The veil that falls between truth and the eye is lifted by the sacrifice

Sacrifice, in essence, is an act, an act of worship, that expresses the human being's drawing near to God. Because of its part performed by slaughtering an animal, that is, by shedding blood, it has been the subject of very different interpretations or perceptions throughout history. The distinctiveness of Prophet Abraham's sacrifice is that it was either merely a repetition of a tradition of sacrifice that had existed since the first human being, or the living out of an already known sacrifice so as to make it an unparalleled trial for Abraham. Otherwise there was sacrifice before Abraham as well.

The sacrifice experience of the first human being's two sons, Abel and Cain, is also mentioned in the Qur'an. Sacrificing a human being is not among the acts of sacrificial worship that God proposed to human beings. There is a call for people to sacrifice themselves in God's way, to be martyred in the way of rejecting servitude to fellow human beings and devoting servitude to God alone, but there is no record whatsoever that taking up a knife and shedding the blood of any human being, let alone a loved one, one's child or brother, in God's way took place before or after Abraham.

The trial that Prophet Abraham went through is an entirely unique trial. In fact Prophet Jacob lived through the same trial in a different way with regard to his child Prophet Joseph, moreover after Abraham. And what was expected of Jacob there was not even to slaughter Joseph with his own hand; it was precisely the trial of relinquishment, of letting go, that is meant in Abraham's example. A trial that required a far longer, more anguished wait full of yearning.

Jacob's excessive fondness for Joseph, and the place he reserved for him in his heart, became so wide that his brothers envied him, and this envy made them do the worst thing a brother can do to a brother. The 11 brothers unite and, in order to win a position with their father, to win his heart, to get close to him, decide to sacrifice their own brother.

That the object of envy and hatred serves here as a means of drawing near has appeared throughout history as a form of sacrifice to which people resorted to preserve their place before the gods or to restore a spoiled place. This form of sacrifice is a thought produced by human obsessions. With this thought we can witness in history the emergence of different sacrificial rituals in many cultures. Such sacrifices, which are a product of human thought, have never been a form of sacrifice that God, the Most Gracious and Most Merciful, asked of human beings.

The approach that raged at Ishmael because he laughed, and deemed it fitting to exile him to a place far from sight as if abandoning him to death, constantly nourishes a certain feeling of the Children of Israel against the Children of Ishmael throughout history, and today comes and explodes it in Gaza.

The only reason of Joseph's own brothers, who were willing to murder him, to throw him into the well, is envy. But for Jacob, the father, the trial that required truly sacrificing Joseph would not this time require putting a knife to his throat. The veil falling over his eyes through his fondness for him would show the existence of a distance to be crossed between him and God, a distance that this fondness prevented him from seeing many things across. To see the existence of this distance and close it, he would draw closer to the truth. This drawing near, this sacrifice, would take place when he saw with the certainty of sight that both Joseph and he himself belong to God, and completely gave him up.

Only when he drew near to this truth through this experience of sacrifice would the veil that had fallen on Jacob's eyes be lifted. From this hour on, what he saw was that nothing could be a partner to the love of God that filled his heart. We all belong to God and to Him we will return. Whatever He has given us is a trust, a provision. None of it belongs to us; together with them, all of us belong to Him. When we slaughter a sacrifice, we take, again in His name, the life that belongs to Him and that He gave us as a gift, as a ransom for our own life, our own being, and by the meat we distribute to the poor we come still closer to Him.

Jacob has been reunited with his child, but by truly having sacrificed his Joseph. To sacrifice, he does not need to have laid hands on his child's life. There is no such form of sacrifice anyway. That is a lesson told once to all people through the unique experience of Abraham. By placing his place in His heart in the right place, when he reached the certain awareness that, in return for all his affection, Joseph too belongs to God, he was reunited with his Joseph.

To see sacrifice, instead of as one among the many other acts and acts of worship we do in order to draw near to God, as a substitute for other acts, and to imprison it in this substitution, is one of the greatest superstitions that have attached to sacrifice. No act of worship takes the place of another. No one bears another's sin. No one is accused and condemned to pay a penalty because of another's sin. This superstition, this belief, is a beginning of a thought that requires the violation of this universal human rule. It is a political theology that opens, as much as bearing another's sin, onto being privileged because of what others have done without any labor of one's own. From here a wide field opens onto racism, onto merciless genocides, and onto a secularism that removes individual or social responsibility.

THOSE WHO ARE MARTYRED IN GAZA ARE NO ONE'S ATONEMENT FOR SIN

Someone being in our place and thereby lifting responsibility from us. The absolute form of this substitution is Jesus' sacrificing himself on behalf of all people, for all people, thereby lifting the responsibility of being sacrificed from all the rest of the people. This radical sacrifice does not only sacrifice itself, it also sacrifices sacrifice itself. Christianity regards the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the final and universal sacrifice: "Look! The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29).

Thus Jesus' death is at the same time an atoning sacrifice for all humanity. From this atonement paid for all humanity, there is no longer any need for sacrifices offered by slaughtering animals; because the sacrifice has been offered "once and for all," even "once and for all time" (Hebrews 10:10).

Deep within the exclusion shown toward sacrifice in the West, and the demand to remove it from sight, lies the sacrifice of sacrifice. Jesus, who sacrificed himself for us, but at the same time as an atonement for our sins, has at the same time freed us in all our actions. We are already beings afflicted with the burden of eternal sin; whatever we do is fitting. The absolute sacrifice, who by sacrificing himself took all sinfulness upon us once and for all time, opens the way for the modern Western Christian to establish his relationship with other sacrifices in the same way. In the experiences of colonialism spread over the world, as in the earlier crusades, millions of people who were spent pay the price somewhere out of sight for the welfare of Western man. This price paid does no harm. The Westerner makes up for it somehow with his own humanism, human rights discourses, and stories of progress and modernity. What matters is that these massacres are out of sight, just like the banning of ritual sacrifices offered by slaughtering animals.

And for which sins of the Westerner do those who die in Gaza become the atonement? His genocidal past? His colonial expansionism? How many more people must be sacrificed for this atonement?