Bound to Each Other: My Longing for Ishmael
Had the Bible begun with the Binding of Isaac, it appears nothing would have been detracted from the foundation of Judaism: the right to sacrifice your life for the sanctifacation of God. Not everyone is given that right, but rather it is a right that implies while also constituting another basic right, deeply and inseparably intertwined with it: to be from the seed of Abraham. The binding creates an eternal pact between one chosen blood and one choosing God, founding the supremacy of the holy alliance above genealogical law and granting it only to the seed of Abraham. All of the universal genesis stories, the narrative of the division of the races, the languages and cultures and their actions on earth, were only meant to serve as a very calculated linear introduction leading to its peak, the binding of Isaac, where the radical and ultimate transformation occurs in the Biblical divinity, the transition from a creating God to a choosing God, who makes a choice to which he will be commited for eternity. According to the principle of dichotomous lineage that preceded the binding of Isaac, the whole story of Ishmael the son of Abraham before the binding is construed as a sacrifice that is suspended in order to mark and construct the absolute uniqueness of Isaac, the chosen and sacred sacrifice. Ishmael is banished and suspended not from the right of inheritance but from the very right to be the chosen and sacred sacrifice – a right that grants all of the inheritances together, both the rule of the earth and eternal life as God’s chosen one. That principle of the right to be the chosen sacrifice and the heir alongside a suspended and banished sacrifice, which construes the designated and sanctified sacrifice, runs as a thread through all of Jewish history, and has astonishing manifestations in Zionist and Israeli history in particular.