Lot’s Child Sacrifice—and Abraham’s

This week’s Torah reading begins with Abraham’s reception of three mysterious guests, a gesture held up in rabbinic literature as a model of righteous hospitality. It then juxtaposes two of the most dramatic stories in Genesis: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Binding of Isaac. Sarah Rindner notes important parallels between these passages. In Sodom, Abraham’s nephew Lot imitates his uncle’s hospitality by inviting the same mysterious guests into his home, but when a mob of Sodomites demands that he turn them over, he engages instead in his own act of child sacrifice:

Many read the story of the Binding of Isaac as an act of blind and heroic faith on the part of Abraham. Others understand it to be an articulation of the Torah’s supersession of the pagan custom of sacrificing one’s firstborn. This second group focuses on the moment when God tells Abraham that he does not need to sacrifice his son. Yet, in interpreting the story and Abraham’s actions here, it may be instructive to examine the only other case of child sacrifice we see in the book of Genesis—when Lot offers up his daughters to the mob. For Lot, this is the ultimate act of generosity, of giving up something that is dear to him to satisfy the imperative of hospitality.

When Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, perhaps he also interprets this request in a similar vein as reflecting the darker side of . . . self-abnegation and sacrifice, of the intertwining of the death-instinct with the life-instinct. The triumph of the story is that Abraham learns that . . . that his generosity toward God does not have to involve losing something of himself. . . . Hospitality is in some ways the inverse of sacrifice; it represents the possibility of giving without depletion. The Binding of Isaac represents one powerful paradigm for understanding the life of faith, and too often in Jewish history we have seen our own Isaacs bound and led to slaughter. We should not forget, however, that Abraham is defined primarily by his expansive and life-affirming hospitality, and this, too, can enrich our sense of the Jewish mission in the world.

Read more at Book of Books

More about: Abraham, Binding of Isaac, Genesis, Morality, Religion & Holidays, Sodom

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF