“Hagar and the Foreigner”
By Rabbi Reaboi
Have you ever felt alone? Different? A little odd, perhaps? Have you ever felt like you weren’t cut from the same cloth? You’re not alone. I spent most of my younger life feeling “not the same” from my peers. In the Yeshiva I attended until 7th Grade, I was known as the student from the Non-Orthodox family, whose mother sometimes picked him up from School wearing-(gulp) pants. My teachers and fellow classmates were mostly kind. But some of them were not. Imagine how embarrassed I was when, on a scorching June day, my father waited for me in the parking lot wearing shorts, sandals… and nothing else. Back then, I was different because my parents were different.
Later on, I was different from my friends and classmates possibly because of my sensitive and artistic nature, and the fact that I was a 1st Generation American, being born from immigrants fleeing Communist Romania. Even now, it’s hard to find an Opera Singing/Cantor/Rabbi/Son of Immigrants. We are few and far between!
My childhood experience of being different has been a blessing, in the way that I can relate to others who have been the Strangers, the ones cast out, the foreigners in a foreign land. To use a fictional location reference from a childhood holiday movie, from “The Island of Misfit Toys.”
Many of us have likely been in social situations where we have felt vulnerable and cast out. That makes us all capable of identifying, at least to some degree, with one of the characters of the story in today’s Torah Reading. The character I’m talking about is Hagar.
If you followed the reading, it is the story of the Matriarch Sarah sending out Hagar in Genesis 21; or to be more precise, Sarah demanding Abraham cast out Hagar. To recap: Because Sarah is barren, she gives Abraham her maidservant Hagar, so that she may become pregnant with an heir to Abraham’s legacy. Hagar gives birth to Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son. Through a miracle, Sarah then becomes pregnant and gives birth to Isaac. Upon hearing Ishmael’s laughter during Isaac’s Weaning Celebration, she becomes incensed and demands Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael. Sarah understands that the special Covenant between G-d and Abraham needs to go through the line of Isaac, not Ishmael. Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael to the wilderness, where Hagar collapses in hopelessness and despair. But God sends an angel, who produces a well. The story ends on a positive note, with Ishmael growing up to be a great huntsman and Hagar acquiring an Egyptian wife for him. G-D promises Abraham that from Ishmael will come forth a great nation. It is clear that Ishmael and Hagar were given a path that was different than Sarah and Isaac.
This text has a few midrashic interpretations that you probably have heard at some point in a Rosh Hashanah d’var of the past. There’s the take that God opened Hagar’s eyes to something present in the world rather than creating a well from thin air, teaching us that we need to take notice of all the wonderful miracles that are already present in our lives.
Then there is the message of faith: since Abraham is unsure of the right thing to do, God tells Abraham (a) to listen to his wife, and (b) reassures him that Hagar will be just fine. This teaches us that if we have enough faith in God, that everything will work out in the end. A very Rosh Hashana-like theme, indeed!
Then there’s the reverse take, where Sarah and Abraham and God are all doing the right thing in casting out Hagar, and we should just tell it like it is – Sarah is selfish and cruel; Abraham is spineless; and God is mysterious in this story of a woman done wrong. This type of teaching tells us that sometimes the Biblical text serves as an instruction of what we should not to do, rather than what we should do. This can be applied to many of the flawed characters in the Torah.
Most of us tend to focus on the “main” characters of the Bible. The Amidah opens with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sara, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. Moshe, along with G-D, leads the Exodus from Egypt. And who can forget Joseph and his brothers? Throw in Adam and Eve, and you have a proverbial Biblical cocktail!
But who I’d like to focus on is the seemingly thin and unsubstantial personage of Hagar. She’s treated in the text as a minor character, a slave-woman with little to no free-will or power for herself. Maidservant to Sarah, concubine of Abraham. Hagar is the outcast. The foreigner. The stranger who serves and lives like so many among us.
The Torah describes her as ‘Hagar the Egyptian’. In her righteous indignation, Sarah simply calls her ‘That Slave-woman’. The very name Hagar means ‘dweller’, sojourner’, or ‘stranger’. How it is that an Egyptian came to serve a family in Canaan who previously moved from Ur in Babylonia is beyond me! But, in essence, she is a foreigner among foreigners.
All my life, I had never looked at this Torah reading through the eyes of Hagar. But her narrative raises my awareness and understanding of current events that resonate deeply with the moral state of America today.
First, let’s take a moment and dwell on the fact that Hagar’s situation is exceedingly precarious – a foreigner who entrusts her life and livelihood to other foreigners, not unlike a migrant passing through a neutral country. But more on that later.
In the Torah’s first mention of Hagar, her very existence sets up the explanation for another plot problem – and that is, Sarah’s infertility. We know where this is headed – Hagar will serve as the surrogate for Abraham’s legacy. This story reminds me of the dystopian vision of Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. At least at the outset, she is barely a person. At most, she is a womb. But it doesn’t take long for the narrative to go from Hagar the surrogate to Hagar the antagonist, the threat. And the Biblical solution is to banish her.
As I mentioned before, Sarah never calls her by name- she is the Other. But let’s not forget that, despite the cruelty of Sarah’s treatment of Hagar, there is some compassion shown by Abraham. As he understood that this was a test of faith, he is not without sensitivity. The narrative describes Abraham in a tender moment: “Early the next morning Abrham took some bread and and skin of water, and gave them to Hagar. And he placed the satchel over her shoulder, together with the child.” Abraham understands that, although this is G-D’s will, he can still act with compassion. In fact, there is a midrash that says that Keturah, whom Abraham took as a wife after Sarah died, is in actuality Hagar!
The Hagar story isn’t the only story of someone who is marginalized by society. The story of Ruth is a story of how a woman wished to follow her mother-in-law, Naomi back to the Land of Israel, after the death of their husbands. Naomi is a Jew and a citizen of Israel- her daughter, Ruth is the foreigner who leaves her country behind to follow Naomi in the promise of togetherness and for a better life. “Wherever you go, I will go”, proclaims Ruth. “Wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
It works out better for Ruth, as there is a path for her to become a citizen and a Jew by marriage. At the end of the story, Ruth the convert is blessed with King David as her future great-grandson. But the story of Hagar remains a sad reminder of the treatment of the foreigner, the other, the woman that is without a name.
Perhaps these two stories are instructive contrasts about about advocating for the rights of others. Naomi and Sarah, being women who hold power, treat Hagar and Ruth in different ways. While Sarah makes no attempt at integrating Hagar into the family and shuns her, Naomi takes the opposite action, escorting her into the Land of Israel and introducing her to her future husband, Boaz. Because of Naomi’s advocacy, Ruth becomes fully accepted in the country she now calls home. As for Hagar, she is banished, remaining the outsider.
If you bring these two stories into 21st Century United States, it is we who are in a position of power. We can either be like Naomi – creating connections and allowing another person freedom and then supporting them on their own journey. Or we can be like Sarah – judging and shunning, pushing away, saying ‘I thought I needed her, but now I don’t, and she’s a threat.’
To me, this is a great point for personal introspection. Who do we push away, and who do we bring close? Do we cultivate relationships only with people that are like us, or do we strive to cultivate relationships with people who are different from us as well? How do we judge the people who we think should be part of our society?
Martin Buber, the great Kabbalistic philosopher of the 20th Century, explains the concept of the ‘Other’ simply as everyone outside of ourselves. How we relate to the Other is an expression of how much or how little God is present in our lives. All people are ‘other’, but sometimes, when we marginalize one person or an entire group of vulnerable people, we denigrate the concept of otherness, in my opinion, to a dangerous level.
In the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible, we are told not to oppress the stranger, the widow, and the orphan no less than 13 times. The Torah mentions the treatment of the stranger 422 times. The most straightforward and all-encompassing line might be in Deuteronomy 10, when we learn:
“For the LORD your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing them with food and clothing…”
Here is another Biblical commandment:
וַאֲהַבְתֶּם אֶת־הַגֵּר כִּי־גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם׃
You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The Torah repeats the commandment to care for the strangers because we were once strangers in the land of Egypt no less than 36 times. I have to remind you that this is not politics. This is Jewish law, which we are obligated to live by.
The Torah isn’t repetitive for no reason. This is because G-D wants us to create a society of mutual responsibility in which we endeavor to be more responsible for each other, not less; that we ought to care more about each other, not less. The Torah also says, “Do not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds”; we are not bystanders, we are upstanders.
Which brings us the question: Who are the strangers in our society? Who are the sojourners, the marginalized, the ‘other’?
There are lots of capital O Others in society today. The elderly, the poor, the homeless, the hungry, and the mentally ill are all marginalized and left insufficiently protected by the rest. Rather than caring for them, They have become the scapegoat for all of our problems.
But nobody is more literally a sojourning stranger like Hagar in our society today than undocumented immigrants. Today, the United States has approximately 11 million undocumented migrants. Some have been here more than 30 years. The overwhelming majority have been productive members of society, filling roles large and small in our economy, often for low wages. They often take jobs that other Americans refuse to do. The work is often difficult. Like everyone else in the United States, they make purchases and pay taxes. Despite the rhetoric, it is an absolute fact that migrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding residents in the US, and commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans. According to the latest report by the Cato Institute, 65% of migrants apprehended by ICE have no criminal records, and 41% of those taken into custody are American citizens. I want to stress that this is not my personal opinion- these are facts stated by an independent political think tank. I will be happy to forward their website upon request.
It is also a fact- and i don’t have to tell you this- that many people in our country speak ill of these Others, and denigrate them publicly. They have been made to be subhuman, in descriptions such as ‘vermin’ and ‘scum’. We scapegoat them for the problems of our society, ranging from violent crime to accusing them of importing a foreign culture to the US. Instead of opening a proverbial tent door to them, our country has offered no legal path to citizenship for these 11 million. Instead, these modern-day Hagars and Ishmaels, who have sojourned here in desperation, are being racially profiled and are running and hiding in terror. Or, they are being held indefinitely in detention centers that seem more like the camps we saw in this country during WWII. Instead of assisting them to become U.S. citizens, our society collectively replies ‘Cast out that slave woman and her son.’
While the Torah contains many flawed characters, it is balanced by commandments to love thy neighbor, to not put a stumbling block before them, to give the strangers who dwell among us the same rights and responsibilities that we as Jews are blessed to have. And, while the Torah asks us to pursue justice, it is clear that justice must be balanced with Chesed– with compassion.
Each New Year, we are reminded to do teshuvah, to right our wrongs, to renew and recommit. On Rosh Hashana, we acknowledge G-D as the Creator, our Avinu Malkeinu who gave us free will and has set before us a path of righteousness and love, and accepts our sincere prayers. During this holy time of the year, we are asked to travel on a road to spirituality. But the road we take is the life we make, for ourselves and for others. And just like road signs that remind us of the speed limit or to ‘buckle up’, it is imperative that we remind ourselves that we were once strangers in Egypt. We were once Hagars, feared and marginalized almost to the point of extinction. And if you don’t believe that, you haven’t studied Jewish history in Europe
In the totality of Judaism, the most common road sign on the roadmap of our lives, is not to make everyone else feel ‘Other’. Instead, we must engage the humanity within them – to see everyone as a whole person, to love them and to uplift them.
In a year marked with much antisemitism and violence against Jews, we know what it is like to be the other. We live it every day. And for those of you who are like me, the son of immigrants coming to this country to seek asylum and to be part of this great country, we cannot fall into the narrative of shunning those who are not like us. We must speak out for the powerless, advocate for the needy, protect those who cannot protect themselves, and remember that while each of us may be on separate paths, we all share the road at some point in our lives. As we sojourn along our path, G-D urges us not to look inward but to look outward and upward!
The Yeshiva boys of my youth were cruel, yes. But they were just boys and that was many, many years ago. Perhaps it is they who were strangers in my midst, and not the other way around. My life’s journey has taught me this and many other things.
This New year of 5786, I ask you to follow me on the path of radical compassion for the stranger. Let us rewrite the Hagar story of today- not as Sarahs, but as Naomis. Let us open our hearts and the road ahead and make room for the other. It was Rabbi Hillel who said: “If I am only for myself, what am I?”
As Psalm 27 says, “Kavei et-Adonai chazak v’ameitz– Have hope in G_D; be strong and take courage.
It is my hope for this country, the country that I love so much, to heed the words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ Rather we should say “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
Shana Tova Tikateivu Umetukah. May you be written in the Book of Life for sweetness and peace, and may the path you take be as meaningful as the destination you stake.