Here I am, twice

Vayera puts the two most extreme Abraham stories in the same parasha. In one he argues with God over Sodom, bargaining from fifty righteous down to ten: shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly? In the other he rises early and goes to sacrifice his son without a word. Uriel Simon called this the second contrast in Abraham, between criticism and blind acceptance of judgment.

Of Sodom, Simon wrote that Abraham speaks out of complete confidence in his own moral judgment. He noticed that readers tend to pick a side: some admire the Abraham who fights for justice in Sodom (on what he called the mistaken assumption that there were at least ten righteous people there), and some admire the Abraham of Moriah. Simon wanted both, and noted that in each story it turns out, after the fact, that the gap between human and divine morality was only apparent.

For the Akedah he followed a single word. Abraham answers God הִנֵּנִי, "Here am I" (22:1): complete devotion. Then, on the walk up, Isaac says My father, and Abraham answers with the same word, הִנֶּנִּי בְנִי, "Here am I, my son" (22:7). Now, Simon writes, Abraham places himself in the terrible tension of a double, even contradictory, commitment. He stays the boy's father to the last moment. Then the angel calls Abraham, Abraham, Abraham says הִנֵּנִי a third time, and the angel forbids him to touch the boy. From now on, the "Hineni" toward his God is not opposed to the "Hineni" toward his son. The religious commitment comes first, and then heaven itself backs the human one.

This is where Simon's essay ends up, three contrasts in all: land and peace, protest and acceptance, God and son. If his plain-sense reading holds, he wrote, then Abraham's blessing to his descendants is in large measure, the blessing of contradictions: not a compromise between the poles, but the strength to hold both.