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When and Why We Question

Avraham’s Silence and Protest – Faith, Justice, and Moral Courage

10 May 2026
AVRAHAM at sunset pleading with God for mercy for sodom abraham lawyer requesting justice

This essay is one of the winning submissions to the Rabbi Sacks Essay Contest. Drawing on the teachings and writings of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l, students were invited to reflect on contemporary questions through the lens of his ideas. This piece reflects the voice and perspective of its student author.

Author: Aria Knepler-Pearl (The Hockaday School, USA) - joint Third place

Rabbi Sacks frames Avraham’s protest at Sodom and his silence at the Akeidah not as a contradiction, but as a profound lesson in how to navigate our relationship with Hashem and more broadly, with the world. Together, these two stories map the landscape of religious conscience, acting as models for when faith demands challenge and when it demands trust. Ultimately, Avraham’s varying actions in each situation prove that emunah and moral courage are often not a simple matter of what you choose to do, but when you choose to do it. The correct course of action depends on timing just as much as content.

At Sodom, Hashem announces the imminent destruction of an entire city. Before Avraham even opens his mouth to speak his response, the situation is already stunningly unique from any other: Hashem has just pondered whether or not to tell Avraham about Sodom, and concluded that He has “singled [Avraham] out…to keep the way of Hashem by doing what is just and right” (Genesis 18:19), then proceeding to enter into dialogue with Avraham. Clearly, Hashem’s choice to include Avraham in this discussion was a thoughtful one, and Hashem’s view of Avraham as a righteous person who seeks out justice prepared Hashem (and us reading the Torah today) for Avraham to push back against perceived injustice.

The modern-day parallels leap to mind: when making a decision that lives in a moral gray area, people often choose to seek counsel from trusted friends, confiding in them while secretly suspecting that these friends will act as sparring partners who articulate challenges in order to debate the ethics of the decision. Avraham’s response is one of the boldest moral challenges in the Torah, and yet it may have been exactly what Hashem was seeking.

“Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” (Genesis 18:23) Avraham queries. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25).

Here, Avraham is defending universal moral principles of justice, proportionality, and the value of innocent life. These are principles that Hashem Himself embedded within creation. Rabbi Sacks teaches that to stay silent would be to betray the very covenant that Avraham represents and to fall short of Hashem’s standards for him as the leader of a nation that walks a divine path of constantly striving for righteousness. Though Sodom is ultimately destroyed, the back-and-forth between Avraham and Hashem demonstrates that destruction of life is not a choice that Hashem takes lightly; it is a decision meant to be grappled with, questioned, and fought against.

When innocent people may suffer unjustly, faith demands protest. An apt historical example is that of the American Civil Rights Movement, a time when justice required disobedience and confronting racism necessitated challenging the status quo. Speaking out against discrimination is an act of moral courage, one that the story of Sodom encourages. Hashem invites moral argument by including His chosen people in the difficult conversation, because justice is part of Hashem’s self-disclosure to humanity, and debating Hashem is part of our promise to pursue justice.

In stark contrast, the loquacious Avraham seems to bite his tongue and stay silent at the Akeidah, when he is commanded to sacrifice his one and only beloved son. The story is one that has perplexed readers throughout history, and our sages typically throw up their hands and attribute this near sacrifice to a daring test of emunah that Avraham passes with flying colors. Rabbi Sacks, however, proposes a groundbreaking interpretation of the Akeidah that paints Avraham’s willingness to almost sacrifice his child in a new light.

Rabbi Sacks insists that Avraham’s lack of argument is not because he neglects his moral compass, but rather because the entire premise of the Akeidah addresses a different category of truth, one quite revolutionary in the ancient world: children are entrusted to their parents, never owned by them. As Rabbi Sacks writes, “All children belong to God…The Binding of Isaac is a polemic against, and a rejection of, the principle of patria potestas, the idea universal to all pagan cultures that children are the property of their parents.” Rather than endorsing child sacrifice, the Akeidah is how Hashem rejects it, and with it, any lingering suspicion that the role of parents in their children’s lives is anything other than that of guardians on behalf of Hashem.

We needed an event as dramatic as the Akeidah to establish this view of parenthood. If Avraham was meant to be the exemplar of Jewish parenthood, then he had to face a test of not whether he would kill Yitzchak, but whether he would renounce ownership over him.

When the angel tells Avraham to put down his knife right as he prepares to sacrifice Yitzchak, the angel declares that Avraham has passed the test, “since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me” (Genesis 22:12). Though this line is often taken to mean that Avraham did not hesitate to follow Hashem’s orders, reading it at face value proves that all Hashem wanted was for Avraham to understand that parents lack ownership over their children and have no right to “withhold” them.

In this situation, Avraham’s silence reflects what Rabbi Sacks, quoting the poet John Keats, calls “negative capability,” the ability to live patiently with unresolved tension, trusting that Hashem will not violate His own code of ethics. Put simply, Avraham’s trust in Hashem is a roadmap for how to be human, since we will never have access to all of the answers. This lesson is one I learned when my family moved across the country right before I started high school. Surviving the move required lots of packing tape, adaptability, resilience, and a willingness to start from scratch, and it taught me to understand transitions and live with discomfort and uncertainty. Refusing to interact with ambiguity is equivalent to refusing to interact with our world, one in which uncertainty is one of the only certain things in life.

Unlike with Sodom, here Hashem’s command challenges Avraham’s sense of control over both his child and the world, rather than the fate of a city of innocent people. This is when Avraham teaches us that faith sometimes requires silence as a demonstration of trust rather than protest.

Following in the spirit of Rabbi Sacks’ disparate interpretations of Avraham’s choices during Sodom and the Akeidah, I believe that questioning Hashem is not only permitted, but mandatory – in the right moments. What matters is why we question and when we question. Questioning Hashem to defend justice and live up to our promise of righteousness is an act of faith. Questioning Hashem to retain a false sense of complete control over the world and our lives within it is a failure of faith.

At Sodom, Avraham speaks up for others, acting as a public defender before the divine Judge. At the Akeidah, speaking would have been asserting ownership over Yitzchak and demonstrating an aversion to living with the unknown. The question of when to question is not an “either/or” query with a simple answer. It’s a complex and ever-evolving challenge that is deeply situation-specific. Jewish faith does not only ping-pong between fiery argument and blind submission; it’s a covenantal dialogue in which the why and when we question is just as important as the questions we pose.

Together, these two stories of Avraham’s relationship with Hashem establish a critical balance that guides us today, teaching us when to speak and when to listen, and how both can be meaningful and necessary expressions of faith. Sometimes, religious duty takes the form of moral courage and loud protest; other times, it takes the form of humility and quiet trust.

Throughout this process of exploration, I’ve learned that there’s a unifying message in the midst of these apparent contradictions: the Torah does not want people who seek to control the unknown, or believers who silence their conscience and refrain from speaking up, or a faith that abolishes morality. Instead, it seeks a faith strong enough to argue with Hashem and humble enough to listen to Him. Avraham becomes the model not because he always speaks or always obeys, but because he knows when each response is required.

That discernment, as Rabbi Sacks suggests and as I wholeheartedly agree, is the heart of mature religious life.

Read the other prize-winning essays from the 2026 Contest