The Shofar Is Sounded Because Isaac Was There First

When the knife was lowered, a ram appeared in the thicket. Abraham took it and offered it in place of his son. That much the Torah tells. What the Torah does not tell is what God said to Abraham in the moment after, when the altar smoke was rising and Isaac was standing beside his father still alive.

According to the Legends of the Jews, Rabbi Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic sources compiled in the early twentieth century from materials stretching back to the Talmudic period, God made a specific promise at that moment. The ram's horn, the shofar, would be blown at the beginning of every year. And every time it sounded, God would remember this day. The instrument through which God's memory would be stirred was the instrument whose first use was here, at the moment when a father had been willing to give everything and a son had been willing to receive it.

Two horns came from that ram. The left horn was sounded at Sinai when the Torah was given. The rabbis heard an echo of the Akeidah in the Sinai theophany, as if the covenant at the mountain was the fulfillment of the promise God made on the mountain in Moriah. The right horn, larger, would be sounded at the end of days. The shofar that opens time and the shofar that closes it both come from the same animal, the one caught in the thicket at the moment Isaac was spared.

But Abraham did not walk away from that altar dry-eyed. Another passage in Legends of the Jews records what the weeping of that day left behind. When the angel held Abraham's arm, Abraham wept. When he realized Isaac would live, he wept again. The tears fell onto Isaac's eyes, and the texts say that those tears dimmed Isaac's sight. Abraham's grief was the first cause of Isaac's blindness in old age. The same blindness through which the aged Isaac would later be deceived by his son Jacob, in a chain of consequences that would take generations to fully unfold.

The Akeidah, in Jewish tradition, is not an event that happened once and was complete. It echoes forward. Every Rosh Hashanah, when the shofar sounds, what the prayer service is doing is presenting the merit of that moment to heaven, invoking the willingness of a father and son who both said yes in circumstances that would have broken most people. The legal and theological framework for this is explicit in the liturgy: Zichronot, the remembrance section of the Musaf prayer, asks God to remember the binding of Isaac and, in remembering it, to show mercy to his descendants.

Isaac himself, in the Legends tradition, invokes it directly when interceding for Israel. He cries out to God, reminding him that he allowed himself to be bound. Not that he was commanded and complied. That he allowed it. There was willingness in it. He became a participant and not merely a subject of the test. His argument is that this willing participation has a weight in heaven that should count against the sins of his descendants.

The circumcision precedes all of this. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a midrash from around the eighth century CE, records that when God commanded Abraham to circumcise himself and his household, Abraham did not delay a single day. He was ninety-nine years old. Isaac was circumcised on the eighth day, as the Torah prescribes. The midrash imagines Satan watching the whole sequence and complaining: here is a man who was circumcised at ninety-nine, here is a son who asked no questions when his father raised the knife, here is a family that has, time after time, given God what was asked without negotiating. What is left that can be used against them?

Not much, the tradition suggests. And that is precisely the problem for those who hoped Israel could be prosecuted in the heavenly court. The Book of Jubilees imagines the morning after Jacob's dream at Bethel, when Jacob woke and rushed to tell his father Isaac about it. He recounted the vision and his vow, eager and flushed with the encounter with the divine. Isaac heard everything his son described and responded with a blessing so elaborate it takes three verses of Jubilees to contain.

The chain is unbroken. Abraham's tears on the altar became Isaac's blindness. Isaac's blindness became Jacob's opportunity. Jacob's dream became the site of a future Temple. The Temple became the altar that superseded all other altars, the place where the merit of the Akeidah was invoked year after year. And the shofar, blown every Rosh Hashanah morning since the return from exile, is still carrying its original promise: that God has not forgotten what happened on that mountain, and will not.