Now I Know

Now I Know
Genesis 22: 11- 19

In 1969, as the Vietnam war reached its peak, the Canadian Jewish poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen recorded a song about “The Story of Isaac.” The first two verses imaginatively retell the story from Isaac’s angle, but then the song ricochets into addressing people who are building altars now for the sacrifice of children. It closes, “Have mercy on our uniform, man of peace or man of war; the peacock spreads his fan.” The reference to the peacock suggests a link with a poem from the First World War, Wilfred Owens’s “Parable of the Young Man and the Old.” It, too, begins by retelling the story from Genesis 22 but ricochets into a description of Abraham building parapets and trenches and binding Isaac with belts and straps. The angel then calls from heaven, points to “the ram of pride” caught in a thicket, and bids him sacrifice that instead. “But the old man would not so, but slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one.” My mother’s oldest sister, who would have been a teenager just after the end of that war, used to talk about the way there simply were not enough boys to go around in Britain then. Too many had been killed...