Rosh Hashana and the Akeidah: Cherishing What We Have

Wake up, wake up from your sleep, become aware of your actions, repent and remember your Creator!

That, says the Rambam, is the message contained in the tekiah, shevarim and teruah, the wails of the Shofar.

The first time the Shofar is alluded to in the Torah is in the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashana, which tells the story of the Akeidat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac. After the angel frantically prevented Avraham from sacrificing his own son, Avraham turned and saw a ram caught in a nearby bush and sacrificed it in place of his dear son Yitzchak.

For a century, Avraham and Sarah suffered, as they remained childless, despite the promise of God, that they would one day have descendants as many as the stars in the sky and the dust of the Earth. In addition to suffering through childless years, Sarah was forced to watch as her maid, Hagar, had a child almost immediately after she entered into a relationship with Avraham. She waited nearly 100 years for a child, and here was this unworthy, idol worshiping, maidservant having the child that she was supposed to be having.

Finally after all of the domestic strife, Sarah, to everyone’s surprise, including her own, had a son. The birth of Yitzchak was an absolute miracle; Sarah had not received any fertility treatments and was well past her child bearing years, yet she was able to give birth to her first and only son at the spry, young age of 90.

After all of that, the years of suffering and mental anguish Hashem then commanded Avraham (Breishit 22:2):

קח נא את בנך את יחידך אשר אהבת את יצחק ולך לך אל ארץ המוריה והעלהו שם לעולה על אחד ההרים אשר אמר אליך

Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, Yitzchak, and get yourself to the Land of Moriah; bring him up there as an offering, upon one of the mountains which I shall indicate to you.

Imagine for a moment that you are Avraham and had just gone through all that you had gone through; wouldn’t you have been tempted to say, “Listen God, you had me with the first Lech Lecha, when you told me to leave my homeland for this little enclave called Caanan, but the buck stops here. I finally have my son and now you want to take him for Yourself!? I’m sorry, but no.”

Instead, the story goes (Breishit 22:3),

וישכם אברהם בבוקר ויחבש את חמורו ויקח את שני נעריו אתו ואת יצחק בנו ויבקע עצי עלה ויקם וילך אל המקום אשר אמר לו האלוקים

So Avraham awoke early in the morning and he saddled his donkey, he took his two young men with him, and Yitzchak, his son. He split the wood for the offering, and rose and went toward the place which God had indicated to him.

Not only did Avraham ready himself to go through with the sacrifice of the child who was supposed to be his heir and successor in the family business of monotheism, he set his alarm clock to wake up extra early in the morning so that he could carry out God’s commandment zealously.

What is going on here? Any questions about Avraham’s behavior can be answered by simply saying that he 100% complete and unwavering faith in Hakdosh Baruch Hu. God told him to do something so he was ready to do it; no matter how potentially crushing it would have been to him on a personal level. He understood as Iyov did (Iyov 1:21),

ה' נתן וה' לקח יהי שם ה' מבורך

Hashem gave, Hashem has taken away, may Hashem’s name be blessed.

What we really need to ask is, what was God doing? In the week leading up to Rosh Hashana we say daily in our Selichot, “Hashem Hashem Kel Rachum” - God is a merciful God; how could He be so cruel and merciless to the person who was the founder of monotheism?

To answer this question we must fast forward in time to when Avraham’s eventual descendants were on the cusp of entering the land which their forefather had settled in after leaving his homeland of Ur Kasdim hundreds of years earlier. As he begins his final address to the Jewish people at the end of Parshat Ki Tavo, Moshe tells the people (Devarim 29:3),

ולא נתן ה' לכם לב לדעת ועינים לראות ואזנים לשמע עד היום הזה

But Hashem did not give you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear until this day

Until this day, the day in which the Jewish people would enter the land, the people did not fully comprehend nor appreciate all of the miracles that Hashem had performed for them. Moshe tells them that they have no eyes, ears nor minds, because they could not fully appreciate all that they had seen and heard during their time in the desert. Hashem had traveled with them in the desert for forty years, protecting them with the ענן הכבוד during the day and the עמוד אש at night. Their hunger was satisfied by the manna that rained down from the sky. They never had to change their clothes or shoes because they never wore out and they grew along with their owners. Moshe was telling them, that only once they arrived in Israel and the cloud and pillar of fire disappeared, the manna stopped falling, their shoes needed new soles and the holes in their clothes needed to be sewn back together, would they truly appreciate all that God had done for them over the course of 40 years in the desert.

In the same vein, in explaining the Akeidah, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (A Letter in the Scroll pg 113) writes that,

What we have, we eventually take for granted. Only what we lose and are given back again do we not take for granted, but consciously cherish and constantly protect...To be a Jew is to see nothing as merely natural.

God never intended on having Avraham sacrifice his beloved son; He only meant to teach Avraham an important lesson, one which could be passed down to his descendants, to us, in the form of מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, the actions of the fathers are a sign for the children.

The lesson of Rosh Hashana and the Akeidah is that we must not take anything for granted. We must improve our ways and here the cry of the Shofar to wake us up from our slumber, from our routine of walking through life taking everything for granted.

This Rosh Hashana may we utilize the opportunity presented to us by the wake up call of the Shofar; to appreciate life and all that we have and use that renewed appreciation to be grateful for the gifts that Hashem has given each and every one of us so that we can grow closer to one another and closer to our Creator.