Parshah Commentary

“Where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” This is the question that Isaac asks his father, Abraham, as the two walk up Mount Moriah in the final aliyah of our parshah, Vayera. At first glance, the inquiry seems utterly naïve: Could Isaac truly not have noticed until this moment that his father had conspicuously failed to bring a sacrificial animal with them? Does he really not know that he is the sacrifice to be offered up? But perhaps Isaac is already aware of the answer, and the question expresses not a genuine uncertainty but rather his mounting horror that his loving father plans to slaughter him.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), the great Hasidic master, picks up on Isaac’s dread, connecting the unusual word for “where” that Isaac uses—“ayeh”— with a line from a prayer recited on Shabbat mornings: “Where [ayeh] is the dwelling of God’s glory?” In the context of the prayer, the question seems to be a rhetorical declaration of God’s omnipresence: The preceding line is an affirmation that “God’s glory fills the entire world,” and it is followed by the insistence that God will “turn toward us in mercy.” For Rebbe Nachman, though, the question is an articulation of the same despair that Isaac voices: Where could God possibly be amid such horror?

Rebbe Nachman spoke often of his own despair. This world, he taught, is actually hell, “for everyone is always full of great suffering.” Over the past 13 months, I’ve thought of these words often as I’ve wrestled with my own hopelessness. Time has felt like “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”: October 7th, the horrific destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, the extreme manifestations of climate catastrophe in North Carolina and Florida, and now the looming onset of another Trump presidency, with more wreckage surely on the way.

Faced with such a grim reality, it is tempting to try to think our way out of despair. How many of us have already tried to convince ourselves that maybe Trump won’t be as terrible as we expect this time around, or that he’ll be just terrible enough to mobilize the working class against him? Or that eventually the images of burning children in Gaza will awaken the world to Palestinians’ right to freedom and dignity? Rebbe Nachman, however, cautions against this approach. “When a person follows their own intellect and wisdom,” he teaches, “they can fall into great errors and obstacles, and come to great evils, God forbid.” Rebbe Nachman is not advocating the rejection of critical thinking or the adoption of an unsophisticated faith; rather, he is insisting that there are some fundamental challenges that neither rationalizing nor intellectualizing can solve. Such efforts lead us into “great evil” not because they are ill-intentioned, but because when our fantasies inevitably collapse, they tend to leave us feeling even more hopeless. After all, Trump could end his presidency to resounding applause, paving the way for a more extreme and capable fascist. And as Israel continues to unleash carnage in Gaza and Lebanon, the world may grow more apathetic instead of more outraged. If we have conditioned our ability to act on the belief that ultimately, the world is not as bad as it seems, will we have the strength to fight when it turns out to be far worse?

But what are we to do if not fantasize? Articulating an alternative path forward, Rebbe Nachman begins by noting that, according to the rabbinic sages, burnt offerings atone for “wayward thoughts.” While for the rabbis, this phrase refers to sinful impulses, Rebbe Nachman reinterprets “wayward thoughts” (“hirhurei ha-lev”) as referring to the confusion and disorientation of despair. In Rebbe Nachman’s reading, the “sacrifice” we can offer in response to our anguish is none other than the act of asking, “Where [ayeh] is God?,” which is itself a reenactment of Isaac’s experience of horror. For Rebbe Nachman, it is only by giving voice to the very despair we are seeking to escape—by honestly facing the extent of our hopelessness—that we can avoid being trapped by it. When we admit that there may well be no logical reason to hope, we can exchange our fantasies for an insistence that no matter the odds or the cost, our ideals and our communities are worth fighting for. This, too, is a sort of hope—one not dependent upon external circumstances.

But such faith does depend on something else: our own commitment. One of Rebbe Nachman’s later followers draws an additional parallel to Isaac’s inquiry—to the question God asks Adam as he hides in fear in the Garden of Eden after sinning: “Where are you [ayeh-kah]?” In this version of the question, the suffix “kah” is added to “ayeh” to direct the query back to humanity. Perhaps, we might venture, this connection means that it is only when we admit that no one is coming to save us that we can truly commit to fighting. When we finally cry out, desperate and broken, “Where is God?,” we may yet hear a faint echo, asking in return, “Where are you?”

Aron Wander is rabbinical student, organizer, and writer.