Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 12 September 2026

William Ellery Channing¹

• So… what the hell was Abraham thinking?!
• The instruction to slaughter his own son² was repugnant and utterly stupid, and one to which he should have said ‘no’ straight away. The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski rightly condemns Abraham for having “the nature of a lance corporal” and reflexively obeying orders without engaging his own conscience.³
• But of course this merely begs the question of why God – our God, our only God, whom we love, אֱלוֹהֵינוּ – would issue an order so obscene that it needed to be disobeyed for reasons of conscience.
• I have a sneaking suspicion that generations of commentators have completely misunderstood the nature of the “test”⁴ that was being imposed on Abraham. It’s almost universally accepted⁵ that the object of the test was for Abraham to show willingness to go ahead with the sacrifice. So he is credited as having passed.
• What, though, if the object of the test was entirely different, and Abraham failed? What if the test was whether he would have the scruples and the guts to say ‘no’? Rabbi David E Ostrich, who has an amazing name, notes⁶ that this episode marks the last time God is recorded speaking to Abraham. It seems perfectly plausible to me that the whole mess made God feel rather queasy. Abraham had been meant to exercise his conscience. He failed, and a young person nearly died. The Divine face turned away in disgust.
• The idea that, as people of faith, the Jews should passively and slumberingly obey everything God demands of us (or purports to demand of us) is an entrenched one. Progressive Jews are often derided⁷ for “picking and choosing” which bits of Judaism we do and don’t follow.
• There are two ripostes to this gibe. The first is that picking and choosing is a good thing. Engaging our moral compass – the moral compass we were Divinely granted – is the essence of being human. It’s what separates us from animals. Indeed, Rabbi Jacob Meir Zalkind, a Yiddish-speaking anarchist who lived just down the road from here in the 1920s, taught that God created Adam and Eve because “the company of angels had become צוּ לאַנגווייליג, far too tedious”.⁸ God likes a good argument! God wants us to push back.
• The second, and more important, riposte is that picking and choosing is by no means confined to Progressive Jews. There have been Orthodox Jews in Brighton for 250 years; at least one of them must have committed adultery in all that time; yet has there been a stoning?⁹ There has not. Orthodox Jews pick and choose their commandments as well!¹⁰ Those choices might be hidden behind linguistic arguments and dense Talmudic reasoning,¹¹ but they’re absolutely choices.
• Judaism is picking and choosing. Judaism is the religion of choice. From the very moment at Sinai that our ancestors were offered a covenant with God, and declared נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע, We will do and we will hear,¹² freedom of choice has been the hallmark of the relationship between Israelites and their Creator. Indeed, a beautiful midrash¹³ explains with a parable why the Torah starts with the Creation rather than with the Ten Commandments:

In other words, authority has to be earned – even Divine authority. God couldn’t just assume the power to issue commandments without first proving that God had a right to do so.

• So when the Israelites asked, Monty Python-style, כלום עשית לנו טובה, “What has God ever done for us?”, they were right to do so. And the answer – the freeing of the Hebrew slaves, the parting of the sea, the magicking of manna out of mid-air – is what gave the covenant its legitimacy.
• As Rabbi Kaufman Kohler taught in 1887: “The Bible is holy not because it is inspired, but because and insofar as it does still inspire.”¹⁴ We cleave to Judaism not because of its Author but because of its content. And where the content is deficient – stoning adulterers, trafficking young women,¹⁵ sacrificing sons – that content is not Jewish. Moreover, surrendering our decision-making capacity and our ethical intuition is not Jewish.
• So where does that leave Abraham? He failed the test. He said ‘yes’, and by saying ‘yes’ he engaged in an ironic form of idolatry: he worshipped at the altar of God’s word rather than at the altar of God’s justice.
• This story is often referred to as the Binding of Isaac, obviously because Isaac was bound on the pyre ready to be sacrificed.¹⁶ But the feminist theologian Alicia Ostriker has another interpretation: Isaac ended up bound “to the theocentric world of [his] father[]”.¹⁷ On this account, Abraham failed not only himself but also Isaac. He let himself down, he let his son down, he let the whole school down. Isaac, an impressionable youngster,¹⁸ was brought up to believe that commandments were to be complied with unthinkingly. He would spend his life trapped into obeying unjust orders and doomed to sneer jealously at Progressive Jews with our moral freedom to choose.
• Of course, the fact that we have moral freedom to choose doesn’t mean that we always exercise it correctly. There have been plenty of mis-steps along the way. I read the words of some early Liberal and Reform rabbis about, say, homosexuality, or racial equality, and I cringe.¹⁹ But I know that they’ll be looking down delighted that their cringey words inspired a new generation of Progressive Jews to progress, to move on, to continue pursuing justice through God’s commands rather than to assume God’s commands constitute justice themselves.
• God never again spoke directly to Abraham after the Binding of Isaac. God has never directly spoken to any of us either (although, if I’m mistaken about that, please let me know). So, as the descendants of Abraham and the inheritors of Judaism, it is our duty to make God speak through us. The way we live our lives, the way we engage our consciences, the way we judge right and wrong and separate the two: that is the voice of God in a world of unholiness. שנה טובה.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. William Ellery Channing, Complete Works (London: Christian Life Publishing Company, 1884) @p341. ↩︎
2. Genesis 22:2 ↩︎
3. Leszek Kolakowski, Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and The key to Heaven trans Salvator Attanasio (1972; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), @p115. ↩︎
4. Genesis 22:1 ↩︎
5. See eg Rashi, Radak ad loc ↩︎
6. Rabbi David E Ostrich, “What is Abraham supposed to do?“, Congregation Brit Shalom (15 September 2020). ↩︎
7. See eg Jonathan Sacks, One People? Tradition, modernity and Jewish unity (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 1993) @p171. ↩︎
8. Jacob Zalkind, “A shtiekel shepfungs-mitologia” [Yiddish], Arbayter Fraynd (May 1920) @p3 ↩︎
9. Leviticus 20:10 ↩︎
10. See eg Elliot Cosgrove, “A choosing people: Jews and law“, Sources (spring 2023). ↩︎
11. See, for example, the contortions through which the rabbis went to avoid stoning their stubborn and rebellious sons to death even though the Torah clearly told them to: b.Sanhedrin 45b. ↩︎
12. Exodus 24:7 (which would, incidentally, be a good name for a kosher corner-shop with extended opening hours) ↩︎
13. Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishma’el, Ba-chodesh 5 ↩︎
14. Dr Kaufman Kohler, Hebrew Union College and other addresses (Cincinnati: Ark, 1916) @p179. Emphasis omitted. Kohler’s argument is intriguingly similar the ‘normal justification thesis’ for political authority formulated by the modern Israeli philosopher Joseph Raz z”l: see eg Scott Hershovitz, “Legitimacy, democracy and Razian authority”, Legal Theory 9 (2003), 201-220. ↩︎
15. Deuteronomy 21:10-13 ↩︎
16. Genesis 22:9 ↩︎
17. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) @p39. ↩︎
18. Maaaaybe ↩︎
19. See eg Lev Taylor and Gabriel Kanter-Webber, “Two ethical descendants of Rabbi Rayner in conversation”, European Judaism 58 (2025), 27-36. ↩︎