The Stolen Blessing – Supportive Text The Stolen Blessing: Esav’s Blessing – Supportive Text
Because of the fundamental importance of the entire chapter 22, each mundane episode can be fruitfully examined. In 2018, I completed a series of thirty paintings that focus on each verb in the narrative entitled Akeidah Verbs. Additional Texts: Richard McBee’s Akedah Series: Reimagining and…
Rashi: Sarah’s death is juxtaposed with the Binding of Isaac because through hearing the news of the Binding—that her son was readied for slaughter and was nearly killed—her soul flew away and she died. Vayikra Rabba, 20:2: “…for Isaac then returned to his mother and…
Because of the nature of God’s test of Abraham, it is considered as if Abraham actually slaughtered Isaac. In the Rosh Hashana Machzor, in the chazzan’s repetition of Shacharis, a piyut declares: “They are confident in the ashes of [Isaac] who was bound like a…
The links, emotional and theological, between a God who would demand the unthinkable of Abraham and a God who hid His face during the Holocaust seemed overwhelming. Additional Texts: Richard McBee’s Akedah Series: Reimagining and Reconfiguring Jewish Art by Matthew Baigell The Binding of Isaac: Genesis…
The shattered father and son relationship was an early subject. In spite of the traditional commentaries that maintain that Abraham and Isaac were united in doing God’s will, it always seemed to me that the near-death experience of Isaac at the hands of his father…
Among the earliest images I created were reflections of the synagogue fresco series from Dura Europos, dated ca. 235 C.E. and discovered in 1932, that depicted around the Torah niche the Akeida; Abraham, Isaac, the ram, and a figure in a tent doorway. Our tradition…
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976) Jaynes maintained that primitive man lacked self-consciousness, having a bicameral mind, and operated on the belief in the voices they heard in their heads (one side of the brain communicating…
This figure, though common in commentaries, is invented here by me as beginning to give an explanation of the logic of Sarah’s death. Once the angel of death was sent to take a soul and was frustrated by the Divine command to spare Isaac, the…
When exploring a narrative the most obvious, at times banal and yet dramatic theme is the presumed climax of the central event. Additional Texts: Richard McBee’s Akedah Series: Reimagining and Reconfiguring Jewish Art by Matthew Baigell The Binding of Isaac: Genesis 22
Abraham and the Three Strangers Genesis 18:1-16 1 And the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre; and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; 2 And he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men…