In The Beginning was Love?

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

The sacrifice of a son, a sacrifice made by the father, a sacrifice to a god, is a founding act; it is an act that establishes divine law and institutes faith (Abraham and Isaac); it is one of the building blocks of “the religion of love” (Christianity). The sacrifice of a daughter by her father is usually aimed either to appease a god when a law has been broken (Agamemnon and Iphigenia) or as thanksgiving (the daughter of Iphtach); it is no coincidence that both cases are related to the act of war (the “sacred” space of men). But the body of founding myths include no account of any mother who sacrifices her offspring as a ritualized and meticulously planned act, but only out of rage (Medea), ritualistic ecstasy due to confusion or deceit (in the Dionysian worship), or in religious despair (Kidush Ha-Shem2). Are we women really out of law, expulsed from the founding act? Can we not sacrifice others but only ourselves? Are we only good for self-sacrifice, devotion dissolution and preoccupation,3 replaced in extreme cases by fearful murderousness (in the name of God—in sanctification of the name of God—or in “No-name” in a mental nowomansland). Are we really, as some claim, outside of worship or the ritual, reduced to be only observers, subject to the act, or are we in