The Maimonidean Akedah

  ובל יאמר אדם אלו יצוה הש”י אותי לעקוד את בני זה לפניו הייתי עושה כאברהם אבינו ע”ה

For more on this, see David Blumenthal’s TABS essay, “The Akeda and Rosh Hashanah.”

Yosef ibn Caspi, The Silver Cup (trans. Basil Herring; New York, 1982), p. 32.

 אחרים אומרים אשר לא צויתי על יפתח, ולא דברתי על מישע מלך מואב, ולא עלתה על לבי, שיקריב אברהם בנו על גבי המזבח.

Ephraim Meir, “Buber’s Dialogical Interpretation of the Binding of Isaac – between Kierkegaard and Hasidism,” in: The Faith of Abraham: In the Light of Interpretations Throughout the Ages (eds. M. Hallamish, H. Kasher, Y. Silman; Bar Ilan Press, Ramat Gan, Israel, 2003, pp. 281-93 [Hebrew]).

In view of Buber’s lifelong interest in Chasidism, it is not surprising that several Chasidic masters also questioned the meaning of God’s command to Avraham to sacrifice Yitzhak.

Maimonides' view is only one of many medieval attempts to understand prophecy. For a wider range of views, see: R. B. Schuchat. “Abraham’s Faith According to the School of R. Elijah of Vilna: Intellectual Versus Revelationist Faith,” in: The Faith of Abraham: In the light of Interpretations throughout the Ages (Eds. M Hallamish, H Kasher, Y Silman; Bar Ilan Press, 2003), pp. 193-204.

For more on Maimonides understanding of prophecy and revelation, see Sam Fleischaker’s TABS essay, “Making Sense of the Revelation at Sinai.”

She details her observations after working closely with a group of Evangelical Christians.

The Vineyard ministry was led by John Wimber and was a breakaway movement from the Calvary Church which itself had been started in the late 1960s by people who were opting out of the prevailing hippie culture in Haight Asbury.

Luhrman does not meant to disparage the Evangelicals by this observation, but rather to identify cognitive patterns that lend themselves to a proclivity to hear God speak. Luhrmann describes the Evangelicals with great sensitivity and respect and her fieldwork persuaded her that God truly was alive to the people she encountered. Even if she could not feel and act the way they did, she recognized an inherent coherence to their views and practices. Other religious groups, including Orthodox Jews, may share this interest in fostering spirituality and greater awareness of God’s presence in people’s lives.

Luhrmann goes further and hypothesized that the ability to communicate with God is a measurable skill that can be nurtured and developed. She applies an absorption scale—an instrument developed by the US army to determine whether a person could be hypnotized—to characterize the members of the church as more or less likely to acquire the capacity to hear God speak. She even develops an intervention – a mixture of recordings intended to induce different devotional states – and finds that people with high absorption scores can be trained to “perceive” God around them and to actually “hear” his voice.