The Akeidah of Shmuel ibn Abbas

Chesky Kopel

It is easy, as an outsider, to condemn parents who alienate their own children over a disagreement. Even if their grown children choose a lifestyle of which they disapprove, even if they leave religious observance or choose an unsavory occupation or do anything to profoundly injure their parents’ sensibilities, the thinking goes, how can parents ever break the bonds of love and closeness with their own children?

It is much harder to consider that these parents might actually love their children just as much as the rest of us, and that the pain of their children’s decisions is just somehow greater than their love. It is haunting, even, to imagine the unimaginable: that even those of us who believe ourselves to be the right kind of parents, who would never forsake their own children, may react similarly if we were to encounter this kind of pain. Does every parent have their own version of disappointment, including a threshold at which it becomes unbearable? These questions come to my mind in Elul, when I am reminded of the life of R. Yehuda ben Shmuel ibn Abbas.

Yehuda ibn Abbas was a twelfth century dayyan (judge) and poet from the community of Fez, Morocco.^[1] In 1163, his only child, Shmuel, a respected mathematician, astronomer, and physician, converted to Islam. Shmuel is known to history as Al-Samawal ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī, author of the anti-Jewish polemical work Ifḥām al-Yahūd (Confutation of the Jews).^[2]

Many have speculated that the ordeal of Shmuel’s apostasy inspired Yehuda ibn Abbas’ composition of a liturgical piyyut called Eit Sha’arei Ratzon (“The Time of the Gates of Favor”).^[3] The piyyut, incorporated into the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgies of multiple Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions and set by each tradition to a different melody, describes the episode of Akeidat Yitzhak (the Binding of Isaac, Bereishit 22) with great pathos.^[4] Of course, the piyyut’s choice of subject matter is far from unique; poetic treatments of the Akeidah narrative form a centerpiece of the Selihot liturgy for all Jewish communities. But something feels unique about this poem.

I have been drawn to Eit Sha’arei Ratzon ever since I heard it performed, in the Libyan melody, by Livnat ben-Hamou and Oriyan Shukron in Yafo just weeks before October 7, 2023, in our final moments of comprehensible reality. It was strange and powerful to my Galitzianer ears, punctuated by a stage-setting refrain: okeid ve-ha-ne’ekad ve-ha-mizbei’ah (“the binder, the bound, and the altar”).

According to the Israeli musician and songwriter Ehud Banai, what makes Eit Sha’arei Ratzon so moving is its sharp portrayal of the pain experienced by the father Avraham, the son Yitzhak, and the heavenly angels in the fateful moments of uncompleted sacrifice. In Banai’s telling, ibn Abbas has rendered his personal pain over the loss of his son to Islam into the language of the Akeidah story.^[5] When read this way, one line of the piyyut stings especially. As ibn Abbas’ version of Yitzhak questions his father over his failure to bring along a sacrificial lamb (Cf. Bereishit 22:7), he challenges: “ha-at be-yom zeh datekha shokhei’ah” — “have you, on this day, forgotten your religious law?” ‘Your,’ and not ‘our.’ The son no longer shares a religion with his father.

Why, though, would ibn Abbas choose the Akeidah story as a metaphor for his own, very different, loss? Sure, some of the basic narrative elements match up. In both stories, a father is forced to lose his son against his will–Avraham prepares to lose Yitzhak to God’s will, although he is spared from the loss, while ibn Abbas loses Shmuel to Shmuel’s own will. The location of the Akeidah on Mount Moriah, centrally sacred to both Jews and Muslims, may provide another link that drew ibn Abbas to fold his tragedy into the tragedy of Avraham and Yitzhak.

It seems likely to me, however, that what drove ibn Abbas’ choice of the Akeidah is his hope to merit the same ending as that experienced by Avraham and Yitzhak. Of course, in Bereishit 22, the father does not ultimately lose his son, at least not exactly.^[6] God intervenes, and Yitzhak lives to see another day. Ibn Abbas, too, wants his son to return to him. In Banai’s interpretation, the poem, and indeed ibn Abbas’ life, represent a plea for Shmuel to return to the fold of Judaism.

I am tempted, though, to reach for a different, possibly anachronistic, reading. Maybe just as Avraham accepts the unthinkable and agrees to sacrifice his son, ibn Abbas seeks to signal that he has made peace with his own loss and prepares to re-accept his son on those new terms. Shmuel has transgressed everything his father believes in and yet remains his father’s beloved son. Yehuda ibn Abbas will not accept Shmuel’s decisions, but he will accept Shmuel.

One of the poem’s strangest features is its use of the first-person singular in its opening stanza: “ana zekhor na li be-yom hokhei’ah / okeid ve-ha-ne’ekad ve-hamizbei’ah” — “Please recall for me on this day of reckoning / the binder, the bound, and the altar.” Traditional representations of the Akeidah often include a request that God protect us in the merit of Avraham and Yitzhak’s sacrifice.^[7] Here, however, the speaker seems to be speaking only for himself. He pleads, “Please recall for me,” the one who has made the same sacrifice as Avraham, the story’s meritorious ending. He wants that ending for himself.

Later in life, Yehuda ibn Abbas relocated from Fez to Aleppo. His final recorded act was traveling from Aleppo to Mosul to visit his son Shmuel. The journey was undoubtedly painful for Yehuda. We can never know for certain what sort of reconciliation, or confrontation, he planned; he died on the way. We know that Yehuda yearned for the son that he loved and that had been taken from him.

The author’s wish for an Avraham-Yitzhak ending may have motivated the composition of Eit Sha’arei Ratzon. For us, however, the denial of this wish makes the verses even harsher. All that is left, for the sake of Yehuda ibn Abbas, is to hope and pray that parents and adult children who live in conflict today find their way to peace and reconciliation.

^[1] “R. Yehuda ben Shmuel Abbas” [Heb.], National Library of Israel.

^[2] Ehud Banai, “Fathers and Sons: On the Poem Eit Sha’arei Ratzon” [Heb.], National Library of Israel.

^[3] See, e.g., Richard F. Gyug, Medieval Cultures in Contact (Fordham University Press, 2002), 123; Banai, ibid.

^[4] See Eit Sha’arei Ratzon [Heb.], National Library of Israel.

^[5] See Banai, ibid.

^[6] But see Aaron Koller, Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah in Modern Jewish Thought (JPS, 2020) (“As far as we know from the biblical text, Abraham and Isaac never speak again.”)

^[7] See Koller, ibid., 2-6.