The Akedah raises troubling questions. Hashem addresses Avraham in staggering terms:

"Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering."

The Midrashim tell that Satan comes to tempt Yitzhak: "Flee! Your father is not normal!" and Avraham: "You teach that one does not sacrifice children to Moloch, yet you go to sacrifice your son?" Neither listens to these voices.

Sarah dies on the very day of the Akedah (some say on Rosh Hashanah, others at the Mincha of Yom Kippur — precisely at the moment of the Akedah).

The Midrash recounts: Sarah wakes in Beer Sheva; Avraham and Yitzhak have vanished. One day, two days, three days pass. She travels to Hevron — Kiriat Arba, "the city of the four giants" — and asks the giants, who could see across great distances like sentinels: "Can you see where Avraham and Yitzhak are?"

The giant looks toward Mount Moriah and says: "I see Avraham taking the knife to slaughter Yitzhak!"

The Ari HaKadosh, Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, unveils the key:

Adam's sin caused the descent of all the spiritual worlds. Everything we accomplish until the messianic era is meant to repair that sin.

What was the sin? A lack of mesirut nefesh (self-sacrifice). Hashem had said: "From all the trees you shall eat, but not from this one." Adam and Chava should have been ready to die rather than disobey; they lacked this mesirut nefesh.

Every Shabbat, Avraham taught Yitzhak the theme of Chet Adam. Yitzhak told him: "Abba, at the first opportunity, I am with you on this project. Let us go all the way!" When Hashem commands the Akedah, Avraham understands: here is the chance to repair the world immediately — tikkun olam bemalchut Shaddai.

Sarah too, gilgul of Chava, wants a share in this repair. That is why she is disappointed that it did not come to pass.

If the Akedah could repair the world in one stroke, why does Hashem cry out, "Do not lay your hand on the youth"? The answer hides in the very first word of the Torah.

Avraham and Yitzhak wanted to "shorten the path" (kitzur derech) and repair the world immediately, around the year 2000 of Creation. But Hashem answers: "No. No shortcuts. I want the 6000 years."

If Hashem did not want Yitzhak sacrificed, why command this test?

From this strength came the martyrs of the Inquisition who chose death over conversion, the courage in the face of the horror of the Shoah, and those 18-year-old soldiers, on October 7 and in Israel's wars, who know they risk their lives.

How does an 18-year-old come to say, "I enlist even though I may not return alive"? It comes from Yitzhak Avinu, who accepted being bound upon the altar. The Akedah inscribed this spiritual gene within us.

Avraham says to himself: "You stopped me; but I will not leave here without a commitment from You!" The Midrash reports that he demands a promise:

Hashem agrees, and this is the meaning of the verse:

"Avraham called that place Hashem Yireh, as it is said today: on the mountain, Hashem will be seen."

Every year, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, by reading the Akedah and the piyut "Oked veNe'ekad," we activate this eternal merit: "This day is a merit for the children of Jerusalem; in it the gates of mercy open."

The answer: had the Akedah been completed and repaired the world, we would have returned to the state before the Chet Adam — a world without death. Before the sin, death did not exist; it was the chet that introduced it.

The reasoning of Avraham and Yitzhak: completing the Akedah fully repairs the Chet Adam; that repair returns the world to its pre-sin state; there, death no longer exists; therefore Techiyat HaMetim (the resurrection) would be immediate — and Yitzhak would rise at once, the world made whole.

We stand today in the year 5786 from Creation; about 214 years remain until the year 6000. The Akedah left us two gifts: the strength of mesirut nefesh to endure history, and the eternal merit that protects and forgives us.