Every night, for years, when I put my son to bed, I enjoy the ritual (which I know will probably not last much longer) of lying down next to him and reading, and then, at lights out, I say, “Do you know how much I love you?” and he says ( these days, somewhat groaningly), “Yes….”
“How much do I love you?”
“More than the entire universe.”
But a few weeks ago, after the usual exchange, he asked me, “What if you had to choose between the whole universe and me?”
I have to admit, I didn’t really know what to say. He answered his own question, though: he continued, “you would have to choose the universe, because I can’t exist without the whole universe.”
I was reminded of this exchange recently when a colleague posted a question about how to explain the Akedah to a child. How do explain that we have a story in which God asks a father to sacrifice his child, and the father does so? A child that our story claims is beloved by the father?
It is unsatisfactory (and not true to the text) to say that Abraham actually failed the test. But what we can ask is what my child asked me, “What if you had to choose between the universe and me?” and realize that perhaps there is no answer, because without the universe, there is no saving even a remnant of it, and maybe that’s what the metaphor of the story is.
