midrash session 2 (part 2)

[cellio]

This is the second midrash we looked at in this session. (I previously knew this one, but reading it in Hebrew was still educational.)

"et binkha" -- amar lo: shnei banim yesh li.

[Take] "your son" -- he [Avraham] said to him [God]: I have two sons.

"et y''chid'ka" -- zeh yachid l'imo v'zeh yachid l'imo.

"Your favored one" -- this [son] is favored by his mother and this is favored by his mother. (That is, Yitzchak and Yismael have different mothers and each is special to his own mother.)

"asher ahavta" -- amar l'fanav: ribono shel olam, v'khi yeish tichumin bameitzayim? Sh'neihem ani oheiv.

"That you love" -- he said before him: Master of the world, (err...) are there boundaries deep down? (A footnote gives "tichumin" = "givulin" (boundaries); I'm stumbling a bit over the rest and am not sure quite where the "ki" fits in.) I love both of them.

"et yitzchak".

Yitzchak. (Ok, fine, I'll spell it out for you. :-) )

v'khol kakh lamah? k'dei shelo titaref da'to alav.

Why so much? (That is, why draw this out so long instead of just saying "Yitzchak" up front?) So that he will not [verb] his knowledge of [it, him]. We must have discussed this but I don't now know tet-reish-feh (none of my dictionaries are helping); the gist of the clause is essentially, I think, so there'd be no doubt. (Must remember to ask Rabbi Symons about this before we go on.)

Edit: ichur72 jogged my memory; I had the verb direction wrong and it went downhill from there. Lit: So that the knowledge of it will not tear him. Rabbi Symons drew the analogy "the cat's on the roof" -- if God had just said, out of nowhere, go sacrifice Yitzchak, it would have been too much of a shock, so instead he builds up to it.

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Could titaref be related to treif? If so, the meaning of the last phrase would be something along the lines of: "So that the knowledge [of what was to come] did not tear him apart." IIRC the word treifah in the chumash is used to mean "torn", as in meat that's been torn away from an animal without proper slaughtering.