Sigma Alpha Iota

14 Winter 2026 • sai-national.org ADLER continued from page 13 and Sarah, and Sarah laughing at the promise of a child; Sarah gives birth to Isaac; and God testing Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, who is saved by divine intervention. I set the biblical text in a simple and sparse contemporary tonal style. I focus on the name of Isaac, which means "he who laughs," emphasizing when Abraham and Sarah laugh in the text. The piece builds to a climax when Isaac is born and Sarah (soprano), Abraham (baritone), and Narrator (tenor) laugh. God's testing of Abraham and his command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac will bring the end of laughter. The ending of the work is abruptly climactic. The angel stops Abraham from killing Isaac, but the piece ends at the precise moment when the angel sings "Abraham!" before commanding him to stop. I entitled the piece Isaac because I wanted not only to emphasize the incredible faith of Abraham to obey God's command, but also to highlight the innocence and compliance of Isaac to accept God's will and his own death at the hand of his beloved father. The absurdity of Abraham's faith is that he believed that even if he killed Isaac, God's promise of many children would still be fulfilled. My interpretation: in the end, Isaac is saved and the laughter and promise continues. Adler Adler's The Binding is also based on the story of Abraham and Isaac, plus other extrabiblical Jewish texts such as The Book of Jubilee, Genesis Rabbah, and Talmudic and Midrashic sources. The fifty-minute work is scored for five soloists, mixed chorus, and symphony orchestra. In The Book of Jubilee, the devil challenges God to test Abraham to see if he will be faithful by asking him to sacrifice Isaac. He hopes to nullify God's covenant with Abraham. But a paradox exists: If Abraham sacrifices the son of promise, the devil triumphs; if he fails to sacrifice him, he's considered unfaithful to God, so the devil also triumphs. However, God intervenes to save Isaac, and also praises Abraham for being faithful. The devil, in the end, loses. In Genesis Rabbah, the devil attempts to stop the sacrifice by tempting both Abraham and Isaac. He reproaches Abraham three times—for wanting to kill the son of his old age; for being emotionally unprepared for such a sacrifice; and for being guilty of murder. When Abraham rebukes the devil, he moves on to Isaac, telling him that his father will kill him. Isaac remains firm to carry on and, despite wavering slightly, seems to know his fate and complies as a "suffering servant." Adler wrote in his autobiography that he chose to use most of his father's original text, but asked a rabbi to write an English libretto based on both biblical and postbiblical sources. In his musical work, Adler alternates between sections of Genesis 22 and the postbiblical, or extrabiblical, texts that describe the temptations of both Abraham and Isaac. These temptation conversations do not appear in the original Genesis account, but elaborate on the original narrative, making it more vivid and dramatic. This temptation of Abraham and Isaac by the devil is the central section of the work. Adler notes that in writing for the devil, he incorporated exact twelve-tone writing. The work is dissonant throughout in an atonal contemporary idiom. It seems that Arnold Schoenberg's great work Moses and Aron might have provided some inspiration for this piece. An excerpt from this section is as follows: SATAN Look at me, look at me now. Look and recall: was I not present when you thought you heard out of God's own mouth that shattering word? Take now your only son and offer him unto me. Abraham! Abraham! Almost a hundred years have come and gone in which you flourished like a cedar, proud and tall. And now you would destroy a young and tender soul? For a dream of the night in the ban of dark night reduced to a murderer's role. ABRAHAM Be silent! Be silent! I know you, I know your word. Away from my side. The Holy One, Blessed be He, who was and who is, and who will be, in Him I confide! NARRATOR Now Satan rushed over to the side of the lad in the form of a boy of the same age and said: SATAN Whither so early along this way? Cposers Thoms' Thoms' Isaac Isaac, at the highpoint of "laughter." , at the highpoint of "laughter."

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