Awkward: What do we do with challenging texts in the Torah?

Halacha is the bridge over which the Torah moves from the written word into the living deed. Normally, there is a confrontation between the text, which is set, and life, which is forever in motion. (...) How to face the confrontation between the text and the actual life situation, how to resolve the problems arising out of this confrontation, is the task of the torah shebeal peh, the Oral Law. This second Torah, ever since the days of Moses, handed down from generation to generation, accompanies the torah shebichtav, the Written Word. (...) Since there is no such thing as life in general, since it is always a certain form of life at a specific time in history, in a specific situation, Torah application means application to a specific time in a specific situation. The result of this process is what I call halachic Judaism.

But human sacrifice was not murder to him, even if it seems so to us. And yet, we have many analogues today to the sacrifice Avraham was ready to perform, and these are not in conflict with our broader ethical commitments. Who would think that the parents who sent their children to certain death on the beaches of Normandy were ethically lapsed? When we believe a cause is just and is of ultimate significance, the willingness to die—and even to put others at risk—is rightly understood as heroic, not immoral. (...) The consequences for how we approach halakhah are clear. God would not command Avraham—and does not command us—to do things that we understand to be immoral. When we experience a gap between our understanding of the divine will and the ethical imperative, something is in need of fixing. It is possible that our ethical instincts are wrong and must be refined. Alternatively, we may have incorrectly understood the divine will or incorrectly applied it to our lives. A deep process of learning and searching may be required to narrow that gap to zero, but eliminated it must be. The process of halakhah can never end in a place where God and morality are in conflict and the job of the learner—and certainly the posek—is to understand how apparent conflicts are incomplete understandings. There is no possibility of rebellion against God’s word, because God’s human servants know that the divine word is meant to be fully compatible with who they are meant to be. Observing mitzvot is at times exceedingly hard and requires great sacrifice and investment. But the figure of Avraham, properly understood, provides no support for the notion that God’s command is ever meant to supersede our ethics.

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There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting...

In order for the return to the positive to be genuine it must involve negativity, it must not conceal the antinomies between means and end, present and future; they must be lived in a permanent tension; one must retreat from neither the outrage of violence nor deny it, or, which amounts to the same thing, assume it lightly. (...) But we also think that what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, “Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn’t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?”