Exordium

The Exordium opens with a man who, as a child, heard the story of Abraham and Isaac and was never able to forget it. As he grew older, his admiration became stronger and his incomprehension deeper. He did not wish to see the pleasant regions of the East or the vigorous youth of Isaac; he wanted to be present in the moment when Abraham lifted his eyes and saw Mount Moriah in the distance, and to share the shudder of thought that passed through that moment. The opening sets the key: this is a book written by someone who cannot perform what he describes.

Four variations follow. In the first, Abraham tells Isaac that he is an idolater acting on his own desire — not God's command — so that Isaac will lose faith in Abraham, not in God. Abraham says softly: "Lord in heaven, I thank You; it is better that he believe me to be a monster than that he should lose faith in You." In the second, Abraham returns home and goes silent; from that day on, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him, and Isaac thrived, but Abraham's eye was darkened. In the third, Abraham in his anguish cannot grasp that the willingness to offer Isaac was not a sin; in the fourth, Isaac catches a glimpse of his father's clenched left hand and the shudder that passes through his body as the knife is drawn, and loses his faith then and there.

Each variation is followed by a brief domestic image — a mother weaning a child, a mother with stronger food ready — that grounds the theological movement in bodily reality. The Exordium ends with the repeated refrain: "No one was as great as Abraham; who is able to understand him?" The four versions do not aim to improve on Genesis but to show, by counterfactual, that what Abraham actually did was none of these things — and therefore something for which the available human vocabularies have no word.