On Father’s Day we tell stories of devotion, responsibility, and love, and we honor those who accompanied us, taught us, and bore responsibility for the generations to come. Yet there is something worth pausing over in the fact that the most foundational father in Western culture is not a figure easy to celebrate in such terms.

Few figures have enjoyed the standing Abraham holds. Judaism calls him “Abraham our father,” Christianity regards him as the father of faith, and Islam counts him among its most important spiritual forefathers and names him “the friend of God.” For thousands of years Jews, Christians, and Muslims have returned to him, and each tradition has found in him a source of inspiration and authority. And yet the story most identified with him is also one of the most troubling ever written.

The Binding of Isaac refuses to settle comfortably with our moral intuitions. A father who heeds the command to offer up his son, and who rises in the morning to carry it out without a word of protest, is not a figure who fits easily with our conceptions of parenthood, responsibility, or love. Over the generations, the story has drawn countless interpretations. Some saw in it a test of faith. Others stressed that in the end, Isaac was spared, as though the happy ending softens the dread along the way. Some read it as a protest against child sacrifice, while others saw it as a tale of absolute obedience. All these readings, each in its own way, seek to make Abraham comprehensible.

In the nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard offered an entirely different reading. In his book Fear and Trembling, published in 1843 under the pen name Johannes de Silentio, “John the Silent,” he sought not to resolve the difficulty........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)