The Abraham Story

[Oh look, a new blog! The following are some thoughts, old and new, I've had on the Abraham story. I imagine that this will be either the outlines or one small part of an eventual paper. As it is, it doesn't have the conceptual flow that I want, but, for the blog medium, it will do.]

Kierkegaard brings us to the foundation of faith. If one has any concern for the implications of our leaps of faith, of our affirming particular proposition (religious or otherwise) in the face of ethical/rational norms, one need not go further than what Kierkegaard has so vividly displayed for us. Others have similarly furrowed their brow and pleaded with their God for understanding when it comes to the commandment thrust upon Abraham - the commandment to sacrifice "thy" son. But what Kierkegaard manifests for us puts a different sort of weight on such a story. For it is not just that we must sacrifice our offspring if God decides; moreover, Kierkegaard tells us that it would be the right thing to do.

Using Kierkegaard’s terminology, this means that the theological trumps the ethical – that God can choose at any point to overthrow any ethical norm and make what is right change. So, the Abraham story, in simple – and, in all reality, extremely brief - fashion, establishes the necessary divide between what is ethical and what is commanded by God (Sidenote: Here is where faith enters the picture; for faith is not where one ends up, it is where one begins).

Now let’s look at a more contemporary (and less erudite) source for a nuanced take on the Abraham story: the Hollywood movie “Year One”. Jack Black and Michael Cera are the co-protagonists in the film and at one point in their journey come across Abraham raising the knife over his son Isaac (they meet a variety of characters, such that it is obvious chronological consistency is not exactly a goal of the film). Here is the non-verbatum exchange [I’m making a educated guess that Black intensionally means murder when using the word ‘kill’] :

Black: “hey! What are you doing?!?!”
Abraham: “I’m…. uh, we’re playing a game. Its called cutty cutty, burny burny.”
Black: “This doesn’t look like much of a game. You were going to kill him!”
Abraham: “No I wasn’t! I was going to sacrifice him. There’s a difference.”
Black: “Not to him there isn’t.”

What Year One beautifully exemplifies in its telling of the Abraham story (to spite its weak humor in this scene) is what a change in perspective can illuminate for us. It is hard enough to put ourselves in the shoes of Abraham (and agree to sacrifice our son), and it is another thing to be Isaac, but it is altogether another story to be Jack Black's character, who represents the public. In other words, what do “we” do when someone else is murdering their son? This is why Black says that from his own perspective, the distinction Abraham makes (explicit in the movie, but implicit in the biblical version) between killing and sacrificing doesn’t existing. Either way, Isaac is going to die at the conscious hand of his father and we should starting thinking about how we the public should respond to such an event.

Kierkegaard focuses the energy of his book on this idea. For him, it is a question of whether something commanded by god can go against something as established as “don’t murder” and still be right. A quick defense would be to say what Abraham does in the movie: “I’m not murdering him, I’m sacrificing him.” In other words, make the ethically weighted act, a religious act. And this is precisely what is at stake. Can what is an act of murder for the public, be a right and indeed holy act when I carry it out, so long as god commands it?

The former option, concerning the public, simply says that not just anyone can go out and kill another person – we call that murder and incriminate that person. But the latter option, concerns only the (or an) individual, who presumably was told by god to kill. So at what point do we or can we accept as a justified/legitimate reason the exclamation that “god told me to?” In other words, when do we, as a public, upon seeing some guy kill his son, say that it was the right thing to do? Is it right if he says god told him to? I think this is a perfectly legitimate weight to attribute to the Abraham story. So here is where we should invoke the perspective change.

So often, we nobly thrust ourselves into the Abraham story, as Abraham! This is what Paul asks us to do later on: look to the father of faith. Indeed, we want to be the protagonist - we want the fate of our community on our shoulders - we want our faith to bear out the most austere of consequences! (and psychoanalysts would say: we want to be the father). But what Kierkegaard wants us to do (which Year One illustrates), is to put yourself into the 2nd person perspective, the ‘we’. Don’t be Abraham, don’t be Isaac (who really never thought anything through all this) but be Jack Black. What do “you” do when you are on the outside of this story? What do you do when this story isn’t your godly story?

My two cents on this whole thing are, well, worth about two cents. My only thought is that too often people invoke the Abraham story in their own sacrificial way, in the sense of slaughtering something, not in the sense of something selfless. In fact, it is exactly opposite of selfless; it is entirely selfish! It puts “you” in the center of the story. “You” are the one whose decision will change the fate of the world! But when we are selfless and let someone else be the protagonist, the story is an altogether different one. There is a phrase that I’ll invoke here: violent narrative. A violent narrative is one that overlooks all the “others” of the story and focuses only on the decisions of the protagonist (whether it’s one person or a community). It is violent because, for the sake of the story (and usually the image of the main character(s), the narrative marginalizes and completely overlooks everyone else in the story and how the consequences bear out for them. I worry that this happens too often when the Abraham story is retold.