I play a variety of genres of music, ranging from American folk to indie rock to klezmer to classical, and so part of my songwriting process for Girls in Trouble is deciding which genre best fits each song.

Because this song is a dark, gothic, narrative take on a dark, gothic midrash on a dark, gothic story, I immediately thought of Southern bluegrass ballads, especially murder ballads. These songs often use folk instruments with bright sounds - trebly guitar, soloing mandolin - to tell profoundly troubling stories of murder and betrayal which create catharsis in the listener.

But let me back up. Long before I began Girls in Trouble, I fell in love with Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Story of Isaac.” (If you don’t know the song, it’s a beautiful and dramatic modern musical midrash about the Binding of Isaac, well worth listening to.) I appreciated how this song re-imagined the story from Isaac’s perspective.

What I had never considered, though, was Sarah’s experience of Isaac’s near-sacrifice. Years later I began to study Jewish texts, and learned that although I had never thought to consider the story from Sarah’s point of view, the Rabbis themselves had asked this question.

The Torah tells us a great deal about Sarah’s relationship with Isaac; her process of conceiving, weaning, and caring for Isaac during his youth get a lot of airtime in Genesis. But Sarah is almost entirely absent from the Torah in this, the most important and traumatic episode of her son’s life. And, as the ancient Rabbis note, the next thing that happens in the Torah is that she dies.

Following their interpretive principle that there are no accidents in the Torah, the Rabbis propose midrashic answers to how Isaac’s near-sacrifice could have led to Sarah’s death. In this song, I retell the midrash which I find most compelling: she died, essentially, of heartbreak after learning that her husband was willing to sacrifice their son.

In effect, this song is a midrash on a midrash. In the Rabbis’ imagination, Satan - a rabbinic trickster figure who is always trying to dissuade people from having faith in God - shows Sarah a vision of what is happening up on the mountain. (I always imagine this as a Star Wars-like projection in the air, a “Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi” moment.) To support his case against God, Satan stops the vision before the dramatic rescue of Isaac. And Sarah perishes from grief.

In writing this song, I chose to stay fairly close to the midrash. I wanted to explore more fully what Sarah might have felt during this terrible moment. I chose not to write about Sarah’s relationship with God, but instead to focus on her grief for her son, and her anger at her husband. Sarah flashes back to Isaac’s miraculous conception, and bitterly remembers her years of faithfulness to Abraham.

Like the midrash, my song also ends with Sarah’s death, but with a twist. In my interpretation, Sarah decides to die not as a passive result of grief, but as an active attempt to be present for her son on “the other side.” She won’t leave him alone in death; instead, she will be waiting to welcome him. The dark irony is that, of course, he has not actually died, but I still felt like this honored her grief with an act of love rather than simply despair.

As dark as this song is, I wrote it - and sing it - with a spirit of hope. As in those bluegrass ballads I’m drawing on, the point is not to wallow in tragedy, but to feel catharsis: to enter into this tragic, archetypal story, to open our hearts to the fact of human suffering, and in so doing, to relieve a bit of our own pain.