On May 6, 1954, a young medical student named Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes, the first person in recorded history to do it. For years the experts had called it impossible, a wall the human body simply could not pass. And then Bannister passed it. Within weeks, another runner had broken four minutes too, and within a few years, dozens had. The barrier that had stood for all of history suddenly fell away, again and again. Nothing about the human body had changed. What changed was that one person had shown it could be done.
Chassidus teaches that Abraham did something similar for the Jewish soul, on a scale that reaches all the way to us, this week, in the smallest choices we make. He was the first to open the pipeline of mesirat nefesh, self-sacrifice, the capacity to give yourself over entirely to G-d. Before Abraham, that gate was closed. He walked through it first. Ever since, every Jew who has ever put their own wishes aside for the sake of Heaven has been walking through the opening he made. It became, quite literally, an inheritance.
Self-sacrifice is not “giving up your life” for G-d; it’s actually “giving your life” to G-d.
There is giving up your life, and there is giving up your very self. A person can be willing to die for a cause and still, underneath, be making a calculation. If I don’t stand firm, everything I’ve preached was a lie; I’d rather die than live as a fraudster. Or: the reward waiting on the other side is worth it. Those can be noble, principled choices. Look closely and they’re still, in the end, about me: my values, my integrity, my reward. That kind of sacrifice is really a very good business decision. It’s just transacting in a different currency.
The binding of Isaac, in this week’s Torah portion, Vayeira, made no sense at all. By every measure of logic, principle, and self-interest, Abraham should have said no. But he didn’t. He went and brought Isaac up on the altar, for one reason and one reason only: G-d asked.
That is the breakthrough. Not giving up your life for something, but giving up your self, your whole sense of who you are, purely because Hashem asked.
The inheritance Abraham left us doesn’t show up in dramatic acts. It shows up in the smallest, most private moments of an ordinary week.
The Alter Rebbe writes that we should recite the story of Isaac’s binding every single morning. Not only to remember what our ancestors did, but to remind ourselves that we, too, can lay our own will on the altar the way Isaac laid down his body.
Imagine turning down something you really want: the non-kosher thing you’d love to eat. Not because anyone is watching, not because you’ll be praised, not because it earns you anything, but simply because G-d asked you not to. That quiet “no,” the one nobody sees, is, at its core, the very same act as Isaac on the altar. It might look a thousand times smaller, but it really is the same thing: a person setting their own desire aside purely because it’s what G-d wants. You inherited the ability to do that from Abraham. It’s in you.
Each one of us can find their path through the gate. So much of a rabbi’s work is visible: the classes, the events, the things people thank you for. This teaches me that the real avodah, the real service of Hashem, is almost never the part anyone sees. It’s the small, unglamorous, uncelebrated choices made when no one is in the room. The sharp word swallowed, the shortcut not taken, the quiet yes to something inconvenient because it’s simply right. That’s exactly where the gate Abraham opened is actually being walked through.
Pick one small desire you let go of, a temptation you quietly pass up, a good deed no one will ever know you did, and do it for one reason only: because He asked.
Wishing you and your family a wonderful Shabbos,
Rabbi Kushi Schusterman