Life Torn and Sewn Together (comments on Torah Portion Chayei Sarah) 2023

Life Torn and Sewn Together (comments on Torah Portion Chayei Sarah) 2023. (adapted from previous versions)

Pain, regret, hurt, and betrayal form part of the backdrop of the book of Genesis. Those tragic moments often produce visions of God and the appearance of angels. Sometimes moments of unimaginable fulfillment arise.

Of the many sad, heart-wrenching and ultimately beautiful stories in Genesis, one of the most distressing is that of Hagar. We see Hagar three times in the Torah, in Genesis 16, Genesis 22, and, according to the Midrash, in our Torah portion, this Shabbat, in Genesis 25, but under the name Keturah.

We met Hagar as the maidservant of Sarai (before she became Sarah) in Genesis 16. When Sarai could not conceive, Hagar was given to Avram (before he became Abraham) as a concubine. Hagar conceived, but Sarai felt slighted. Sarai mistreated Hagar, and Hagar fled down Highway 61, and found herself near a spring of water in the desert.

An angel of God intervened, and counseled Hagar to return to Sarai. The angel assured Hagar that her own offspring will increase beyond measure. The child of Avram whom she is carrying will be named Ishma’el, “God hears,” because God has heard her prayer. We are told that Hagar gives a name to the God who spoke to her through the angel:

And she called the name of Adonai who spoke to her “You are the God Who sees me,” for she said, “Even here I saw after I was seen.” Therefore, the well was called, “The Well of the Living God Who Sees Me.” (Genesis 16:13-14)

We don’t know why Hagar must return to Avram and Sarai, but it seems that some great part of the plan that the God of the Bible has in mind requires that Hagar submit herself to Sarai.

Hagar returned and bore Avram’s son Ishma’el at the end of Genesis 16. In Genesis 17, Avram is circumcised, and the covenant is established. Avram’s name becomes Abraham and Sarai’s name becomes Sarah. In chapter 21, Abraham and Sara have a son and name him “Yitzchak,” laughter.

We also meet Hagar again in Genesis 21, some years after she saved by the angel in Genesis 16. By this time,  Ishma’el was a teenager. In this chapter,  Sarah saw something unseemly happening between Ishma’el and his younger half-brother Isaac, Yitzchak. Sarah insisted that Hagar and her (and Abraham’s) son Ishma’el be banished into the desert. The offense that Yishma’el committed is not quite clear, other than it is a play on the name “Yitzchak” – laughter.

In Genesis 21, Hagar was devastated again. Back in Genesis 16, Hagar fled the mistreatment of Sarah, but she returned to the fold and submitted to Sarah. Here, in chapter 21, she is banished with her son. Hagar stumbled through the desert near Be’er Sheva (on my map, just off Highway 61), and suffered a spiritual collapse. Hagar ran out of water, and resigned herself to the fact that she and her boy will die. The angel intervenes again. God opened her eyes, and Hagar saw a well of water. She and her son were saved.  The reader assumes that she has returned to the place, to the well, and to the angel of the first angelic intervention – “The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me.”  Twice forlorn and stranded, twice saved by the power of sight.

The rabbinic tradition insists that Hagar’s story does not end here. In this week’s Torah portion, after Sarah died, Abraham remarried a woman whose name is Keturah – “Incense.” In the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 61:4), Rabbi Judah says “Keturah is Hagar.”

The brevity of this statement – “Keturah – Zo Hagar” (Keturah is Hagar) is directly disproportionate to its interpretive brilliance. In that brief utterance of Rabbi Judah, many things are brought to light.

It seems that the Midrash, through Rabbi Judah, tells us that Abraham loved Hagar. The desperation of barrenness that caused Abraham and Hagar to be thrown together, however begrudgingly, produced a forlorn intimacy. Perhaps their love was simply that of two people who quietly asserted their humanity in the midst of some vortex of pain and destiny. Sarah’s barrenness brought them together. Sarah finally bearing Yitzchak drove them apart. Now Sarah’s death released a force that took each of them by surprise. We don’t know, but we are bidden to imagine.

Rabbi Judah’s assertion, in no way supported by the biblical narrative, helps shape a rabbinic theory of love and alternative lives. Rabbi Judah seems to conceive of a God who holds blessings in store that might have seemed to be sheer fantasy.

Had the Bible had its way, Hagar would have gone her way, and Abraham would have married an Incense Woman of consolation. Rabbi Judah cannot accept this. In saying, “Keturah is Hagar,” Rabbi Judah insists that loose strands of the narrative urge themselves back on each other.

Hagar’s son Yishma’el nearly died – but Ishma’el was Abraham’s son as well. Both of Abraham’s sons, Yitzchak and Yishma’el, nearly died at his own doing. Imagine the tear and trauma in Abraham’s heart – he attempted to kill both of his sons, only to be stopped by angelic intervention. Is such a man worth loving?

Might we assume that Hagar/Keturah loved her stepson Isaac like a son, in spite of what Isaac’s mother had done to her? Might we assume that Hagar/Keturah herself was stricken when she heard that Abraham had taken Isaac up to the mountain to be killed as a sacrifice to the God? She and her son Yishma’el almost died at the hand of Abraham. Isaac almost died at the hand of Abraham. Why doesn’t Hagar hate Abraham? Rabbi Judah has us ask different questions. How did she forgive him? How did their love survive?

The text does not report Abraham’s weeping when both his son and his concubine, Ishma’el and Hagar, were cast from his life seemingly forever. Perhaps that inconsolable heartache – and guilt – had led Abraham to take Isaac for a sacrifice. (This is indeed one of my interpretations of the Binding of Isaac – his anger at God and Sarah, his own horrific acquiescence, producing unbearable guilt and shame, all causing Abraham to imagine that God wanted him to kill Isaac.)

From Rabbi Judah’s assertion, we can only infer why Hagar had to return to Sarah.  So that the love between her and Abraham could be sealed? So that Ishma’el and Isaac could forge a friendship based on their wounded father, their wounded mothers, a friendship that was torn but not shredded, and now could be sewn back together?

Life can rip us apart. Rabbi Judah wanted us, the readers of the Bible, to be able to sew fragments back together.

Hagar had almost witnessed her son Ishmael’s death, due to Sarah, Abraham, and the will of the God of the Bible. An angel of God intervened. Abraham had almost killed his son Isaac, due to the will of the God of the Bible, but an angel of God intervened. Hagar and Abraham shared a horror, but also an angelic miracle rooted in that horror.

Sarah and Hagar’s sons’ lives were shaped by that horror. We can only imagine their trauma. Was their attending their father’s funeral together a way to face that trauma? We don’t have a record of what the two men said at their father’s funeral. Perhaps his complicity in their near deaths was not addressed directly.

We do know from the Bible that after the funeral, Isaac decided to settle at a place called “The Well of the Living (God) Who Sees Me” – it seems certain he went to live with his half-brother and stepmother, Hagar/Keturah.

We must assume that Isaac took his new wife Rebecca there. We might assume that Rebecca got to know Isaac’s stepmother Hagar, and his half-brother Ishma’el, very well. The stories Rebecca heard from Isaac, Hagar, and Yishma’el are recounted in the yet to be written Midrash of Rebecca. (I hope to write it.)

I am in awe of the genius of Rabbi Judah.