In Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, he gets really worked up over that story where God asks Abraham to kill his son Isaac. "I stretch every muscle to get a perspective," he writes, "and at the very same instant I become paralyzed" (Kierkegaard 33). Kierkegaard, towering theological and philosophical mind of the 19th century, is reaching excruciating physical fatigue over a page and a half of the Bible! Eventually, he admits that he can't understand Abraham, but he sees that Abraham was able to make his movement by "the virtue of the absurd," that God's command made no sense whatsoever, but that by that as a virtue, he had to obey God's command.
Personally, I don't think too often about this story. I can get where Kierkegaard is coming from, trying to show what perfect faith looks like and how we can embrace it, but it's not something that I stay up all night thinking about.
If I were Kierkegaard, I'd probably direct my attention to Genesis 17, many decades before the binding of Isaac, where the Lord establishes His covenant. It's pretty straightforward: Abraham, God says, you're going to have a ton of babies, and I will be your God. This is an exclusive contract, and every one of your sons and their sons on down the line will be in the everlasting contract.
I would be totally on board with this, I think; it's God chatting with me, and it sounds like a pretty sweet deal. But then God gets to this part that keeps me up at night sometimes. "You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you" (Torah 17.11). Could you repeat that last part? I'd probably ask if I were Abraham. And God would repeat it for me, and I'd ask, Why? What's the deal with that?
I've read a lot of writings on the subject by rabbis, ministers, even the American Academy of Pediatrics, and none of their answers really does it for me. "It was a passport of sorts for the Jews in the 1st century" ("Circumcision Covenant" 2006). Then why is it something only men can do? Why not cut off an earlobe or get a sweet tat of Abraham or Sarah? Some kids that lived in my building last year loved a passage out of an old medieval text which asserted that circumcised penises were better than uncircumcised penises because they finished sex quickly, leaving no time to enjoy the act and thus making sex purely about baby-making. There's no science to back up this absurd statement, but it brings up the issue of what circumcision means. Paul in Romans talks about the circumcision of the heart, basically allowing Christians to not have to do all the physical aspects of circumcision to be cool with God, but that still doesn't renounce the practice altogether. In the Dogon and Dowayo Tribes of West Africa, circumcision represents the removal of the female aspects of a boy, which really doesn't make sense to me; a penis is a penis. Not a whole lot feminine about it. The AAP basically has proven there's no hygienic reason to perform circumcision these days, though it may have been necessary in Abraham's time. But still, there were a lot of things that were necessary for sanitation, like washing your hands and wiping after you shit, but God didn't make those the sign of His covenant. If I could go back in time, I'd ask Kierkegaard what he thought about it, because I think circumcision as the sign of God's covenant is far more absurd than proving your devotion through the sacrifice of your son. Isaac was the most dear possession in the world to Abraham—it kind of makes sense that God would ask him to sacrifice Isaac. But getting circumcised? It would make sense to me if God kind of mumbled it under His breath after everything else (oh yeah, and you should probably get circumcised), but no! God talks at length about it, and stipulates who has to get circumcised. It's such a pressing issue that Abraham goes out and does it later that day.
I'm probably never going to understand it, but that's okay. Kierkegaard sure couldn't understand Abraham's actions, so why should I be able to understand God's? I guess it's just a little too much to ask that God have a little transparency regarding such important issues.
Works Cited
"Circumcision Covenant of Genesis 17." Jan. 2006. 09 Mar. 2009. http://www.gentiles-and-circumcision.info/
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 6. Ed. Edna H. Hong. Trans. Howard V. Hong. New York: Princeton UP, 1983.
Tanakh. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication, 1985.