In July, I posted an interview with Prof Aaron Koller on his book Unbinding Isaac (JPS, 2020), his book took issue with the Kierkegaard’s approach to the story of the binding of Isaac, and he rejected the influence Kierkegaard had on the thought of Rabbi Soloveitchik and Yeshaya Leibowitz. This was, in turn, used rejected a Judaism that he required us to suppress our sense of morality. He showed that it was not the true reading of Genesis or the predominant one of Jewish history nor does it fit Maimonides view of prophecy.
Three days later Rabbi Zach Truboff responded with The Things We Do For Love: A Response to Aaron Koller, which defended the role of passion, compulsion, desire, and projections in religion mediated by Julia Kristeva, Eric Santer, Yishai Mevorah, and Maimonides on passionate love of God.
We gain another response to Koller written by Rabbi Elinatan Kupferberg who defends the role of submission to the law and not following our ethical intuitions, defense of Yeshivish Orthodox thinking as found in the Hazon Ish and Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk. Kupferberg argues that Rabbi JB Soloveitchik did not need Kierkegaard for focusing on submission, rather his direct Rabbinic antecedents already emphasized the need for submission to the divine will, and more than that, the Divine will is assumed to be moral even if we do not see it.
Rabbi Elinatan Kupferberg is the Rabbinic intern at the RJC in Riverdale, NY. He currently learns in the Beren Kollel Elyon in Yeshiva University. His learning includes the Telshe Yeshiva of Chicago, Yeshiva Zichron Moshe in South Fallsburg., Brisk in Jerusalem, and Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood.He has an MA from BRGS.
Rabbi Kupferberg divided his essay into four parts.
In the first part, he shows how Jewish thought, as exemplified by Rabbi Isaac Arama’s Akadat Yitzhak considered God’s word as intrinsically ethical even if it appears immoral. Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk felt the same way and hence Rabbi Soloveitchik did not need Kierkegaard.
In the second part, he presents an Orthodox worldview in which Jerusalem must take precedence over Athens. Kupferberg present an Orthodox reading of Leo Strauss, where morality is not from reason or human understanding but entirely from listening to God. He also presents an original homily based on a leit-motif of the word ‘eikev as showing how the Akadah’s idea of obedience is the very core theology of Deuteronomy. And he presents Maimonides on the sublime as showing a limit to the human intellect.
In the third part of the essay, Kupferberg shows how the Hazon Ish does not acknowledge any moral criteria in understanding the law. While in Kupferberg’s view and own self-understanding, he as a Centrist Orthodox rabbi does acknowledge, similar to Rabbi David Hartman but not as firm, that the ethical played a role in Abraham pleading for Sodom. he does note that he finds Rabbi Hartman’s readings questionable. Furthermore, Kupferberg is willing to recognize that the Talmudic desiccation of the laws of the rebellious son was done for ethical concerns.
More than this, he sees Orthodoxy as having a tension of obedience and moral concerns. But the moral concerns are always tempered by the obedience. For Kupferberg, who exemplifies many in Orthodoxy, ethical concerns end when they “bump up against the facticity of the text” Meaning that the system and the status quo are already taken as a factual reality, which limits moral concern to small moments in the system. Kupferberg see himself as engaged in independent moral reasoning but recognizes that it is restricted by the norms and ideals unbudgeably established by Torah and halakha.
Identifying the biblical text or halakha with moral rationalism is itself an act of moral surrender, since it assumes a position not arrived at or subject to autonomous moral thought.Personally, Kupferberg identifies with Telshe thought as essentially the position sketched out.
He concludes the third part with a sharp dichotomy of those autonomous rational people without prior commitments to facticity of the text, in his mind they treat the Bible as immoral, archaic, and irrelevant. Rather, the correct approach is to have a commitment which is heteronomous, about obedience, and following the Biblical text as understood to support the halakhic worldview. At this point, Koller’s entire thesis or concern with increasing moral concern in Modern Orthodoxy has been rejected before a stricter approach about obedience the text, albeit one with some moral concern.
Kupferberg contrasts his understanding of Telshe approach to the Hazon Ish to say that he does indeed have a significant moral element compared to the Hazon Ish’s formalism. For Kupfererg, this is a solid qualitative difference between his approach and Hazon Ish. But the thesis of Koller’s book and Koller’s argument was against a Centrist Orthodoxy that already had a greater moral element, this difference seems more rhetorical than substantively. Those who find Centrist Orthodoxy as not morally concerned are already discussing a Centrist version of Rabbi Soloveitchik, not a Haredi version. The false dichotomy would also place Levinas’ heteronomous Biblical vision, used by Koller as a conclusion, as somehow on the side of autonomous rational self.
Finally, in fourth part of the essay he gives a contemporary example of the firm need for ethical submission and heteronomy, the case of Israel/Palestine. For Kupferberg, he can have unencumbered ethical concern for the Rohingya genocide or the Uyghur genocide. But he has to temper his ethical concerns when it concerns Palestine because in his Centrist Orthodox view the facticity of the text restrains it. Kupferberg may have moral concern for the situation in Palestine. He trusts, however, that his relation to the land is God’s covenantal command. He concludes with a paean to the Akadah paradigm as the basis of his reading of Torah and of the religious life.
In the end, Kupferberg offers an alternative religious worldview to take of Prof Koller. I am not sure that there can be much give and take between the opinions. When many in the current generation feel a need to reclaim a moral sense over fidelity to the text, this essay goes in the other direction. He excludes those Jewish thinkers who emphasis the moral rationalism of the Torah such as Rabbis Saadiah Gaon, Shmuel David Luzatto, SR Hirsch, or Rav Moshe Shmuel Glasner to name a few. In fact, just this week a new book of Rav Menachem Froman Z”L quotes, including one that starts “Religious obligation is a disaster.”
This division of worldviews is part of a bigger divide. I received many emails from Centrist Orthodoxy educators after I posted the interview with Professor Koller wanting to defend fidelity to the law over what they saw as the immoral anarchy of human reason. Many who defend Prof Koller’s position would see the position of fidelity to the law without only minor ability to be moral as the height of immorality and suspension of the ethical.
Either way, I have to deeply thank Rabbi Kupferberg for coming through with flying colors and writing a substantive essay defending his position showing the position of post-Brisk Centrist Orthodoxy, and its fellow travelers.
Rabbi Elinatan Kupferberg responds to Prof Aaron Koller
Part I
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard challenged the readers of Abraham’s Binding of Isaac (the Akedah): There were countless generations who knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word, but how many did it render sleepless? It appears my teacher, Professor Aaron Koller, wants to help us sleep more satisfactorily.
In his recent book, he argues that the prevailing Modern Orthodox interpretation of the Akedah is of distinctly Kierkegaardian origin. Abraham’s suspension of his ethical instincts and unquestionable submission to God’s will are both morally troubling and inconsonant with Jewish tradition, where faith does not supersede ethics and Abraham’s remarkable act of faith is not meant to be normative. Instead, he offers an erudite explanation of the revelation not to sacrifice Isaac, arguing that it is the core teaching of the Akedah. The lesson of the Akedah is ethical.
Koller defends his reading on the grounds of its cogency as biblical interpretation and its coherence with traditional Jewish perspectives on the Akedah. Though I find his literary interpretation of the unbinding compelling and insightful, I want to argue that it is precisely on those grounds that his approach to the Akedah’s ultimate significance should be rejected.
Koller is correct that Judaism, which considers morality a basic obligation, cannot accept a Kierkegaardian interpretation of the Akedah which translates Abraham’s faith into a general obligation to obey the Torah at the cost of being morally monstrous. However, Jewish thought does not need recourse to Kierkegaard to account for Abraham’s seemingly absurd act of faith.
Traditional Jewish thought did see a clash of God’s word and rational ethics at the heart of the Akedah. But, instead of embracing the absurd, it prescribes the conviction that, despite its impenetrability, God’s word must be reasonable. It was this ethos of submission to God’s will that thinkers such as R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik drew on in their interpretations of the story.
Four hundred years before Kierkegaard, the 15th century Maimonidean philosopher-exegete R. Isaac Arama (in his coincidentally named Akedat Yitshak, Sha‘ar 21) described the essential conflict of the Akedah as the clash between faith in the wisdom of God’s word and human rationality. The intention of the trial was
to actualize [Abraham’s] perfection and thereby complete his reason and knowledge… it should completely elevate him from the tier of a natural philosopher to the superiority of divine Torah, since this is the greatest philosophical absurdity, and it is evident that no one would do so unless the compulsion to obey the insight and command superior to human reason endured in his soul with both love and fear…
The significance of the Akedah is that Abraham’s faith in God’s word triumphed over his reason. Abraham persevered because he recognized that God’s words represented a pattern of thought that human reason can’t reliably master. And, precisely because the sacrifice of Isaac was considered absurd by any rational philosophy, and it was only sensible for Abraham to comply if he had faith in divine wisdom, did the trial elevate him above the limits of human rationality.
The religious experience of the Akedah, applied to us, generalizes as submission to the divine wisdom as manifest in the entire Torah. The lesson of the Akedah is that the same submission “is a standing obligation for every person.” Completing the analogy and further anticipating Kierkegaard, R. Isaac Arama adds that the Akedah teaches that one must follow this divine wisdom even at the cost of committing what society would consider a patently abhorrent crime (Akedat Yitshak, Sha‘ar 27).
In the 19th century, the intellectual sovereignty of God’s word emerged at the forefront of the Orthodox Rabbinic consciousness. R. Hayyim Soloveitchik, building on the theological groundwork laid by his father R. Yosef Dov (author of Beit Halevi), developed his method of Brisker halakhic analysis founded on the belief that Torah is epistemically independent of science or the natural realm. It can only be understood and expressed in its own terms, with its own discursive tools, defying the reach of academic or other distinctly human modes of understanding.
And for R. Hayyim, this was epitomized by the Akedah (Hiddushei Maran Hagriz Halevi Hahadashot §37). R. Hayyim begins his analysis of the story with the midrash which describes Abraham’s response to the news that Isaac was not to be sacrificed.
R. Abba said: [Abraham said:] Yesterday You told me: “For through Isaac your seed shall be recognized.” And then You tell me: “Take your son.” And now You tell me: “Don’t extend your hand to the boy.” God responded to Abraham: “I do not violate My covenant… (Ps. 89:35).” When I told you “take your son,” I didn’t say, “sacrifice him” rather “bring him up.” [I mean:] Bring him up and then take him down. (Bereshit Rabbah 56:11)
R. Hayyim questioned why Abraham only challenged God’s conflicting statements after Isaac was released. Why did he act in solemn subservience rather than immediately addressing the conflict? R. Hayyim explained that, in theory, it is actually forbidden to entertain doubts regarding the logic of God’s words. Human rationality is not a standard by which the Torah is measured. However, one of the traditional principles of Biblical exegesis is: Two verses that conflict with each other until a third verse arbitrates between them, which sanctions questions asked within that framework. Working in the opposite direction of R. Isaac, R. Hayyim applies this hermeneutic to Abraham’s engagement with God’s statements. When God spoke to Abraham at the beginning of the Akedah, there was no “third arbitrating verse” yet, so questions were as yet forbidden. And so, at first, Abraham was silent and solemnly complied. Only once Abraham received the third statement (Don’t extend your hand…) was he able to use this method to inquire after God and clarify the previous statements. Throughout the Akedah, Abraham’s actions and thoughts were guided by the strictures of Torah.
The idea of the Torah’s philosophical independence was passed down to R. Hayyim’s grandson, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. It shaped his halakhic thought, (conspicuously motivating the thesis of his early essay, The Halakhic Mind), and it informed his reading of Abraham’s obedience during the Akedah. While Kierkegaard influenced R. Soloveitchik’s approach, the distinctly Brisker hue of his understanding of the crux of Abraham’s faith has been overlooked. When addressing this central problem, his interpretation eschews Kierkegaard and echoes his grandfather, R. Hayyim.
Yet how did Abraham take this divine command? Did he argue, beg for mercy and clemency? Did he ask God the dreadful question: “If I am to sacrifice my son, what is to become of the great promise?” We marvel at Abraham’s sedateness, complacency, and peace of mind. The enormous feat of the knight of faith was demonstrated not in his actual compliance with the divine order but in the manner in which he behaved in the face of the most puzzling divine absurdity. The blood-chilling fear of meeting the nonsensical did not overcome Abraham. Abraham’s performance is not to be equated with a compulsory submission to a tyrannical power who overwhelmed it; nor should it be understood as an act of fatalistic despair… Abraham did not realize the absurdity and paradoxality of the divine order… Naively, almost irrationally, did he conceive of the demand as somehow compatible with the whole… By acting the way he did, Abraham unconsciously relieved the tension and reconciled himself with God.(The Emergence of Ethical Man, 156-157).
R. Soloveitchik refuses to see Abraham abandoning his reason in favor of the Kierkegaardian absurd. Instead, he adopts the Brisker conviction that God’s word is in some way sensible despite its defiance of rationality.
Seeing R. Soloveitchik as a Kiekergaardian exegete of the Akedah obscures how he read the most conspicuous part of the biblical story itself. The existential drama of Abraham’s inner world takes place between the lines of the text. The Abraham we directly encounter, the one presented to us for reflection, is serene, unquestioning, and eager to listen to God. In biblical terms, he fears God. While Kierkegaardian explorations into Abraham’s psyche may be religiously fruitful, it is the understanding of how Abraham’s silent faith triumphed that is salient for the Akedah’s religious message. When it comes to this crucial picture, R. Soloveitchik avoids Kierkegaard and colors it in accordance with his Brisker heritage.
Part II.
A careful reading of the biblical text bears out this Abraham-centric reading. Beginning with the Torah’s opening self-description, the text informs us that what follows is to be a test of Abraham. The nature of the test is not spelled out, but the angelic speeches make clear the basis upon which Abraham was evaluated. The first speech – “now I know that you are fearful of God and you did not withhold your son… from Me” – indicates what the trial has revealed (Abraham truly fears, or reveres, God) and why (he didn’t refrain from sacrificing Isaac).
As Maimonides describes, fear of God is the experience of the limits of one’s rational mind when encountering the majestic wisdom of God (MT Yesodei Hatorah 2:2; GP 3:52). Recognizing the boundless, cosmic, wisdom of God causes man to shrink back in fear and awe, suddenly conscious of his mortal deficiencies. Leo Strauss, in his essay Jerusalem and Athens, has argued that this idea is, in fact, the Bible’s core teaching about wisdom, as encapsulated in the verse: The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Attaining wisdom begins with first recognizing that limited human reason is transcended by God’s wondrous wisdom. Natural human rationality is insufficient for true wisdom, which consists of apprehending the divine wisdom that God has revealed, namely, in His commands and His Torah.
Adapting Maimonides’ explanation of fear of God to the Akedah, the description of Abraham as fearful of God means he was not moved by his embrace of the absurdity or irrationality of God’s word but, as R. Isaac Arama interpreted, by the recognition of its supra-rationality. Within the bounds of his own rationality, God’s words remained inscrutable. But Abraham had faith in the divine intellect beyond the reaches of human reason.
This interpretation enables us to understand Abraham’s cryptic response when he was asked by Isaac about the whereabouts of the lamb. Abraham was unable to articulate what he believed – it was entirely unintelligible to him. The only certainty he had, and therefore the only answer he could give, was “God will see to the lamb Himself.” Only from God’s perspective was the identity of the lamb knowable.
The significance of this obedient faith is underscored in the angel’s second speech. Because of Abraham’s obedience, the angel reinforces God’s promise of land and progeny with a divine oath. The significance of the oath should not be overlooked. Not only does it appear at the climax of the Akedah, it is the apotheosis of Abraham’s own narrative. After a life of recurring promises, it is the first time that God finally secures His word to Abraham with an oath and it is also the final dialogue between God and Abraham. Effectively, the ordeal of the Akedah marks the culmination of the God-Abraham relationship and the election of Abraham as the patriarch of God’s chosen people. It’s hard to imagine that we are meant to see the unbinding of Isaac as the high point in the drama.
Abraham’s obedience to God also resurfaces again in the Torah. In the narrative, the oath is accompanied by the peculiar phrase “since [you] listened to My voice (‘eikev ’asher sham‘ata bekoli).
The phrase only reappears in the Torah first when God repeats the oath to Isaac in chapter 26 and then again in Deuteronomy chapter 7. Moses tells the Israelites that if they listen to God, (vehaya ‘eikev tishme‘un), God will guarantee them the oath He swore to Abraham their ancestor. In other words, just as Abraham received the promises on account of his listening to God, his descendants who inherited the promises must likewise listen to God to benefit from them. By describing Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and the people’s observance of Torah in the same, highly specific, terms, the implication is clear: we should be emulating Abraham.
Part III.
Koller writes that Kierkegaard’s glorification of the knight of faith, who overcomes his own natural thinking to suspend ethics, has no place in Judaism, a religion whose operative assumption is that religion ought to agree with ethics. Granted, this is an important theological distinction between Judaism and Kierkegaard’s Lutheranism regarding the place of ethics in religion. However, the conceptual agreement of religion and ethics doesn’t preclude an ethos of submission to God’s will. It simply means that part of surrendering to God’s will means accepting that it is ethical.
The purest exponent of this theology was the Hazon Ish. The notion that halakha is determinative of ethics formed the backbone of the Hazon Ish’s veiled critique of the Mussar movement’s ideas of general spiritual and ethical self-development in his Emuna u-Bitachon. The Hazon Ish took the fact that halakha necessarily entails ethical judgments to its extreme logical conclusion: Halakha makes decisive and thoroughgoing ethical claims which are prone to contradict the discernment of even the most perfected moral conscience. Polemicizing against Mussar’s independence and lack of reliance on halakhic strictures, the Hazon Ish articulated an alternative ethos of submission to the ethical code implicit in the norms of the Torah. The only way to improve oneself morally from a Jewish perspective is to study and surrender to the ethic of the Torah.
However, accepting the lesson of the Akedah as surrender to God’s word does not necessarily entail following the Hazon Ish in the abandonment of moral reasoning when faced with challenging religious obligations.
The Akedah is not the only story where Abraham is positioned in moral tension with God. The counterpoint to Abraham’s submission at the Akedah is, of course, Abraham’s moral courage on behalf of Sodom. Koller addresses this contrast through David Hartman’s analysis (A Heart of Many Rooms, 12-14). Hartman placed both religious paradigms alongside each other and argued that both submission and moral courage are operative in Jewish tradition. God both demands unconditional surrender to His command and invites moral initiative.
Hartman stresses the tension between the two paradigms, between unconditional surrender and moral initiative, informs the range of Talmudic interpretations of the biblical law of the rebellious son. The Rabbis morally questioned the justice of stoning a child for juvenile acts of gluttony. Their responses range from invoking an Akedah mode of argument to accept the literal meaning and forfeit moral justifications; to offering a justificatory interpretation that the Torah foresaw more heinous crimes the child will inevitably commit; to accepting the critique and concluding that the law is entirely theoretical and meant only for study. (though I find this reading very questionable). From Abraham at Sodom we learn that when parsing God’s word, one does not leave morality outside and approach the text as an empty receptacle.
Nevertheless, Koller, similar to Strauss, is unconvinced, arguing that the paradigm of Sodom is unhelpful for tempering the religious message of the Akedah. The stories do not reflect different religious models – but different realities. In the story of Sodom, God engaged Abraham, offering an implicit opening for his initiative. Whereas in the Akedah, Abraham is confronted by “a blunt and unambiguous command.” The paradigm of Sodom is unrelated and, therefore, incapable of saving us from the austere demands of the Akedah.
Here I must disagree with Koller. Granted, the realities are different, but the story of Sodom still importantly contextualizes and qualifies the religious force of the Akedah. Taken on its own, the Akedah presents a categorical response to all contact between God’s word and ethical sentiments, namely, total surrender. Reading the stories together, however, Abraham’s obedience at the Akedah is recontextualized as a response that actually exists at one end of a spectrum of this type of conflict. On one end of the spectrum are clear, direct, and personal divine orders, and they claim unconditional obedience. This is the paradigm of Abraham at the Akedah, when God spoke to and commanded him personally. But God’s voice does not always materialize with such peremptory authority. Jumping to the other end of the spectrum, we find the paradigm of Sodom: God implicitly inviting man into a moral dialogue with Him. And, in between the two, are all the instances where God’s word is not so transparent or directly personal nor His invitation so unequivocally open. In other words, where the examples of real-life struggle of faith and ethics are.
Not all moral dilemmas are as binary as the sacrifice of an innocent child, where moral surrender automatically violates Judaism’s commitment to morality. Most encompass shades of gray, with multiple possible resolutions, where giving up some moral autonomy does not necessarily mean acting unethically.
In fact, integrating Koller’s reading that the command not to sacrifice Isaac was an ethical revelation makes the traditional interpretation of the Akedah less morally troubling. If the possession of children by their parents was conventional moral logic until the revelation at the Akedah, then up until that point Abraham was not in conscious violation of the moral law. Abraham’s faith that God’s command was just didn’t come at the cost of consenting to murder.
The Talmudic dispute about the law of the rebellious son is instructive here. The passage in the Torah is textual case law, it is not a direct, personal command from God. Rather, the rebellious son is somewhere in between the paradigms of the Akedah and Sodom, enabling the range of views regarding the strength of the opposing moral questions. But, since it is God’s word, the surrender of the Akedah paradigm can’t be totally avoided. Even in the most extreme option, when the Rabbis deny the application of the law in practice, they don’t allow their moral confoundment to suppress the passage or deny its wisdom. God forbid. Instead, their commitment to God’s word – the Torah – leads them to conclude that it is meant to be studied.
And herein is the inescapable moral surrender that we do learn from the Akedah. Commitment to the Torah creates a dialectical tension between heteronomy of God’s word and the autonomy of man’s moral reasoning. With no prior commitments, a moral reasoner appalled by the obedience demanded by the biblical text would be free to dismiss it as immoral, archaic, and irrelevant.
The Rabbis demonstrate how a committed Jew cannot escape this tension. However far he is carried by the power of his moral questions, he will inevitably bump up against the facticity of the text. He cannot escape his commitment that it is, at the very least, educative and worthy of study.
IV.
Much of Orthodox Jewish thought, in my case typified in Yeshivish Orthodoxy by Telshe, does not take halakha’s ethics to be as exhaustive and defined as the Hazon Ish did, allowing more room for independent moral reasoning. But there is nonetheless a more nuanced, but very real, surrender of autonomous moral reasoning inherent in the acceptance of the authority of the Torah. Even identifying the Torah with moral rationalism in the vein of R. Saadiah Gaon or Maimonides is effectively moral surrender since it accepts a position not produced by, or subject to, autonomous moral thought. Overlooking the surrender to God’s word epitomized by the Akedah ignores what is a vital element of religious life even for modern communities who champion critical thought and independent moral reasoning.
Examples of this surrender are more ubiquitous in halakhic life than one might think. Accepting the authority of halakha introduces competing moral and religious responsibilities that, subtly but pervasively, prevent one from living a wholly autonomous ethical life.
When a committed halakhic Jew works through an ethical question, he doesn’t face an uncharted moral landscape. The Torah has already established obligations, priorities, and inviolate boundaries that restrict and readjust the paths his reasoning can take.
Moreover, even if we put aside consideration of the Torah’s express moral claims, there is still a degree of ethical heteronomy entailed in the elementary acceptance of the Torah’s conceptual framework. Here, I will speak personally, but I imagine I am not alone.
Suppose I was asked to weigh in on international territorial disputes and two virtually identical cases were brought before me for my assessment. One was the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the second was an entirely isomorphic case, with identical histories and religious beliefs, but the Kurds replaced the Israelis and the Swedes replaced the Palestinians. I confess I would judge them differently. And not simply due to my individual biases, though not overlooking ethical concerns (nor justifying any specific course of action). Whichever moral assessment I made about territorial rights in the abstract, and then applied to the latter dispute, would necessarily be somewhat adjusted (in whichever direction) by my faith that God made a covenant with my ancestors in which He promised us the land of Israel. My faith in the covenant would be incorporated into the broader calculus. (In fact, one who subscribes to Satmar theology, for whom the eschatological conditions of the covenant shift the moral balance toward Palestinian territorial rights, is equally complicit in moral surrender).
If someone asks me how I could alter my moral judgment on the basis of faith, I will respond that it was on the basis of this type of surrender that God originally sealed the election of my ancestor Abraham.
And, indeed, Jewish tradition recognizes that are instances where the Akedah paradigm comes to the fore and the force of God’s command subdues man’s ethical instincts. An example of this clash of faith and ethics is presented in Yoma 22b:
Rabbi Mani said… When the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Saul: “Now go and attack Amalek,” he countered: Now, if for one life the Torah said to perform the ritual of breaking the heifer’s neck (egla ‘arufa), all the more so [must I have pity on] all these Amalekite lives. And if the men have sinned, in what way have the animals sinned? And if the adults have sinned, in what way have the children sinned? A Divine Voice then came forth and said to him: “Do not be overly righteous” (Ecclesiastes 7:16).
Drawing on Ecclesiastes, R. Mani asserts that Saul must surrender his moral instincts in face of a direct and unambiguous divine command. The choice of Ecclesiastes here is deliberate. Ecclesiastes joins the Akedah paradigm with its trenchant skepticism and despair about the fruitfulness of man’s reliance on his own wisdom or notions of virtue. And yet, like the Akedah, Ecclesiastes’ message is also balanced. Its skepticism is met by the constant confidence of Proverbs that the wise and discerning man can live a good and ethical life.
The Akedah, however, has a different lesson. Its message is one of fearing God, acknowledging the unassailability of His wisdom, and surrendering to His command. Or, to put it the way Ecclesiastes would:
The end of the matter, everything having been heard: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the entirety of man.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 