So…I don't usually do this. But here is a commentary on this week's Torah portion. The portion/parashah tells stories about the legendary founders of two peoples, Abraham and Hagar, described as the progenitors of the Hebrew and Arab people respectively. Perhaps the complexities and beauties of this bit of Torah will resonate at such a challenging time as the one we are living.
Go to you. Numerous commentators have observed that the very first words of our parashah, when translated literally, mean, “Go to you.” This instruction from God to Abraham (then Abram), one of the parents of the Jewish people, initiates not only a personal journey but the founding narrative of a people.
Abram is told that, to become the person he has the potential to be and to found a new community in the world, he must leave everything that he might have thought made him who he was: his father’s grave, his accustomed roots and culture—eventually even his original name. He has to follow a Voice leading him he knows not where.
Already, I feel a deep sense of caution with regard to offering this teaching. Listening uncritically to internal voices can lead us to ruinous decisions. Judaism is not a mere means for self-development. It is a way of life lived in community which fosters a sense of responsibility for justice in the world.
But our parashah reminds us that our communal mission does not spring from a command to unthinking conformity. Rather from a brit, a binding contract, that commits each of us to a searching active involvement with God and one another—that demands we listen for the Voice. This is a call to responsibility, not fecklessness.
Early in Abraham’s journey, he confronts a terrifying vision from God. In a swoon of horror (aimah chashechah), he descends into a nightmare of fractured carcasses, smoke at sunset, a flaming oven and a torch. He is told that his children will be as numerous as the stars in heaven—and that they will endure centuries of slavery and terrible persecution. And it’s all before him—up to him to continue.
“Go to you” is not a triumphalist command. It compels us to face that darkness which overpowers and the magnitude of loss and trouble that comes with trying and loving, with struggling to bring a new good thing into the world.
It is not only Abraham who encounters self in the desert. There is another founder of a people in our story. Hagar, Sarah’s servant who was elevated to the position of second wife and impregnated by Abraham as a surrogate for the infertile Sarah (then Sarai), will be revered as the founder of the Arab people and a mother of Islam. When we encounter her, though, she is in a bad way. Our mother Sarah had tried to do the honorable thing, the socially appropriate thing, and it was turning her inside out. She had thought she was doing a subordinate a favor while solving a problem of her own. She found that the actuality of it, another woman with her husband, pregnant with his child, was more than she could stand.
The Radok, the medieval commentator Rabbi David Kimchi, teaches, “Sarai overburdened her with work and made her perform the work in an intolerably harsh manner. It is even possible that the word vat’anehah includes physical as well as verbal abuse of Hagar by Sarai… from a moral point of view she should have treated Hagar in a manner befitting her status as a wife or legal companion of Avram. From the point of view of practicing human kindness, she should have treated a subordinate with all possible consideration… This whole story is preserved for all future generations in our chapter to teach ethical lessons, and to warn us not to indulge in injustice.”
Fleeing from Sarah into the desert, Hagar hears the voice of an angel making her a promise that mirrors God’s to Abraham: her offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. A new people will come into being through her who will be strong but endure much strife. Like Abraham, she will have to trust. She will go back to face what she ran from and to have her son, called Yishmael: God will hear.
Midrash Rabbah teaches, “How many angels did she (Hagar) meet? Rabbi Yossi bar Chananiah said: Five; each time that it says “and he said” it was another angel. The other sages say: Four; each time it says “an angel,” it was another angel. Said Rabbi Chiya: See the difference between the earlier and later generations! Manoach said to his wife, “We shall surely die, for we have seen an angel” (Judges 13:22); but Hagar the maid of Sarah sees five angels one after the other and is not afraid of them” Said Rabbi Yitzchak: “The members of Abraham's household were all seers–she was used to seeing them.”
Hagar the Seer identifies God as El Roi, the God Who Sees. What she and Abraham find, in their journeys to the core of their being and to the Source of meaning, is relationship; the Ear that hears, the Eye that sees, the Voice that speaks. The journey to you leads to great joy and wretched suffering, to webs of responsibility and relationship that support, that entangle, that cling.
