Theological reflections on the sacrifice in the context of Gaza

The forms that the ritual of sacrifice, whose first practice began with the children of Prophet Adam, has taken throughout history are a very important event for following the ebbs and flows of the human mind. The forms that sacrifice, offered as a kind of education entirely to bring one close to God but at the same time to bring one to the awareness that God is the absolute owner of everything, has taken over time in different cultures and societies show that the transitions from the moment when man is most knowledgeable about God to the moments when he is most ignorant (or the reverse) can never be closed off.

Yet even the theories about sacrifice themselves suggest the opposite: that sacrifice began in past times with very primitive practices and evolved over time into more advanced forms. The point it is said to have reached through evolution is the complete abolition of sacrifice. That is, in our time there is no longer any need for sacrifice, since this is the point at which the mature human level has been attained. The point at which it began is a level of certain primitive conceptions of God: a level at which people thought of shedding blood for him to appease his anger, or to be the subject of some bargains with him, in order to obtain a request in return.

In this understanding it is of course assumed that God or the gods need blood to be shed. How much could a logic that brings "God" and "need" together have understood, have known, God Himself? What kind of God could a God who needs something be? Does the idea of God not itself exclude the condition called need? But people's perceptions of primitive gods are put this way, and passed over: that the blood shed will add strength to him or set him in motion in a certain way and persuade him to fulfill human requests.

This relationship between the idea of God and sacrifice is parallel to the positivist sociologists' conception of the history of religions. An evolution from the simplest idea of God, from a polytheistic understanding of religion, toward monotheism, and then a positive level at which the idea of religion is understood to be entirely empty. Of course this is a history imagined entirely out of the humanist arrogance of Western industrial society. It says that man created the idea of God in his own mind and that its first form was totemism, idolatry or polytheism.

The truth is that from the earliest times of humanity both polytheistic thought and the monotheistic thought and stance have always existed simultaneously, together. On the contrary, polytheistic, idolatrous thought is a form of deviation from an original belief in tawhid that the human mind produces very easily, and it can occur wherever there are human beings. Even today one can often come across people who, having adopted the pure belief in tawhid, then stain that same belief in tawhid with pagan thought. Anthropomorphic thought, owing to the human mind's nature inclined to facility, can contaminate people even after belief in tawhid itself. Let us not go too far, but it is enough to look at where the routes opened by the sanctification of some hodjas and some saints, in order to come closer to God, end up.

A series of understandings, a series of different practices regarding sacrifice, arise as a product of anthropomorphic conceptions of God and divert it in these conceptions from its original. It is a way of thinking, to which the human mind could very easily incline in the past as today, as if God needed the acts of worship that God asks of us. Yet all acts of worship are for the human being, in that the human being finds his own nature in them, and they lift him out of the quagmire of servitude to fellow human beings and bring him to the freedom of being a servant only to God. It has been decreed that it is not the meat of the sacrifice but only taqwa (God-consciousness), that is, the intention and effort that led one to slaughter the sacrifice, that will reach God. This decree is valid for all acts of worship.

One form of deviation and distortion regarding sacrifice gets caught on the patriarchal mentality behind regarding a father as authorized to sacrifice his own son's life by himself, even if in God's way. Truly, as we said before, the practice of human sacrifice has not existed in any period of the religion of tawhid. The journey that led to sacrificing his son is an entirely unique trial of Prophet Abraham, and the moment he passed this trial successfully, his son's ransom was paid, again by God Himself, with a ram. In the end it is God who is the owner of Abraham, of Ishmael and of the ram. The ram, by its very creation, has embraced this better than the human. But the moment Ishmael understood that this dream was from God, submitting not to his father but to God, he did not hesitate for even a moment to lay his throat before the knife.

Here Ishmael too is mentioned as a subject who could decide by his own will. That is, there is no patriarchal subject here unilaterally seizing others' will. We had mentioned this here before: in Jewish sources, it is mentioned that from the moment he understood that he would be slaughtered and burned as the sacrifice, Isaac began to beg his father to spare his life. One should not be surprised that the one who altered the sacrifice itself, who falsified it, who dared to reserve the status of sacrificial victim here for his own lineage as a seat of honor, has also falsified the content of the story here.

The falsifying intervention in the story also writes a role that would never befit God's prophet. A conception of a prophet who does not know God, who has not come to the realization that life too belongs to God. Even if it is Isaac, one who is to be sacrificed, one who has a relationship with God at the level of a prophet, could not have shown such resistance. These attitudes also exemplify at their root the obvious difference that appears today between Zionist Israel and the people of Gaza. The tight attachment to life of the corrupted figure of Isaac, with whom Israel identifies itself in its theological conceptions, is an archetypal reflection of the passion to live as if there were no hereafter. They claim that they are God's beloved and chosen servants, but they are in no hurry at all to meet God. They do not think that death will bring them to that God who loves them so much and whom they love so much. If it were possible they would want to live a thousand years or eternally, without feeling the slightest desire to meet God...

On the other side is the stance of an Ishmael who yearns to die for God, who sees dying as martyrdom, as a reunion. We repeat, in the conception of the Gazan on this matter, moreover, there is no difference between Isaac and Ishmael.

Thus the falsification of sacrifice and the falsification of the idea of God have in fact run parallel to each other throughout history.

The interesting thing is that the Jewish theological sources themselves have mentioned that the tradition of burnt offering attributed to Jewish theology itself is also a falsification. The assessments that Maimonides, one of the most influential names in the history of Jewish theology and philosophy, known as having become the property of Islamic culture and civilization too under the name Ibn Maymun, made about the history of sacrifice begin at the same time by showing that sacrifice was distorted within the Jewish tradition as well.

The burnt offering has no benefit at all, for example, and this could not have been something laid down by the Jewish God. But Moses or his God could not have shown a will that would abolish this ritual, already existing among people, at that stage of humanity. Because humanity was not yet ready for it. This approach, in which we can find the first traces of Evolutionary Historicism in Jewish history, though it appears, with its fine sides, to be far ahead of the current Jewish sacrificial tradition and much influenced by Islam's understanding of sacrifice, falls well behind Islam by regarding sacrifice as a product of the human mind. If there is an opportunity, let us take up this subject as well.