Who can understand Abraham?

Although sacrifice as a trial has existed since the first human being, the event we are called to re-enact every year as a feast is specifically the great trial of the Prophet Abraham. When he was asked to sacrifice his "only" son, the only child given to him as a gift at that age, though not given to him until then, at a time near very advanced age when he felt himself failing, we are asked every year to take part, to a small extent, in the storm of emotions he began to live through.

Who today, and to what extent, can understand what Abraham really went through? Having reached the level at which he could sacrifice his own child, how much can we understand the great pains and hardships he went through until he reached that level, in return the patience and steadfastness he showed, and how he drove away every time the devil who came near trying to whisper his insinuations to him?

Every year we sacrifice again, in order to draw near to God, the ram that the God of abundant mercy gave as a ransom in place of the child, whose readiness to be offered He proved through Abraham living the hardest trial.

We are expected to realize that we are giving back to Him what He gave, but are we truly aware? The moment we fully understand that what we think we have worked and striven for and earned in the world does not ultimately belong to us is the moment we breathe our last. That moment is also the moment when we reach the truth of everything. The moment when we understand that nothing we believed belonged to us in the world belongs to us, that everything was given to us by Him in order to be returned to Him. The moment when we realize, lamenting, what ignorance we fell into when we mistook what belongs to Him for our own and withheld it from those in need.

Before that very moment arrives, before that moment when no regret is of any use once it arrives, the sacrifice performs the function of making us familiar with that truth. The experience of dying before dying..

The truth is that we all came from God and to Him we shall return. The differences, identities, material and social possessions we have accumulated in this world, whether those given to us or those we think we earned ourselves, all of them belong to Him at their beginning and at their end.

The world will go on turning even without us, until the place God has decreed for it. A trial is not an event won once and for all time. A human being is tested according to his level of intellect, perception and spirit. A person does not acquire a chosen, superior rank over all people because he once passed a trial well. The stage of the trial is set anew at every step, and moreover this time with the bar raised a little higher.

Although the sacrifice repeated since the first human being is celebrated once a year as an act of worship with all its symbolism, in truth sacrifice is a routine of life. At every moment we cover our path of life by revealing, through the choices we make, whom we are drawing near to and whom or what we are moving away from. Our re-enacting the event Abraham lived through each year ensures that we do not forget how far back the roots of our existence in the world, of the path of life we cover by sacrificing as we go, extend, and that we do not break off from those roots.

Abraham's Sacrifice is not an event that happened once and ended, of no concern to us; in it there are lessons that will shed light on our lives every day and ensure that we re-evaluate what we are living through with a different eye.

Who will give these lessons, who will take them?

There is no need at all for anyone else to step in between. The story tells itself, with all its awesome mystery, anyway. To each according to his own level... After a point, do not worry too much about why people do not understand from this story what you understand; people are not obliged to understand everything the way you do. In essence, even when a miracle comes, even when God's verses are set forth, it is not decreed that everyone understand everything in the same way. Do not even God's verses lead some to guidance while increasing the misguidance of others?

Abraham's story and its several-thousand-year history extending to the present remind us, above all, how small a slice of history we live in. Many generations have come and gone before us, signed their names to many achievements, founded many cities, states, civilizations. All of them, in the civilizations they founded, saw themselves as so privileged, so different, so superior, as if they would live forever through their works and their descendants. Now the winds blow where all of them once were.

Doesn't the help we withhold from those who ask something of us, the mercilessness and stinginess we show toward needy people who have taken refuge in our country, show how far we are from this truth?

This truth says there is no point in going on weeping, after a certain point, that without us this cause will be left in limbo and all the work done will be left unfinished. Just as the rule of the oppressors will not remain firm forever, the good, too, the moment they begin to see themselves as indispensable to this world, will have drifted away from this truth. And to the extent they drift away, they begin to resemble the oppressors. It must not be forgotten: struggles on Abraham's path are not lost on battlefields; they are lost when one begins to resemble the enemy. When one is not alert, when one does not constantly keep one ear open to the truth, it is one's fate in time to fall for the seductions of the self and the devil and come to resemble one's enemy.

When God promised to choose Abraham the Friend and make him a leader for people, he said "and my offspring too," and God had said that His covenant would not reach the community of wrongdoers (Bakara, 124). So no matter how high a station the Prophet Abraham reached through that great trial, he would not have left these stations to his own grandchildren automatically, as an inheritance, as a guarantee.

Abraham's story, which transcends the ages and speaks to us all the way to the present, shows on the one hand how insignificant, how nothing each of us is within history. We all belong to Him; nothing we think belongs to us belongs to us. The alms, the zakat and the property we are asked to give do not belong to us, nor does the sacrifice we are asked to offer. The ram we offer to Him as a sacrifice is also something He has graciously gifted to us.

The warning that those sacrifices will not reach Him does not show that the act of sacrifice is without importance. What we try to deliver to Him already belongs to Him. To whom, and for what, are we expressing gratitude?

While Abraham's story reminds us of our smallness, indeed our nothingness, within history, it still takes us seriously and gives us the task of re-enacting this blessed story. It prepares each of us, like an Abraham, for similar struggles that await us.

May your feast be blessed.