Well, the biblical standpoint is discussed at this website. I have always phrased it thusly: The sins of the father are visited upon the son. I always figured it had something to do with karma (ha!). Dad's shitty karma bears poorly upon the son.

Middlesex actually interprets it in a really neat (I think) way, turning the Greek tragedy idea into a genetics thing. So the "sins" being visited are faulty chromosomes -- not in a biologic version of predestination, but more in a "We inherit the vulnerabilities of our ancestors, and the consequences of their biological decisions" sort of way.

positively c.a.r.m-ic

I remember reading in "Jewish Renewal" a different interpretation of it all, saying that after four generations the bad stuff in a family gets wiped out - IF they're determined to do so.

I found an essay that references that here. The context is about revenge leading to revenge (stay with me here)

Interestingly, in the story of Esther each instance where a decision about revenge is to be made the individual making it -- Ahasueras,Haman or Mordechai ( 1:16-22; 3:9; 5:14; 9:14) seeks confirmation from some outside source -- the king's adviser's, Haman's wife or Ahasueras himself. Even the most devious of politicians seek some outside authority – some wise man or adviser -- to justify their deeds.

If all this were confined to a Biblical story, this would be a mere abstract discussion. But the fact that it is Biblical ensures that its impact reaches across the generations, with different people learning different lessons from it. In his book "Jewish Renewal" for example, the contemporary thinker, Michael Lerner observes that since 1994, Purim has taken on a far more ominous meaning. On that Purim, Dr Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque inside the cave of Machpela and gunned down 29 praying Moslems. Noting that the extremists who supported this act quoted precisely the passages about Amalek and chapter 9 of the scroll of Esther, he observes that the Biblical passage "does not order the blotting out of Amalek but only the memory of Amalek . And where does that memory live? Precisely in our tendency to act out on others what was done to us... Torah seeks to make the unconscious conscious by instructing us to remember what happened to us so we don't act it out unconsciously. The point of remembering is to disentangle us from the pain and thus to 'blot out the memory.' The memory remains with us as long as it is unconsciously shaping our actions."

Professor Lerner's psychological analysis of revenge powerfully echoes those of Rambam (Sefer Mitzvot) who emphasizes that the "remembering" is to be expressed in words, and the "not forgetting" in the heart. Rabbi Shimson Raphael Hirsch, too, in his comments on the Amalek passages in the Bible, interprets the remembering of Amalek as meaning never repeating his cruelty.

So going with Alice Miller and the repetition compulsion, we have kids that will tend to act out what was done to them, unless there's a helping witness, or an intervention, or somehow the kid decides to act differently. Even so, there may be the inability to react normally all the time, so even though Kid A doesn't beat his kid, he may not be able to form a close relationship because with his kid because he didn't have any relationship with his father. So now it's up to kid 'a' to not repeat that pattern, and slowly the sins of the father are not visited upon the sons.

The "too bad" aspect, to me, is a cop-out. There should always be hope. Even if people don't see results they want to see right away, they never know the impact that one positive encounter can have.

And now I seriously have to quit Metachat and do some actual work today.

So going with Alice Miller and the repetition compulsion, we have kids that will tend to act out what was done to them, unless there's a helping witness, or an intervention, or somehow the kid decides to act differently.

I like this interpretation. I wrote some lyrics once that captured that same thing, back when I thought I was a folksinger:

Night never comes to the house down my block --
Draw tight the curtains, no one sees the dark inside.
They greet the morning with their strained steel smiles;
Their children grow up to commit the crimes that were done to them.