Both Boys Lived

Rabbi David Levin

Nobody is sacrificed on either morning. We move past that faster than it deserves.

The knife stops. The well appears. Both boys grow up and become something. Ishmael is promised 12 princes and a great nation. When he dies, the Torah uses the identical phrase it gave Abraham eight verses earlier, vayigva vayamot vayei’asef el amav, meaning he breathed his last breath, died and was gathered to his people. Isaac carries the covenant. Neither is destroyed by what was done to him, and neither ever says a word against the man who did it.

Begin with what they were called, because neither boy was given a name of his own. Yishmael, “God will hear,” is assigned because the Lord has heard your affliction. It is the record of his mother’s rescue, fastened to him before he was born. Yitzchak, “he will laugh,” comes from a father laughing face down on the ground and a mother laughing behind the tent flap.

One name commemorates a woman being heard. The other commemorates two people who did not believe. Neither name is about the boy carrying it.

A mother saves them both.

Hagar lifts her voice in the desert, and God hears the boy. Then comes a verse we don’t read on Rosh Hashanah. Vayehi Elohim et hana’ar vayigdal. God was with the lad, and he grew. He lived in the wilderness and became an archer, and his mother took him a wife from Egypt. She arranged her son’s marriage herself, in exile, with nothing. Isaac’s father sends a servant and 10 camels to do it for him.

Sarah is harder. She acts on her child’s behalf so he will live, and she puts another woman’s child in the desert. She sees her son, but she sees him so narrowly that she cannot see anyone else’s. And still, the one fact the Torah gives us about Isaac’s inner life is that he was comforted after his mother. Not after his father. Vayinachem, from the root that also means to change your mind, because comfort in Hebrew is a turning, and Isaac has a great deal to turn from.

So, what happens to the children we do not see? Are they sacrificed? The Torah’s answer is no, but it is not a comforting no. The trauma somehow endures despite the achievements.

They live. That much the text will say. They grow, they marry, they raise 12 princes, they inherit the covenant, they are gathered to their people full of days. Somebody looks at them. The looking gets done. Someone who is not you does it. Whether that is the same thing as being fine, the Torah leaves it for later and it does answer it.

What gets sacrificed is the relationship.

Count the words. After the mountain, Abraham and Isaac never speak again in the Torah. Between Abraham and Ishmael, there is not a single recorded word in either direction. Here is a man who fathers two nations yet has no conversation with either of his sons. That is the cost of the Akedah, and it is not paid by a boy.

You can see this happen now in families where everybody is still alive and nothing has visibly gone wrong. The child is thriving. There is work, a partner and children of their own. The parent can narrate all of it accurately and has learned every detail from somebody else.

Abraham dies at 175 years old, and Isaac and Ishmael bury him together at Machpelah. The verse does not say they mourned him. It says they buried him. Then the Torah moves on, listing Ishmael’s sons, and Isaac returns to the well.

The boys were never the sacrifice. Ask who was. Then ask whether somebody is out there right now, growing up without you.

May the Days of Awe bring you meaning; may the year ahead be good.

L’ShanahTova U’metukah.

Rabbi David Levin is the president of The Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia and founder of Jewish Relationships Initiative.