The turbulent late 1960s were notable for campus unrest and civil disobedience among the nation’s youth. In this 1968 Rosh Hashanah sermon Sidney Ballon takes one of the most famous and problematic Biblical father-son relationships, that of Abraham and Isaac, and uses it as a foundation for commentary on the so-called generation gap. Despite his discomfort with much of their behavior, he was not unwilling to hear the message of the younger generation and to acknowledge the principles that they sought to uphold.
Young people…are challenging our unrecognized hypocrisies and have the daring to insist that societies and individuals live by the values they preach, that they wipe out the gap between principle and practice, between national creed and policy. Thus, it may well be…that young people have indeed followed the preachment of their elders only too well.
One additional note—from our perspective over forty years later, it is ironic to hear his description of the rapid social and technological changes that may have influenced the youth of that era.
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We have just read from the Torah this morning, as we do every year on Rosh Hashanah, the story of the Akeda—the binding of Isaac.[i] Our tradition attaches a great deal of significance to this chapter. It is considered to be an awesome illustration of the deep commitment of our ancestor Abraham and a convincing demonstration of God's goodness in that Isaac ultimately was spared.
Despite the importance, however, that tradition places upon this tale, it is one which often troubles the modern reader. The idea of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son is a disturbing one. The idea of a father being willing to sacrifice his own son, even though at God's command, is even more disturbing. And our distress is not relieved even though we know beforehand that Isaac will survive and a ram will be offered in his stead.
Several explanations have been offered. We are asked, first of all, to remember that the sensibilities of people in biblical times were not quite as delicate as ours today. We are told that the early Hebrew people also abhorred child sacrifice, but that the idea was not altogether devoid of plausibility for them, because it was practiced by their neighbors. There are many, indeed, who interpret this story of the Akeda as a Hebrew protest against this practice of child sacrifice by other nations. They consider it a subtle way of proclaiming that God did not really want that kind of sacrifice after all.
It has also been pointed out that the telling of the story takes for granted that God's demand is something extraordinary, something no man would think of doing on his own, but precisely therein, it is said, is its value as a test of faith. The very unreasonableness of God's demand and Abraham’s readiness to do something one might ordinarily find repulsive and inhuman was only greater proof to the storyteller of Abraham's worthiness, and this is the point of it all.
The modern reader, however, may still be left unsatisfied by either of these explanations. He may still be disturbed by the fact that God is said to give such an order to a father concerning his son, whatever the reason may be.
Because of this theological difficulty, Edmond Cahn,[ii] who was an eminent professor of law, decided to evaluate this story from a lawyer's point of view, and he came to the conclusion that we really have not been given the true facts of the case. In a typical legal manner his first question is, “Who were the witnesses that could have reported this event and given us the facts?” Only two, obviously, were possible—Abraham and Isaac themselves, who were alone on the mountaintop. He then decides that it could not have been Abraham because everything we know about the character of Abraham is inconsistent with his actions as reported in this passage. Abraham was not a passive personality. The Bible tells us that he was a fighter. He did not fear to argue even with God himself. When Sodom was about to be destroyed, Abraham bargained with God in an effort to save it. He challenged God with the words, "Shall not the judge of all the earth act justly?"[iii] It is unlikely, then, that Abraham, when his own son was involved, would be so submissive and not argue with God against the idea of taking his life. Therefore, the conclusion is that our report of the Akeda has come from Isaac, who must have embellished the incident to suit his own purposes. Isaac, from the little we hear of him, was not as strong a personality as Abraham. He was quieter, more submissive. And one day possibly when he was in despair about the behavior of his twins Jacob and Esau, he must have cried out to them, "Why can't you obey me, as I obeyed my father, and as my father obeyed God?" And he probably tried to impress them by telling them the story of his trip to Moriah with some conscious or unconscious variations. Thus we do not know what really happened on Moriah. We know only what Isaac told his sons to demonstrate to them how obedient he was to his father Abraham.
Whether this theory is correct or not, Jewish tradition had already accepted the idea of Isaac's exemplary obedience to his father. Rashi comments on the phrase, “Vayailchu shnaihem yachdav—And the two of them walked together,”[iv] and he says, “Isaac knew he was to be sacrificed and yet he did not rebel.” It has been very common even for modern rabbis to overlook the more disturbing aspects of the Akeda and to focus rather on this beautifully worded phrase, “And the two of them walked together.” Many a congregation on many a Rosh Hashanah has heard a sermon using this text and expatiating on how wonderful it would be if contemporary fathers and sons would emulate Abraham and Isaac in walking together, in avoiding a clash between the generations, how wonderful it would be if children followed quietly in the footsteps of their fathers.
Apparently these sermons have not been altogether successful. Regardless of how many of them may have been preached, it is obvious that today the problem of walking together, the problem of establishing rapport with our young people is greater than ever before. This is the age of the generation gap, of hippies and of campus rebellions.[v] We are deeply disturbed by the restlessness of so many of our young people, by their defiance of convention, by the violence which has sometimes come to pass. We are perplexed as to the wisest way of responding, and we vacillate between trying to reason together with them and cracking down on them, between exhortation and condemnation.
The thought that I am leading to this morning is that before we altogether condemn it, perhaps we should seek to understand. To be sure, we cannot condone or justify every extreme act that students or other young people have engaged in to make their point, but there may be a silver lining in the cloud. They may even be walking together with us more closely than we realize. A recent book entitled The Young Radicals by Kenneth Keniston[vi] tries to give us an insight into the nature of our thinking young people today. It is worth reading. It is a study of a limited number of college students who have been exceedingly active in the protest movements, but through this study of a few we do gain some understanding of the mood of young people in general. Keniston concludes that it is easy to find good grounds to criticize these young radicals. They seem "unrealistic, anarchistic and romantic" but, however we judge them, he suggests that:
…to describe their search is to enumerate the problems of our changing, affluent and violent society, a society that has barely begun to catch up with the dilemmas it has created.... The new radicals," he says, "are at least confronting the central issues of our time, and confronting them more directly than we can afford to. They are asking the basic questions, making the mistakes, and perhaps moving towards some of the answers we all desperately need.
The adjectives “changing, affluent and violent” seem to be the key to the understanding of our young people. The major factors in the rebellion of youth today seem to be the fact that they have lived in a society which has undergone the most rapid change that the world has ever known; they have lived in a society which is the most affluent the world has ever known, and they live in a society which has suffered the greatest violence the world has ever known, and is capable of even more.
Since World War I, social, technological and political change has proceeded with unprecedented and ever increasing rapidity. Space has been contracted. Communications are instant. Technological skills have increased. Our young people have not only benefited from these changes personally but have, as a result, grown more open and receptive to change than any other generation has been. They are accustomed to the idea of constant readjustment and they do not fear even greater readjustment when they feel that their elders are lagging behind the times.
Not all the young people of our nation, of course, have been freed from the shackles of poverty. We still have our vast number of deprived, but the rebels among our college youth are not usually among them. They have grown up in middle and upper class families which have taken for granted American prosperity and the luxuries it provides. This has not only made them physically comfortable, but also provided the opportunity to be independent, to acquire a higher education, to have the leisure to think for themselves. They begin to seek new values in living that will fill the spiritual emptiness created by such material affluence. These young people are freed from the concern for providing for their own immediate needs, and are thus also free to concern themselves with the welfare of others and the wider society. Their own security makes it possible for them to give thought to the insecurity of others, and they do not hesitate to express their outrage and indignation at the social evils which they see.
Our young people today are also part of the first generation to grow up in the shadow of possible worldwide atomic destruction. They are aware of Hiroshima and they are aware of Auschwitz. They are mindful of the many violent struggles which have taken place in many parts of the world in the past quarter-century and of our own involvement this very day in faraway places, justifiable or not. Such a background of violence has had two opposite consequences. On the one hand, it has stimulated further violence among young people, and on the other, it has convinced, particularly the more highly intellectual, of the futility of conflict and created determination to oppose all war and to bring all violence as much as possible under control.
The study of our young people, however, seems to show that in spite of their seeming desire to change things, they do not really want a change in the basic values which they have learned from their family groups. Our young people often seem to reject the philosophy and politics of their elders, but they still act in accord with a basic set of moral principles which adults also profess to embrace. They are concerned with justice and decency, equality and nonviolence, honesty and kindness. They are profoundly faithful to many of the fundamental values of American democracy. What makes these young people different is that they take these values more seriously than their parents, and they propose that American society and the world set about implementing them. They may seem to be revolutionary and disruptive, but they are merely trying to apply more completely a great variety of political, personal and social principles that no one before seemed to think of extending to such situations as dealing with strangers, relations between the races or international politics. When we talked about peace and love we somehow have managed to exclude foreigners and Negroes from our thinking. Young people, however, are challenging our unrecognized hypocrisies and have the daring to insist that societies and individuals live by the values they preach, that they wipe out the gap between principle and practice, between national creed and policy. Thus, it may well be, as was previously suggested, that young people have indeed followed the preachment of their elders only too well.
It should be noted that even Isaac, the exemplar of obedience, dared to question a little bit. Intuitively he sensed that something was not quite right and as he walked with his father, you will remember, he turned to him and said, “But where is the lamb for the offering?"[vii] It is true that Isaac did not resist nor protest too loudly, but his question is not too different, basically, from what is troubling our young people today. They, too, are being led by their fathers to a remote place under circumstances that they cannot comprehend, and so they, too, ask, "Where are we going and who will be the sacrifice?" The big difference is that today young people refuse to wait for an angel to stretch forth his hand to save them and so they cry out for themselves:
Do not put forth thy hand unto the youth![viii] Do not offer us as a sacrifice in Vietnam! Do not let us die in hate-infested cities! Do not carry on your business as before, in betrayal of all you have taught us!
We may, therefore, not necessarily excuse all that young people do today in the name of justice. Sometimes they seem to pervert the very justice they crave. But neither should we be too quick to condemn. With William S. Paley,[ix] member of the board of trustees of Columbia University, we must recognize that they do have legitimate complaints. He deplored the student violence on the campus,[x] but he cautioned that "We should not lose sight of the...widespread feeling of sincere discontent, not only about the university but about the entire world." Students may challenge and question, but perhaps in this very fact lies our best hope for the future. There must be some good and promise in young people who risk their careers for a social ideal. If we could only combine the honesty and energy of youth with the judgment and discipline of age. With such a pooling of natural resources we could move much faster toward the objectives we desire in common and achieve more easily the walking together we so fervently desire. May the year to come bring us closer to this goal.
[i] Genesis 22:1-19
[ii] Edmond Nathaniel Cahn (1906-1964), taught at New York University, lectured on the philosophy of law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and on ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City.
[iii] Genesis 18 “23 And Abraham drew near, and said: 'Wilt Thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 Peradventure there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou indeed sweep away and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? 25 That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that be far from Thee; shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?'”
[iv] Genesis 22:6 “And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife; and they went both of them together.”
[v] Protests raged throughout 1968 included a large number of students. Worldwide, campuses became battle grounds for social change. While opposition to the Vietnam War dominated the protests (at least in the United States), they also protested for civil liberties, against racism, for feminism, and the beginnings of the ecological movement can be traced to the protests against biological and nuclear weapons.
[vi] Kenneth Keniston, psychologist, taught at Harvard University, Yale University, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[vii] Genesis 22:7 “And Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father, and said: 'My father.' And he said: 'Here am I, my son.' And he said: 'Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?'”
[viii] Genesis 22:11-12 “And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said: 'Abraham, Abraham.' And he said: 'Here am I.' And he said: 'Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him; for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me.'”
[ix] William S. Paley (1901–1990) was the chief executive who built Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) from a small radio network into one of the foremost radio and television network operations in the United States.
[x] The Columbia University protests of 1968 were among the many student demonstrations that occurred around the world in that year. The Columbia protests erupted over the spring of that year after students discovered links between the university and the institutional apparatus supporting the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as their concern over an allegedly segregatory gymnasium to be constructed in the nearby Morningside Park. The protests resulted in the student occupation of many university buildings and their eventual violent removal by the New York City Police Department.
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