Isaac Went Blind and God Named Himself the God of a Living Man

Isaac lost the doorway first, then the fire, then his own hands.

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Heaven treats a man in that condition as though he were already dead, and the reason is a technical matter about names. The Holy One does not put His own name on a righteous man while the man is still breathing. He waits for the burial. As long as a man is alive the yetzer hara (יצר הרע), the evil inclination, can still take him at the end, and no name should be tied to a story that goes wrong in the last chapter.

Then He said to Jacob, on a road, at night: "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac." Isaac was lying in a tent a few days' walk from that road, alive, waiting for a plate of venison.

Two Reasons a Living Man Got the Name

One answer counts ashes. Isaac had lain bound on the wood with a knife above him and an angel shouting, and Heaven kept the ashes on the altar as though the offering had gone all the way through. A man already burned cannot fall afterward.

Rabbi Berechiah gave the colder answer. Isaac was blind. A blind man stays in his house. The street stopped reaching him, and the evil inclination, which needs a street, walked off and left him alone in there. He had not been perfected. He had been sealed in.

The Blessing Over Lights He Could Not See

The question came up in every generation after him in a plain form. Can a blind man stand before the ark and lead the congregation. He may say some of it. He may not read from the scroll and he may not lift his hands over the people in blessing, because both of those want eyes. Rabbi Judah pressed harder, on the man blind from birth. Let that man say "Blessed be He who created the lights," and he stands there as a witness testifying to something he has never once seen.

Isaac was not blind from birth. He had seen the lights. He had seen a knife over his own chest. He lost the world by degrees until the tent was only voice, and smell, and the feel of a wrist under his fingers.

A man who cannot check a face has to trust his hands, and hands can be covered in goat hair.

Two Good Goats

Rebecca heard Isaac send Esau out for game. The words reached her before the tent flap had finished swinging. She went straight to Jacob. "Go to the flock and fetch me from there two good goats."

Good for you, she meant, and good for your children after you, who will find their forgiveness through goats on the Day of Atonement. The meal that was about to take a blessing already had a later altar folded inside it.

Jacob brought the food in. He brought wine with it. Wine keeps a blessing of its own, unlike every other fruit of every other tree, because wine was poured out on the altar and because Jacob's blessing rode in on it.

Isaac ate. Isaac drank. Isaac put his hands on the head of the son in front of him and gave away the dew of heaven and the service of nations.

Isaac Trembled a Great Trembling

Jacob had barely cleared the tent when Esau came in from the field with the meat.

"Let my father rise and eat of his son's venison."

"Who are you?"

"I am your son. Your firstborn. Esau."

Then Isaac trembled a great trembling.

He had eaten the meat. He had drunk the wine. He had run his fingers over hair on a young man's arms and been satisfied. The smell of open country was still in the room, and now the country itself was standing at the flap holding a dish.

He could not call back the dew of heaven. He could not see the son he had just turned into a servant, and he could not see the son who had walked out with everything. He shook, and the shaking went on long past the point where anyone knew what to do about it.

Sealed In and Robbed in the Same Room

Esau cried out after that, a great and bitter cry that filled the house.

The house that had kept the evil inclination away from Isaac was the same house that let a younger son walk in wearing his brother's arms. The seclusion that made him fit to carry the Name is what made him easy to rob, and there was no version of the afternoon where he got one without the other.

Jacob went out with nations in his hands. Esau stood holding a bowl of venison nobody needed. And the Holy One, who does not put His name on the living, went on calling Himself the God of Isaac while Isaac sat in the dark with his hands shaking on his knees.