Opher Kutner writes:

> Abraham was being tested to examine the level
> of his relationship to God. In Kabbala (and in Chassidism),
> there are two natures of man's relationship with 
> God - out of Love, which is the higher level,
> and out of fear, a lower one. Abraham didn't pass
> with flying colors, according to the Gur Rabbi.
> By obeying His command, he showed  absolute faith -
> out of fear. If he had loved God, HE WOULD HAVE ARGUED
> (as he did with the Sodom affair).
> 
It seems to me very meaningful to distiguish between Abraham
who argued with God about saving Sodom on account of the
minority of the righteous within it, and Abraham who prepares
without question or complaint to carry out God's command that
he sacrifice Isaac.  If one chooses to interpret the temptation
of Abraham literally, as both Kierkegaard in "Fear and Trembling"
and the rabbi quoted by Opher seem to me to have done, then one
might consider whether Abraham's failure to argue about the
prospective sacrifice of Isaac reflects rather than a deficient
love of God, or, for that matter of Isaac, a paralysis of thought
and feeling precipitated by the terror of the idea (Vorstellung)
that he himself should plunge the knife into his son, whom we are
told that he loved. Abraham's relationship to Isaac was surely
more intimate than his relationship to the anonymous righteous
Sodomite minority for whose lives he pleaded with God.

However, I am sceptical of the wisdom of purporting to
give a "literal interpretation" to any text. It is seldom
indeed that a text evokes for a reader an intellectual and
emotional experience identical with that out of which the
author composed it.  Literal truth is just that: the truth
of words: and the truth of words is trivial in the context
of experience.  "Literal interpretations" of the Bible seem
to me to be unavoidably inconsistent and invariably to serve
not spiritual but ideological and political purposes.

To insist on the literal interpretation of Scripture is
often to trivialize its symbolic (spiritual) meaning, 
and this seems to me to be especially true of the temptation
of Abraham. When I recently reread Kierkegaard's
"Fear and Trembling", I was reminded of the assertion of
one of his translators (Hayo Gerdes) that Kierkegaard
never doubted the teachings of Lutheran orthodoxy. The
arguments of "Fear and Trembling", if I understand them
correctly, rely on a totally literal construction of the
pertinent chapters of Genesis. Kierkegaard demands that
this literal construction, and more importantly, the
absurdity of the temptation, be accepted as a matter of
faith.

I cannot agree. I find Kierkegaard's interpretation to be
neither ethically nor aesthetically persuasive. It seems
to me impious to postulate a deity whose fiendishness
requires to be sanctified by an act of faith. It seems
frivolous on Kierkegaards part, to correlate such fiendishness
with the personal catastrophe of a broken engagement. I am
mindful, of course, that in disavowing Kierkegaard's
interpretation, I lay myself open to charges on the one hand,
of insufficiency of religious faith, and on the other hand,
of naivete in matters of theological hermeneutics.

I prefer to interpret the Temptation of Abraham as mythology,
as a story which germinated and grew in the collective consciousness 
of a people that considered deity its protector, and itself
the protectorate of deity. The details of provenance, whether
the account is the composition of a single author, or a
cumulative oral tradition, are irrelevant both to the sancticity
of the story and to its spiritual (symbolic) truth.

I see in Abraham Adam's double (Doppelgaenger). As Adam was the
original biological father (Urvater), so Abraham was the original
spiritual father. As Adam first experienced biological life,
so Abraham first experienced faith, a living relationship to God.
As Adam had to be expelled from Eden to secure divine sovereignty
over nature, (lest Adam live forever and become like God),
so the spiritual union with God that is implicit in God's promise
to Abraham to make him the (spiritual) father of uncounted
descendants, required a dialectical retraction. Abraham's
journey to Mount Moriah is the counterpart of Adam's expulsion
from Paradise. In each case the sin to be expiated was the implicit
threat of competing with and displacing deity. The expulsion from
Eden and the drama on the summit of Moriah each serve to 
secure the inviolability of deity, "to show who is boss", if
one will pardon this lapse into the colloquial.

The theme of retraction pervades many parts of Scripture with
which I am familiar. With the expulsion of Adam and Eve, 
God took back Eden, with the Flood, he took back the earth,
with the tower of Babel, he took back the rationality of language,
with the breaking of the tablets, he took back the holiness
of the law, and with the symbolic sacrifice of Isaac, he took
back his promise to Abraham to make him the progenitor of God's
chosen people. From this perspective, Kierkegaard's sentimental
annotations about Abraham's journey to Mount Moriah seem to me
superfluous.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com