The sto­ry of the Akedah, the bind­ing of Isaac, has long been con­sid­ered one of the most prob­lem­at­ic in the Bible. It rais­es trou­bling ques­tions about the nature of God and faith with which even rab­bini­cal schol­ars strug­gle. Ayelet Amittay’s pow­er­ful debut col­lec­tion, The Eat­ing Knife, presents read­ers anoth­er lens though which to see the sto­ry — a poet’s. Amittay’s speak­er wres­tles with sac­ri­fice, alters, and God’s cru­el tests.

The open­ing poem ​“How to Build an Alter” speaks to pos­si­bil­i­ties for the Akedah sto­ry — and to resilience. While the poem intro­duces the bind — and a father with a knife — it also offers the son agency “… if he imag­ines the bro­ken branch­es / whole again, lets the tim­bers / turn back into trees.” We learn the painful, per­son­al rel­e­vance the sto­ry has to the speak­er when she vis­its her father in a state hos­pi­tal. Both Abra­ham and the speaker’s father heard voic­es com­pelling them towards acts of vio­lence. But while Abra­ham was saved from the act, the speaker’s father, unfor­tu­nate­ly, was not: ​“The angel will not stay his hand.”

Amit­tay explores the Akedah sto­ry through free verse, prose poems, ekphras­tics, and an abecedar­i­an. ​“Burn­ing Burnt Offer­ings Hai­bun,” a poem in three sec­tions, begins with Gen­e­sis 22: 1 – 21; sec­tions II and III are era­sures of the text. God’s direc­tives to Abra­ham, for exam­ple, become ​“I will / split the wood,” and, final­ly, ​“I am / split.” The sparse­ness of the words and bril­liant use of white space echo the after­math of trau­ma and the pain of men­tal illness. 

While the Akedah is not ref­er­enced direct­ly in every poem, the sto­ry lingers through­out the col­lec­tion. In ​“Years from Then,” the speak­er is study­ing math on her lawn with friends. One friend men­tions the crime com­mit­ted there: the speaker’s father stabbed his moth­er-in-law. ​“Shall we return to the sine and cosine …” the speak­er asks her­self. ​“The answers are in the back of the book but only for the even-num­bered prob­lems.” Sev­er­al poems express the heav­i­ness of hav­ing to find answers on her own. In ​“Hon­or thy Father and thy Moth­er,” struc­tured as midrash on Torah, the speak­er grap­ples with how to obey the Fifth Com­mand­ment: ​“Call­ing the pub­lic gaze toward my parent’s mad­ness — is this hon­or?” She then direct­ly address­es her par­ents: ​“I hon­or you, Ima, by leav­ing you outside/​these poems; you, Abba, by hold­ing you inside them.”

Hon­or them, she does. While shar­ing the pain inher­ent in men­tal ill­ness, Amittay’s com­pas­sion for every­one affect­ed is at once both beau­ti­ful and stun­ning. The long­ing in these poems for what’s been lost and for ways to move for­ward is hon­est, gen­er­ous, and deeply moving. 

In Amittay’s clos­ing poem, ​“The Mir­ror in His Pock­et,” God vis­its the speak­er. Made in His image, with so much promise, the speak­er is ​“too illu­mi­nat­ed to have a reflec­tion.” But then God places an unman­age­able weight in her palm. When she asks Him why, he answers by shut­ting the mirror. 

The poems in The Eat­ing Knife are not easy poems. Sit with them. Reread them and then reread them again. Like Amittay’s speak­er, you may not find answers, but you will be reward­ed with an inti­mate view of one poet’s brave strug­gle to come to terms with sev­er­al of humanity’s most chal­leng­ing questions.