Sacrificing the flesh of the fathering-organ is thus a natural analogue for offering up what that flesh signifies and produces: the conception and birth of the firstborn. In this way, not only does Abraham's circumcision presage the Akedah, but since Abraham's phallus represents the flesh of Isaac, we can appreciate the excitement generated by the kabbalists when they realize that God's phallus, the so-called divine phallus (yesod), of a necessity, similarly represents the Righteous One of God, which, unwrapped, is therefore God's own personal Isaac, his own flesh and blood firstborn: the living, fleshly, God, who must, in parallel with Abraham, Isaac, and the Akedah, become a sacrificial korban קרבן.
Remember that if Adam had not sinned . . . Man would not have been required to bring himself close to G-d by means of an animal sacrifice; he himself would have been the sacrifice, much as is described by our sages when they tell of the archangel Michael offering the souls of the departed righteous on the Heavenly Altar (Chagiga 12).
Shney Luchot Habrit, vol. 2, p. 681.
In the passage above, Rabbi Horowitz relays the kabbalistic significance of Isaac being sacrificed as an offering without spot or blemish rather than that offering being ritualized through the sacrifice of an animal. Because of Abraham's circumcision, symbolized by the circumcision of Isaac on the eighth day, Isaac represents a post-lapsarian firstborn conceived and delivered without spot or blemish and who's thus able to affect on a higher plane what's signified by the sacrifices of the animal:
Both the priests who offer the sacrifice and the animals to be offered must be free of blemishes because they represent sanctity. Any blemish, however insignificant, is termed רע, because it originates in the pollutant man has absorbed from the original serpent.
Ibid. p. 734.
The "blemish" that symbolizes the loss of sanctity is situated in the nature of the serpent in the Garden and the original sin of Adam and Eve affected by that serpent:
. . . if man on earth had not failed and as a result become garbed in the pollutants emitted by the serpent, there would not have been such a thing as shame, negative aspects to the act of procreation. . . the person born as a result . . . would have come into the world with the same stature as Adam.
Shney Luchot HaBerit, Torah Shebikhtav, Vaera, Torah Ohr, 39.
Abraham's circumcision sacrifices the flesh through which Adam produced the original sin and thus the pollutant emitted by the fleshly serpent created on Adam's body in the likeness of the serpent; the pollutant the holy Shelah calls the
evil-smelling drop of semen:
. . . the original seduction practiced by the serpent on Eve in Paradise . . . is the reason that nowadays the origin of man is the proverbial טפה סרוחה "evil-smelling drop of semen" familiar to us from the saying of Rabbi Akavyah in Avot 3, 1. If Adam and Eve had not allowed themselves to be seduced into sinning, all seed would have been holy seed. The whole subject of the covenant, the ברית מילה, which is performed on the reproductive organ, is designed to reconsecrate it to G-d.
Ibid. 29.
It follows then that Isaac's life after the עקדה, was the life of a human being who had not originated from a drop of semen. We must view Isaac as someone reborn in consequence of that experience: a totally new creature. . . Isaac's body resembled that of אדם הראשון, also not the product of a drop of semen.
Ibid. 46.
Since the Akedah is the fulfillment of Abraham's ritual sacrifice of the firstborn (his circumcision), Isaac's body represents what Adam's body was before the desecration that added the fleshly serpent through which the semen came that conceived Cain and the rest of humanity by means of the evil-smelling drop of semen. What Rabbi Horowitz calls reconsecrating it to God, i.e., circumcision, is elsewhere, even according to Horowitz, considered to be sacrificing it to God. The fathering-flesh is reconsecrated not by using it to father the holy firstborn, but by sacrificing it so that it plays no part in the birth of the firstborn sanctified precisely by its absence in the conception and birth. Thus the holy firstborn in Abraham's case is Isaac, and in God's case is the previously mentioned "living God" whom Rabbi Kaplan says is also known as "Shaddai."
The Living God: The name is associated with the essential creative forces, represented by the Sefirah of Yesod (Foundation). In man, this force parallels the sexual organ. In Hebrew, this phrase is Elohim Chaim. . . the "Living God. . . We therefore have two designations for Yesod (Foundation), "Living God" (Elohim Chaim), and El Shaddai . . . God thus told Moses, "I appeared to Abraham . . . as El Shaddai" (Exodus 6:3).
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, p. 17-18.
Where
yesod is recognized as God's fathering-organ, representing the sacrificial flesh of his firstborn (the organ that links
tif'eret and
malchut in order to produce holy offspring), and where, "as above, so below," is the adage linking Abraham and God, that is, where the lower parallels the higher, and earth parallels heaven, then, by means of the crux of his own sacrifice of the fleshly fathering organ
, yesod, God both sanctifies his firstborn, ala Isaac, and makes his firstborn to be conceived without "blemish," such that just like Isaac, God's firstborn is abel to be sacrificed as the reality only signified in the lower realm by ritual animal sacrifice.
John