the ability to know right from wrong altogether. He bypassed his own ego and listened only to God. Even with all the marbles at stake, Avraham dispatches himself immediately and without hesitation.
Hineini: I am here.
When a person says “I am here” to God’s question, in doing so they attach themselves to God, through His mitzvos. The very word mitzva is related in Aramaic, language of the Talmud, to the word “tie.” Mitzvos are our attachments to our Creator. The more the better. When we say mitzvos are the purpose of existence, we don’t only mean in the long term, although it also true. But we also mean that today's mitzvah is the purpose of life right now in the here and now. Mitzvos fill a day in the life with life. This is because the mitzvos direct us to express our will in consistently positive ways. The mitzvos focus us on our actions, our decisions, on the very question of whether or not something is good. And remember the Torah’s math from Chapter 30 of Deuteronomy. Good = Life and therefore Life = Good.
Avraham’s journey from home to the Mount Moriah took three days. The Sages teach this was so no one could accuse him of being “confused” by God’s commandment and acting rashly. He had time to think about it, a lot more than the time between free throws. But he stretched the zone of his soul so that he was able to do what God had commanded even as he tenderly revealed the mission to Isaac, who then accepted his father’s level of commitment to God’s Will also as his own.
We think Avraham’s test was that he was losing his cherished son, and of course that’s true, but we miss part of the story if we forget what Avraham believed in. Once Isaac was a real boy, his soul had had entered the world and was therefore by default eternal. (Support for this logic from the Talmud can be found in Gemara Sanhedrin 91a in the discussion between Gavya ben Pasisa and the heretic, see there)
Avraham would never “lose” his son in the absolute sense, and even though he would be cursed potentially in the eyes of his beloved wife and certainly in the eyes of everyone else, I think even these things were not the real test. But that Avraham would lose his most beloved son who would also be the real vessel for his Torah, this is what pressed upon him, I think.
We know from the Torah (in Chapter 30 of Deuteronomy quoted earlier) that there is such a thing as a “bris milah” for the heart. I believe the Binding was how the Almighty circumcised Avraham and Isaac’s hearts following their recent bris on the body. He hollowed their hearts and thus made them hallowed.
Although we usually read the story of the Binding as a triumph of fear of God over human rationale (as the verses themselves indicate), let’s consider this. As Isaac was an olah temimah, a perfect offering who had not known sin, and as Avraham doesn’t need to be convinced of the eternality of the soul, well then would it be so irrational for God to say to His loyal servant: This cherished one, this only one, is perhaps too good for the world just yet? Heart rendering, devastating, unbearable yes, but irrational?
Again, this is no salve to the pain of heart that misses the sight, smell and touch of a loved one, but the issue is one of pain, not “rationality.” If Mr. Spock beamed down from the Starship Enterprise and was asked: Is it possible that God will have to provide a different son for Avraham to raise? I think he would have to say yes. Because what we really mean by “irrational” is irrational to the ego-mind. Indeed, to the body-mind who fears death God was utterly wacked (and not in a good way). For the body-mind the only way to do the act would be to become evil incarnate. To remain the person that Avraham considered himself and be sane, is not possible at the same time as he raises the knife, unless his concept of death was not as the end.
And indeed it was not the end, not by a long shot. Because this place, the rock upon which Isaac was bound by his father’s hand, is the very heart of the Temple, which is itself at the heart of the Land and the People, as we will next explore.
To sum up: The real test of consciousness is our ability to respond when called upon, not to “think” per se but rather to harness the will and be.
1 22:1-18 Translation from Living Torah with minor changes.