There are weeks when I struggle to find a topic to write about, and others when I feel spoilt for choice. However, never can I remember a week when I felt there were at least three topics that I simply had to write about. Never, that is, until this week. In the end, I have decided to write about something else entirely, but before I do, let me give you the blogging equivalent of speed dating, with a couple of one-paragraph summaries of the last seven days’ ‘in other news’. Our personal ‘news’ from Portugal, such as it is, will be held over until next week.

US election. Here’s my takeaway. If you lie for months to the American people about the mental capacity of the sitting President, then, with no open selection process, replace him with someone whose major qualifications are her sex and race, rather than her personal suitability, then attempt to appeal to the key black undecided voters and the undecided wives of Republican voters by patronising both groups, all the time mocking the rival candidate rather than presenting coherent policies, and peddling woke attitudes which you tell the nation to accept without offering a rational explanation as to why, you’ll lose the election. It will be interesting to see whether this is a lesson too hard for the Democratic party to internalise.

On the same day as the Democrats reaped what they had sown, another, for me bigger, story broke: Netanyahu’s firing of Gallant, and his replacing of him with Yisrael Katz. I can’t address this story in one paragraph. For the moment, let me say that, horrifying and saddening as it is, I cannot find an explanation for the timing of this act that is not connected to Netanayahu’s struggle for political survival. Given the military background and experience of Gallant, his relationship with his American counterparts, and Yisrael Katz’s almost total lack of experience in this field and singular unsuitability for the position of Defence Minister, I can only see this as an act of betrayal of the nation by Netanayahu. A dark day indeed.

But what I really want to write about is this week’s Torah portion, and, in particular, the story of the Akeda, Abraham’s binding of Isaac. The apparent significance of this story is that it is a test of Abraham. Is his faith is Hashem sufficient for him to be prepared to sacrifice his son to Him? This is, of course, a test that Abraham passes, and, at the last moment, he is told by an angel not to sacrifice Isaac.

I have long struggled to understand this story. Our sages teach us that Abraham grew up in a traditionally polytheistic and idolatrous home, in a society that favoured child sacrifice. Independently, by observing the world and its blessings, he came to deduce the existence of an omnipotent and loving God. God then made himself known to Abraham. How is it conceivable that Abraham could for a moment believe that God wanted him to sacrifice Isaac? If he did not believe that, then the test was an empty test.

A further problem I have with this story is in understanding why it occupies the place it does in our liturgy and the way it is presented there. The Biblical account of the Akeda, in its entirety, is recited every day as part of the preliminary morning service: all 19 verses. Clearly, the sages believed that the story has an important message for us. The account in the liturgy is then followed by a prayer that begins: Master of the Universe, in the same way as Abraham overcame his mercy in order to do Your will wholeheartedly, so may your mercy overcome your anger towards us. This suggests that the key message is not that we should behave mercifully, but that we should not act impulsively and emotionally, but rather should master our passions.

I heard this week another explanation of the significance of the Akeda story: an explanation that curiously brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In stark contrast to Owen’s description of parents sending children to war in defiance of God, Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, one of the most influential Orthodox Jewish figures of the late 20^th Century, in conversation with Daniel Gordis, discussed the significance of the Akeda in the reality of Israel in 2024. “Emil Fackenheim said one of the great lines of modern Jewish theology. He once said… every parent, after the Shoah, every Jewish parent who has a child and… chooses to be a Jew after the Shoah is as great, as heroic as Abraham, because the peak of Abraham’s life was that he was willing, out of faithfulness to his mission, to his covenant, to his God, to take his child and bind him to the altar. Well, every person who has a Jewish child knows that they are binding not just their children, but their grandchildren. Grandchildren of Jewish grandparents were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.”

Rabbi Greenberg went on to explain that he was always upset by the idea of the Akeda as a test of Abraham and that he now views it as something totally different, as God’s full disclosure, God’s admission that to join this covenant is to take on risk, to take on danger. The fear of losing one’s child is surely the greatest risk a parent can take. And yet, he pointed out, the Jewish people, far from backing away, has taken it on. He acknowledged that he did not know how the Jewish people would get through the next year or two, given the inevitable great danger and heavy losses. But he declared his belief that that the past record gives us good reason to believe that the Jewish people will come through again.

“If the Holocaust didn’t break them, October 7 is not going to break them. If the past tragedies were overcome by life and by love and by all these things, we have every reason to believe this is, too. Given the past record of the Jewish people, I think this should be a moment of sadness and of pain, but also of hope and of real expectation. I say, again, I can’t wait. I look forward to it… After the Exodus, the greatest revolution of our history, out of that experience came the Bible. After the destruction of the Temple, the greatest destruction of our period, came the Talmud, the second greatest creation of Jewish people.

Now I say to myself, in our time, we have an exodus, the state of Israel, greater than the biblical, and we have a destruction, the Holocaust greater than [previous persecutions]… What’s going to come now? I hope it’ll be greater and more transformative for the whole world than ever before.”