Abraham has already begun walking home.
Two figures wait for him below. He still carries the knife. Above them, Isaac remains on Mount Moriah, separated from his father and suspended in the place where he was nearly sacrificed by his father.
The painting is titled “Alone.” It is the final work in Richard McBee’s new six-painting cycle on the binding of Isaac.
In the biblical account, an angel stops Abraham from sacrificing his son. A ram is offered instead. Abraham then returns to the young men waiting below, but Isaac is not mentioned.
McBee’s paintings stay with the son who was left out of the final scene.
“Akeida Alone: Where Is the Lamb?,” presented by the Jewish Art Salon and curated by its founding director, Yona Verwer, opens at the Jerusalem Biennale on Sept. 24. The exhibition comprises six new paintings, each measuring 6 feet by 5 feet, and two earlier works dating back to the 1990s.
The New York-based artist has returned to the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) for decades, producing more than 100 paintings on the subject. He was drawn to it even before he became an observant Jew.
“The idea that God asked his faithful servant to do this type of horrifying act grabbed me,” McBee told JNS. “It made me look at such a horrifying story right in the eye and confront the difficult emotions and situations that come out of these types of stories.”
The biblical narrative offers little access to Isaac’s thoughts. The boy speaks while he makes his way up the mountain with his father, asking Abraham where the lamb is for the offering. Once he is bound and placed on the altar, he says nothing. The Bible records no further conversation between Abraham and Isaac.
“The ‘after’ part of the story fascinated me,” McBee said. “I was able to place myself in the narrative and fill that biblical silence that sometimes appears after these types of stories.”
Giving voice to a biblical silence
The six new paintings follow the Akedah from Isaac’s question to his abandonment on the mountain.
In the first, “God Will Provide,” Abraham answers Isaac’s question, “Where is the lamb?” In “Sacrifice,” he places his son on the altar in a scene McBee describes as a Jewish Pietà. “Do Not” shows an angel physically restraining Abraham’s “murderous obedience.”
The angel’s intervention does not end the ordeal in McBee’s telling. In “Abandoned,” Abraham begins to walk away while his son remains suspended above the altar. In “Never Again,” Isaac turns furiously towards his father beneath a dark divine cloud.
Then comes “Alone.”
McBee imagines Isaac watching Abraham rejoin the servants below, still holding the knife used in the aborted sacrifice. The father appears almost proud of what has taken place. His son is left above him—angry, hurt, alone.
The anger in the paintings is not confined to Abraham. They also raise questions about the God who demanded the sacrifice and offered Isaac no explanation.
McBee said the damaged father-son relationship was not drawn from his own experience with his father, whom he “loved and respected.”
Still, his experience of being both a son and a father helped him imagine what might follow such an event. His interest also extends to Sarah, whose death is recorded in the next chapter of Genesis. Jewish commentators have traditionally connected her death to the news of the Akedah.
Confronting the trauma
Curator Yona Verwer said the six monumental works were painted specifically for the Jerusalem exhibition. She chose to bring the series to the Biennale because of its refusal to look away from Isaac’s trauma.
“In these stark, monumental works, McBee confronts the trauma without redemption, a necessary and unflinching artistic response to our time,” she told JNS.
Verwer does not see Isaac as simply the son who survived Abraham’s test and continued down the mountain. In McBee’s interpretation, she said, he “never really leaves the altar.”
“McBee keeps the wound open,” she said. “The father-son bond is presented as shattered rather than repaired. Isaac remains frozen in time and cannot forget the terror.”
The exhibition forms part of this year’s Biennale theme, “De Profundis,” the Latin translation of Mima’amakim, the opening word of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I call You, O Lord.”
Biennale founder Rami Ozeri began considering the psalm as a possible theme after Oct. 7. He heard it added to the end of services in synagogues and prayer groups where he prayed.
“It made me think about the importance and power of prayer,” Ozeri told JNS. “This psalm is talking about a prayer that is coming from a deep or low place and creating movement towards elevation.”
