Filicide and faith ...

I'm rostered as liturgist for end of the month. I see that the lection includes Genesis 22 - Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice on God's command. It's a story I'd rather ignore. I remember one sermon suggesting that Abraham was psychotic. And a psychiatrist pointing out that there is no record of Isaac ever speaking to his father again after the incident (I don't know if that is true). Brueggemann and colleagues are quite helpful - noting that the point of the story is God's generosity in providing what is needed. This commentary does not seek to explain away the story, but rather to accept the narrative at face value (i.e. a test of whether allegiance is to the giver or the gift) and to ignore the family violence dimensions.

I am working on a review of literature about parents who kill their children. It is the worst of family violence and a blatant indictment on rich countries that we tolerate the destruction of so many young lives. American pediatrician Jeffrey Goldhagen puts it like this:

As nations, the United States and the United Kingdom venerate and romanticize childhood, while at the same time, we abuse, molest, incarcerate, subjugate, segregate, and exploit our children. Although glorifying the developmental state that we call childhood in the abstract, we have as societies done much to eliminate it as a reality for many communities of children in our countries. As a result, gross inequities and disparities define the epidemiology of child health in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Preventing abuse and neglect of children is a fundamental responsibility of every society. Every country, except Somalia and the USA, has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and explicitly accepted the responsibility to ensure that all children enjoy safety, nurture, opportunity, health and that they actively participate in decisions that concern them. Child protection is a key issue in all countries - there is extensive and complex debate about the best approach to achieve safe outcomes. But the bottom line is that children must be secure and separated from perpetrators of abuse.

Yet here in our sacred scriptures we have a perpetrator of abuse held up as a model in faith. You may say that Isaac suffered no wound. But I say being tied up and placed on a pyre and having a knife held to you is an extremely damaging act that is likely to have long-term emotional and psychological consequences. How do I craft prayers and find music to go alongside this?

Wikipedia has some interesting information - including:

• Many commentators think Isaac was an adult in this story (as indeed most historical artists depict him - see 1418 sculpture by Donatello at top of post
  
• The equivalent story in the Quran has Abraham's son as a fully consenting participant
• In a time when child sacrifice was "rife" - this story is a clear statement that such practices are abhorent to God

In a comment on a past blog on Liberal Jesus, Richard Beck said...

I've been reading some midrash on the Akedah. This doesn't answer anything and may actually sharpen your moral concerns, but a lot of midrash on this subject deals with the fact that Isaac doesn't (overtly in the text) return back home with Abraham. The issue for the rabbis is why?

Interestingly, some rabbis have suggested that this whole incident was so psychically traumatic to Isaac that he had to go away for a time to heal, psychologically speaking

Richard is a Psych Professor and his comments very like the ones I remember from long ago. Maybe this story is one of the motifs for psychology/ psychiatry training????

Now I'm sufficiently orthodox to want to check these ideas out in some more conventional theological places, but it was helpful to take a look at this cyberspace emporium of information. Maybe it's a bit like "an eye for an eye" - an exhortation to moderation rather than unmitigated revenge out of proportion to the original wrongdoing.

Given the pressing public health importance of family violence, and the often complicit role of religion in keeping women and children in positions of oppression and danger, I feel that this must be investigated and addressed in some way. There is work to be done ....

And blogging this has helped me to move from a position of seeking to avoid the text to wanting to explore it fully. The lamenting Psalm 13 ties in well with the consequences of child maltreatment.