The Jewish world was in shock. These were hours that left every Jew in Israel and abroad in astonishment. Even those who had previously believed, based on various information, that this was the situation now felt sadness and a sense of helplessness, a sense of participation in the mourning of the families and the mourning of the entire nation.
18 days of uncertainty, 18 days of hope, 18 days of searching, 18 days that ended in the most terrible way possible. 18 days that contain the soul-searching of a nation being trampled upon, a sheep among seventy wolves.
These days ended with the bowing of the heads of parents and family members and the acceptance of a verdict with love. This fact is one of the difficult and beautiful things with which the Jewish nation has been blessed. The father of the nation had already prepared us for this situation thousands of years ago in the tying of his son Isaac.
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On days when we remember the wicked who besiege the land, on days when memories arise in our hearts of homes where there is no food and compassionate women eat the flesh of their children, how uplifting to see mothers accompanying their children with tears covering their faces and faith standing there with strength.
Is losing a child something different? Between Job and Abraham
It was the Book of Job that Moses prepared in order to prepare the humiliated nation to accept their exodus from exile with understanding. Moses is going to bring them out of their exile and what is he afraid of? He is afraid that they will say, "Where is our God?" He gives them the opportunity to leave the Egyptian exile, to be freed from the obligation to work, to remove from them the fear for the fate of their children and their own fate, and what will they say? No?!
And before their eyes, Moses presents a terrible image, Satan addressing the Creator of the world and saying to him: 'I touched his property, I harmed his children, but I have not touched Job himself, the trial is not yet enough' - skin for skin, and all that a man will give in exchange for his soul. Satan took the greatest thing for a man, his 'children', from Job. The sonless are as important as the dead, and dying alive, it turns out, is harder than being dead and not being. What does this claim of Satan do in this place?
Our father Abraham experiences the experience of circumcision, he physically harms himself. After that, he experiences the experience of binding his son Isaac. He has already discovered the ability to harm himself, so why should he experience harming his son?
Our father Abraham understands that there is a ruler for the world. He is willing to suffer self-harm, willing to circumcise his body, but losing the child about whom he was told, "For in Isaac shall your seed be called" is a much more difficult ordeal.
In contrast, Job, who recognizes that God created the world, but believes that it does not operate in a cause-and-effect manner and that various events are by chance, would be more comfortable absorbing environmental harm and would rather give his son's skin for his own. The experience of harming himself is much more difficult.
Moses feared that the people of the children of Jacob would lose their temper because of their own suffering and say that, within the limits of possibility, leaving Egypt could become worse and more difficult for them than staying in Egypt. He wanted to teach them that everything has a reason, even if it is not visible to the eye – and that good and evil are not measured in the scales of reason.
I prayed to this boy – and the boy is gone.
The deep pain of a bereaved parent who has lost their son who fell into the arms of perpetrators is worse than the pain of self-harm. The feeling of losing a son on the altar of his Judaism, on the altar of his faith, is a feeling that cannot be described. 'I prayed to this boy,' the same mother who asked God for a child, another Jewish child who would do an easy will and 'the boy is gone' because of that faith. Her difficulty is indescribable.
The look at the bereaved families, at parents who discovered that their children were no longer there, that bloody men took them and harmed them, that damned terrorists, whose names will be erased, eliminated them, but they look straight ahead and see the hand of God in this is a different look. It is a different look. It is the look of people who understand that there is a reason and a twist, they accept it with love. This is the look of the characters in The Binding of Isaac – who understand that as children of one father, we have the ability to feel a sense of belonging to this terrible situation.
In these days, when we see the identification of all strata of the Jewish people, not differences of opinion and sectors, we are filled with hesitation, and from the mouth of an evil angel, the cry came out of necessity: "How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel!".
The writer serves as the director of the Bar Daat Center in Jerusalem.
