Blog

Sacrifice and Prayer
Rabbi David Stein

I joined a call a few months ago to discuss Jewish education in the wake of October 7th. As part of a fellowship that I’ve been a part of the past several years, a pluralistic group of Rabbis, educators, and academic scholars got together to explore how we have each responded to the tragedies of the past two years. The question at hand was to define our personal goals for Jewish education, and when it was my turn to share, I dutifully presented as succinct a vision as I could:

My goal, I explained to the participants, was for my students to feel a responsibility to something bigger than themselves. For them to be willing to sacrifice something for Am Yisrael.

As soon as I finished, one of the group participants, a senior leader at a Jewish Federation on the other side of the country, unmuted her Zoom audio and declared: “Judaism abhors sacrifice, and we should never educate our students to sacrifice of themselves for either God or country.”

I didn’t have a chance to respond to her at the meeting, but I’ve been thinking about this Zoom call ever since. And as we read the story of Akeidat Yitzchak today, I want to articulate a response. Spoiler alert: I deeply disagree - but I want to share how I came to articulate the goals that I shared that day. And to do so I want to start with the foundational story of the Jewish people that we read on Rosh Hashana:

״קח נא את בנך, את יחידך אשר אהבת והעלהו שם לעולה על אחד ההרים אשר אומר אליך״

“Take your son,” Hashem commands Avraham, “your only son, whom you love, and bring him up as an offering on one of the mountains which I will designate to you.”

How many times over the past two years has it felt like God has demanded our sacrifices? If nothing else, as we stand here today with the book of life open before Hashem and read of Avraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, does it not seem as if Judaism honors - and even expects - sacrifice?

Rav Soloveitchik certainly thought so. Rav Soloveitchik read the story of Avraham, and understood it to be a paradigm for what it means to be a Jew. In his book Divrei Hashkafa, the Rav wrote that “I recoil from all talk that goes round and round a single topic: that the observance of mitzvot should be easy and rewarding, that it is beneficial for digestion, for sound sleep, or for family harmony. The religious act,” he wrote:

is fundamentally an experience of sacrifice. When man meets God, God demands self-sacrifice, which expresses itself in struggle with his primitive passions, in accepting a heavenly "burden," in occasional withdrawal from the sweet and pleasant, and in clash with secular rule. Offer your sacrifice! This is the fundamental command given to the religious individual. The chosen of the nation, from the moment that they revealed God, occupied themselves in a continual act of sacrifice.

Sacrifice, argues Rav Soloveitchik, is not abhorrent; it defines who we are.

By in large, I agreed with Rav Soloveitchik until October 7th. In the weeks after that horrible day, though, I found myself questioning this value of sacrifice - especially after I read the story of Matan Abergel.

As a Jewish educator, I’m privy to a steady stream of speakers who travel the world to share their stories with our children. Nova survivors, spiritual leaders, communal activists, and, of course, IDF soldiers. And so when a group of chayalim came to Shalhevet last spring to speak about their time fighting on October 7th and in Gaza, I sat to listen attentively along with my students. Yet this particular group stood out to me because of those who didn’t speak; I couldn’t help but notice two young soldiers who stood off to the side, shying away from the microphone as their comrades spoke. And so after the program, I approached the two and thanked them for coming. They responded quietly and handed me a bumper sticker with a picture on it of their friend. Their stories weren’t important, they said. Instead, they wanted to share the story of Matan, the soldier who had saved their lives.

I had read about Matan. His story has been told many times over, and is included in the incredible volume of forty stories from October 7th that was published in Hebrew and English as One Day in October - Yom Echad b’October. Matan was a quiet, unassuming kid - a 19 year old who was described by his father as having a heart of pure gold. On October 7th, Matan found himself in an armored truck with a group of soldiers - the ones who visited last spring, surrounded by tens of Hamas terrorists. After fighting for hours and running low on ammunition, a grenade was thrown into their vehicle, and Matan, with his heart of gold, jumped on it to save his friends. Matan survived for a few moments after the blast, just long enough for them to rush over to his body and hear him utter his final words: “I did everything I could for my country and for my friends.”

Matan’s story - alongside the stories of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, alongside the story of the brave lookouts, of the selfless parents, of the supportive friends, of those who danced and Nova and those who lived in the kibbutzim is far too familiar to us. And as I read Matan’s story, I couldn’t help but turn to Hashem and cry bitter tears to Hashem. Really, Ribono shel olam? Is this what you need from us? Haven’t we sacrificed enough?

As I grappled with the pain of the sacrifices of Matan and so many others, I turned to another foundational text that we read on Rosh Hashana. For today, we also read the story of Chana. Chana, of course, is known not for the sacrifice of her son, but for the prayers she uttered to bear him. Hers is a story, more than anything else, of hope rather than of submission. Her paradigm suggests that to be a Jew is not simply to sacrifice to God, but to be in conversation with Him.

Indeed, Radak, one of the most prominent medieval commentators of Tanakh, notes that Chana’s story begins by telling that her husband used to come to the mishkan “להשתחוות ולזבוח"- to bow and pray and only then to sacrifice. Noting this order, Radak explains that

חביבה תפילה יותר מכל הקרבנות דכתיב להשתחוות ואחר כך לזבוח:

Prayer is more beloved than all of the sacrifices, as it is [first] written here, 'to bow down,' and afterwards, 'to sacrifice.'"

We have then, two competing paradigms before us: Avraham and Yitzchak who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, and Chana, who taught us the power of prayer. So am I wrong to instill within my students a responsibility to something other than themselves? Should I not instead seek to inspire within them the experience of tefillah?

I grappled with this question for weeks after October 7th, until I read the introduction to Yom Echad b’October. In that introduction, the volume’s editor, Yair Agmon, tells of his own grief and depression in the wake of 10/7. Faced with the horrors of that day, all he could do in those first few weeks was read the news and cry. And then he started compiling the stories of sacrifice, the stories of those who gave of themselves for the sake of others. And suddenly he discovered that behind each of those stories was a sacrifice that exemplified the good in others. The love of parents for their children. The values that people lived by. The perseverance of our people. The bravery of those who ran into battle. The chessed of those who cared for the dead or wounded. The peace that so many pursued. The beauty, the truth, the friendship, the camaraderie, and the hope behind each act of heroism on that day. These were not simple stories of Spartan sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. They were stories that represented the deep reservoirs of goodness that our people have carried with us for millenia, reservoirs that were opened on that day and found their expression in the sacrifices of so many.

And so I realized that the choice between prayer and sacrifice, between Avraham and Chana, is a false dichotomy. Chana, we are told, summoned her prayers from the depths of her heart, from the reservoirs of hope and longing within her soul:

וְחַנָּה הִיא מְדַבֶּרֶת עַל־לִבָּהּ

Chana was praying from her heart

Her prayer, like the sacrifices of so many that have come before us, was simply an expression of everything that she carried within, of the things that mattered most in her heart. Indeed, Chazal teach us that prayer itself was instituted to replace the sacrifices once the Beit haMikdash was destroyed - for they are two sides of the same coin. Avraham’s sacrifice is an expression of our love for Hashem, while Chana’s prayer is an expression of our dependence upon him. Hakadosh Baruch Hu doesn’t need us to die על קידושׁ ה׳ - he wants us to live and to daven על קידושׁ ה׳.

This, then, is what I would have responded on that Zoom call. That yes, I hope that we will be willing to sacrifice of ourselves, and that we will take responsibility for something bigger that our individual worlds. That like Avraham and Chana, I hope that our children can tap into their own reservoirs of purpose in order to give to, to pray for, and live by the values that we carry in our hearts. And that for us, this is the challenge of our dual readings on Rosh Hashana. Are we each sacrificing enough for the things that really matter in our lives as Avraham did? Do we each pray enough for those that we love as Chana did? Do we give of ourselves enough - not just by sending a check, but by showing up for those that we care for? Do we each experience the relationship, the interdependence, and the commitment to both Hashem and our community? Do we set our alarms early enough for Sunday morning shacharit? Do we push ourselves to show up to that early afternoon winter mincha? Do we come to dance together for Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat, or raise our voices loudly enough here on Shabbat morning?

Chana, we’re told prayed על ליבה - “on her heart,” a formulation that echoes the text of the Shema that we recite every day - “והיו הדברים האלה אשר אנוכי מצות על לבבך” - that Hashem’s words shall be “on your hearts.”  But this is a strange formulation - Rabbi Menaĥem Mendel of Kotzk, asked why it says in Shema that “These words shall be on your heart”? Should it not say that “These words shall be in your heart”? Shouldn’t our story of Chana say that her prayers were “in” her heart, or “from” her heart? Why do we have this language of prayers being “on” our hearts? The answer, suggested the Kotzker, is that our hearts are not always open. Therefore we should lay these words on our heart, so that when it opens, they will be there, ready to enter.

And so this year I pray that our hearts may be opened so that our deepest values can find expression in both our actions and our prayers. Shana Tova.