Netanyahu got his own son’s name wrong — was this a trivial mistake or a revealing Freudian slip?
When the Israeli prime minister called his son ‘Avraham,’ he called up images of one of the Torah’s most terrifying moments
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son Avner in 2015. Photo by Getty Images
Aviya Kushner May 15, 2025
Was it a slip of the tongue? Or was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s subconscious making a Freudian slip? The incident has upset many people in Israel and created associations with one of the most iconic and painful stories in the Torah. It’s the kind of Israel-for-Israelis story that does not make the international news, but my friend in Tel Aviv felt the need to tell me that “everyone is upset,” so I watched the video clip to see for myself.
The scene was the annual Chidon HaTanach competition, a prestigious and challenging contest to see which young person knows the most about the Bible. At the award ceremony, Netanyahu said two things that annoyed people, so much so that my friend was still fuming about two weeks later.
To be more accurate, the first thing Netanyahu said annoyed Israelis, and the second appalled them.
First, Netanyahu, wearing a kippah, mentioned his own father-in-law and his commitment to the Tanach.
I happen to have known Netanyahu’s father-in-law, Shmuel Ben-Artzi, because he was a friend and neighbor of my grandfather’s. And I personally observed his commitment to the Tanach at my brother’s bar-mitzvah. So I wasn’t offended when Netanyahu mentioned his own family while supposedly congratulating the contestants. But my friend in Tel Aviv said, “Why was he suddenly discussing his father-in-law? Who cares?”
It felt out of touch. Anyway, that set the stage for what came next, when Netanyahu referred to the way his father-in-law inspired “his grandson Avraham” to love the Tanach too.
Well, Avraham is not Netanyahu’s son’s name; it’s Avner.
Netanyahu tried to save face and, seeming to turn the slip-up into a joke, asked the audience for his own son’s name. For some, the moment evoked President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance — having the leader of the country make any kind of cognitive slip scares people, especially when the country is in a war.
“Why did he have to make us think of the akeidah?” my friend in Tel Aviv said, referring to the famous scene in the Bible, known as the binding of Isaac, when Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son.
In Israel, the mere mention of a biblical name can create immediate associations. And some immediately wondered whether what Netanyahu is thinking about these days, in private, in his heart of hearts, is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice.
In a traumatized Israel, many rushed to interpret who the “sacrifice” was — in other words, who is “Isaac”? The remaining hostages, now in 586 days of captivity, with no release deal in sight, immediately came to mind for many.
And the constant news coverage this week, with the release of Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander, reminded people that male hostages received a quarter-pita per day, and that Alexander was beaten and held with a bag over his head, while the finance minister in Netanyahu’s government, Bezalel Smotrich, actually said that freeing hostages was not the “most important goal” of the war with Hamas.
It takes a bit of digging to see the original Netanyahu clip — or should I say slip — now, because the Prime Minister’s office cut the problematic section out of the official video of the event, as Israel’s public broadcaster Channel 12 News reported. So if you look it up on YouTube, you’ll see the edited version.
To see both the original and the edited version, look at the Channel 12 site instead; you can see the rough edit in version two.
But that quick editing — OK, censorship — hasn’t prevented plenty of extended fury about the episode.
Netanyahu’s son Avner won a division of the Chidon HaTanach competition in 2010, so it wasn’t crazy to consider mentioning him, but the name slip was viewed by some as something significant — and disturbing.
“There are no delicate words — and no need to look for delicate words — to describe the shock from the unconscious midrash in the prime minister’s speech at the Chidon HaTanach that erupted like lava,” Ruhama Weiss, associate professor of Talmud and spiritual care, at Hebrew Union College, wrote in a column in Ynet.
Weiss points out that when Netanyahu momentarily forgot his son’s name, and instead invoked, of all names, Avraham, or Abraham, it sent Israel straight into the story of the akeidah, and so offered an opportunity to consider what commentators have debated — “was it God who commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, or was it Satan?”
Whew.
But “Satan” doesn’t exactly mean “Satan.”
“I was frozen in front of the short video clip,” Weiss writes, “because from Bibi’s throat came a chilling commentary. His subconscious, or in midrashic language, ‘Satan,’ expressed a truth he refuses to acknowledge.”
One of the photos that accompanied the column — depicting a protest for the release of Edan Alexander — featured the caption “does Bibi think he is the sacrificer or the sacrifice?”
In other words, does Bibi see himself as Abraham or as Isaac? Is he the father or the son in the famous scene?
Weiss reminds us that many commentators are interested in the question of whether Abraham really meant to kill his own son. There is a lot of discussion on metaphor, and what it all means.
The episode reminded Israelis of questions many have right now — is Netanyahu fit to serve? In all the awful moments of the past 580 days, what does this all mean? And more deeply, can Israel survive like this?
And of course, the question of who, exactly, is the sacrifice is so uncomfortable that perhaps it can only be addressed by accident.
As I watched this clip at a time when the U.S. is lifting sanctions on Syria and embracing Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who spent years on America’s terrorist list — I wondered how much of the rapidly changing Middle East and quickly transforming U.S.-Israel relationship Netanyahu knew about, or intuited, or had in his subconscious mind, as he “forgot” his own son’s name and reminded Israel of one of the Torah’s most terrifying moments.
