October 2024

Dear Friend of Golden View Classical Academy,

Last month, I shared a new kind of Board education that we are starting at Golden View. It’s a (as far as I can tell) unique way to work with the Board to develop knowledge and interest in the Western tradition of education. This month, I presented on the challenge of transmitting culture, drawing on the book of Genesis. Here it is, in full. 

How do you draw children into a culture? While we may consider this a matter of course in school, anyone who remembers being a teenager, and anyone who knows a teenager, understands that being drawn into a culture is not a simple task. There is a predictably rebellious spirit, more or less alive, in the soul of any child who begins to find his unique worth and interest. But there is also, in some, a spirit of passive, even docile acceptance that may be just as dangerous. The child who too easily accepts the culture lacks the nerve, energy, drive, or spirit to defend that culture when pressed.  

Both of these challenges - the rebellious and passive spirits - are on display in one of the West’s foundational texts, the Hebrew Bible. For the purposes of this segment of the Sentinel Series, I will focus on the challenge of the passive child, the one who does not push boundaries or seek a fuller justification, and who accepts without question the way of life transmitted to him. In the context of the Hebrew Bible, I suggest this role is played by Isaac, the son of Abraham. 

While Abraham is an adventurous, spirited, and ambitious general and leader, Isaac is none of those things. Indeed, where his father was told to leave his home and lead a new life, Isaac is told to stay put. Where Abraham institutes a demanding ritual of self-sacrifice, Isaac merely receives it without thought. And, centrally, where Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac merely accepts it. It is unclear if, at any stage of his own sacrifice, Isaac does or says anything at all to defend himself. 

The binding of Isaac is the high point of Genesis, and represents a long-standing challenge to anyone interpreting the text. The immediate lesson appears to be for Abraham, but if cultural transmission is a question then the lesson must be for Isaac as well. And this is where the trouble begins. After the incident, Isaac descends the mountain alone and goes to live with his mother. Neither he nor she ever sees or speaks to Abraham again. Indeed, it appears as if the high point of Genesis represents a complete and total break of the transmission of culture between generations. While Abraham never stops caring for his son, even going so far as to find him a wife and prevent him from returning to his ancestors’ land, Isaac appears to be outside of the promise and covenant. 

He does, eventually, return to his father’s way of life, retracing some of his steps, encountering the same challenges, even naming important landmarks in the same way his father had done. How is it that Isaac, the one who docilely accepted his own sacrifice, who then abandoned his father and his father’s God, can come to accept his father’s ways in the absence of his father? How is it that the way of life was actually transmitted? Or, perhaps more directly, how did Isaac choose that way of life in the end?  

I would offer the following as one possible explanation, and this is admittedly not entirely supported by direct text. I wonder about the conversations Isaac and Sarah had after they broke from Abraham. It is clear that Isaac loved his mother, and it stands to reason that they were very close. I wonder if he ever asked about his name, which means “laughter,” and I wonder if, in her response, she smiled and remembered the beautiful moment she found out that, at last, she would bear a child. I wonder if at that moment Isaac started to ask about the God that granted his mother a child, him in particular, and what kind of conversations they had about his father Abraham. There is nothing in the text that indicates Isaac ever knew that his father was asked by God, by the very principle and fountain of his way of life, to sacrifice him. For all he knew, his father just chose to do it. Sarah herself would never know either. But Isaac would know that his wife Rebekah came to him because of his father’s actions and generosity, and he would know that all of his possessions came to him in the same way. He must have wondered how the man who sought his life, and then mysteriously stopped, is the same man who took such care of him even after their separation. Everything about his life is something received rather than earned. 

Eventually, and we have to wonder how long it took him to take this initial step, Isaac does pray for a child and, just like the prayers of his parents, he is answered. And then for at least 20 years he does nothing of note. He seems to be just as docile as he has always been. It’s only when a child is born and a famine strikes that he acts, choosing a path to save his family. This is the first mature thing he does, the first time he decides to step outside of his comfort. 

And this is the crucial point - it is only when he does this that God speaks to him. It could be that God was waiting or it could be that Isaac at last hears what has always been spoken to him. Either way, he hears for the first time that not only is this God the same as his father’s God, but that his father was right the whole time. God favors and praises Abraham for having acted well. The way of life and the structure of belief that Isaac abandoned after Moriah enters his world now in a way that reveals support for the father who tried to put him to death.

That must have been a striking realization for Isaac. It must have been something like the fact that the step he is taking is the equivalent, at the limit, of sacrificing a child. He was about to upend his and his family’s life, and that is a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of the current state to future wellbeing, and something like a sacrifice of what is good for what is better. At the limit of that is the trial of Mount Moriah, which I take as representing, in part, the ultimate truth of what we ordinarily experience as “sacrifice.”

I would argue that it is when Isaac makes his mature and independent step, when he chooses to no longer be the docile recipient of his fate and way of life, that he lives up to the example of his father, whom he can now appreciate more fully. It is here that he sees the promise - if you act well, you will be rewarded. And “well” may not be the same precisely as your father, but it is in the same vein or tradition, and it means in part seeing your own life and the lives of those you live as a gift. 

The text leaves out the conversations Isaac had with his mother and his father as a child, and just with his mother later on. My sense is that those conversations prepared him to see things in this way, to see himself and everything else as a gift, and so to choose the path of independence within a wider and truer realm of dependence for his life on forces he does not command. 

Sincerely,

Dr. Garrow

Principal, Golden View Classical Academy

Board Meeting

The November Board Meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, November 20th at 5:30pm in the Bailey Heritage Library. You can find meeting agendas on BoardDocs prior to the meeting.