Martyrdom for the Sake of Heaven 53

Four hundred boys and girls were kidnapped to be sold into brothels. They reasoned: If we drown in the sea, we shall attain the life of the world to come. All four hundred committed suicide.” We see that martyrdom is praiseworthy in this context even though it involves neither incest nor adultery, but will involve sexual immorality. Also, we note the close connection between martyrdom and the life of the next world.

As Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion was being burnt at the stake by the Romans:“The executioner then said to him:“Rabbi , if I raise the flame and take away the tufts of wool from over your heart, will you cause me to enter into the life to come? Yes, he replied....He thereupon raised the flame and removed the tufts of wool from over his heart, and his soul departed speedily. The executioner then jumped and threw himself into the fire. And a bat kol exclaimed: Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion and the executioner have been assigned to the world to come.”

This story has some resemblance to Luke 23: 39-43 in which Jesus assures one of the two criminals crucified with him that he would have a place with him in Paradise. Hanina ben Teradion is unwilling to do anything to hasten his death, that would be suicide. Suicide and martyrdom are not the same, even when being burnt at the stake. God would take him, when God determined. The executioner (I assume the executioner was not Jewish ), however, can do things to hasten death, a kind of shabbes goy in extreme circumstances. While Hanina ben Teradion is an involuntary martyr, the executioner who has acquired the world to come is a voluntary martyr. It is, also, interesting that the text believes that a Talmudic sage can confer the world to come at will.

Let us now proceed to the first of the two texts to be considered the, akeidah. There are two traditions, one that Isaac was thirteen at the time of the Akeidah, another that he was thirty-seven. If Isaac were thirteen years old when Abraham brings him to his sacrifice, then we would consider him an involuntary martyr. But, if he were thirty-seven years old, and behaved the way he did in many midrashic stories, we would classify him a voluntary martyr. To give just one example from Midrash Rabbah: