Be The Angel

The comment below left on a recent post deserves to be highlighted in a post of its own:

I had heard the interpretation several times before that, despite the praise for Abraham in the text, the fact was that Abraham FAILED the test, that God wanted Abraham to make the ethical choice and refuse the order to do evil. After all, in Nuremberg the world decided that obedience is not an ethical act and the individual has the ethical responsibility to disobey unethical orders – at least when they rise to a certain level.

But a reading of the story that I hadn’t heard several times before came from a sermon preached by a Reform rabbi, a great preacher and a real mensch, with whom my Unitarian Universalist congregation had a wonderful relationship. As he presented it, it is really a question of whom the reader of story should identify with.

– Do we identify with Abraham, who is either a dupe of a mischievous God or self-righteous, seeing himself as incapable of misunderstanding instructions handed down by a wholly Other deity?

– Do we identify with Isaac, the intended victim, and mourn our lot in life, mistreated, even by the one we should most be able to trust but who treated our life itself as a proving ground for himself rather than as our life?

– Or do we identify with the angel, the only other thinking character physically present in the story, who physically stops Abraham’s act of violence once he has begun to act, who orders Abraham not to harm the boy.

For my rabbi friend, this story is not a celebration of blind obedience to God but a call for us to act for social justice, preventing harm of the weaker members of society where possible and being a voice speaking out against harm that might be lessened or stopped in response to our voice drawing awareness to situations needing to be fixed or avoided.

The rabbi’s sermon was titled “Be the Angel.”

I am grateful to Paul Oakley for permission to reproduce his comment here as a post in its own right.