Rosh Hashanah 5773 — September 17, 2012
By Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy
The Torah portion for this first day of Rosh Hashanah is a tale of a family in crisis:
Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who for so long was unable to have a child, finally gives
birth to a son, Isaac. And what does she do to her maidservant, Hagar, who she pushed
Abraham to consort with when they feared that Abraham would have no descendant?
Sarah urges Abraham to kick Hagar and her young son Ishmael out of the family and
into the wilderness of the desert. And Abraham, after consulting with God, agrees to her
request.
Today we read a heartbreaking tale of Hagar and her son, stranded in the wilderness.
Their water sack is dry; the loaf of bread consumed. Hagar lays her son in the shade of
a bush and goes and sits “a bowshot length from him” so she won’t have to hear his
cries.
As a new mother, I can fully imagine her anguish. But as I read the text with fresh eyes
this year, I am struck that she is compelled to leave her child especially at a time when
he needs her the most. Why in the world would she leave her son to die alone? Why
wouldn’t she continue to be a mother to her son even until what she feared would be
their final moment?
Verse 16 reads that she went away and “raised her voice and wept.” But the following
verse begins, “God heard the voice of the child.” It is the child’s call, not Hagar’s tears,
that compels God to speak to Hagar, saying, “What’s wrong with you, Hagar?”
What’s wrong, indeed!
God then says, “Don’t be afraid!” If God knows the heart of every being, then we must
conclude that it was deep fear, even panic, that struck the heart of Hagar and compelled
her leave her son to die alone.
Her fear is understandable: it is a parent’s job to comfort and protect her child, to ensure
the child grows up in health and safety, to prepare the child to face down life’s
challenges and even traumas, and here she is, helpless to protect her child. One can
only imagine what Hagar must have felt at that moment: used as a surrogate, then
kicked out and betrayed by the other parent and left to fend for herself in a place that
offers zero sustenance.
It is hard for us to imagine such a desolate place. This is the epitome of the place that
we all hope never to be in, a place that we avoid at all costs. It is a place of utter
helplessness and aloneness. It is a place worse than death, because death, after all,
can be peaceful. It is a place of abject depression. It is a wilderness of total vulnerability.
Rosh Hashanah 5773 — September 17, 2012
By Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy
Page 2
This year, as I read this text, I understand this exposure of the wilderness as the reason
we read this particular passage on Rosh Hashanah. Our mission during these Days of
Awe is to familiarize ourselves with this wilderness – to face it and experience the
feeling in being in that wilderness. On these ten Days of Awe, we practice feeling small
in its vast emptiness, getting in touch with true awe and even fear. Our liturgy expresses
the sentiment of unworthiness, because of all our collective sins. We ask God to love us
and forgive us in spite of our unworthiness, because God is compassionate in nature.
We purposefully go into that vulnerable place, even that depressed and dark place in
our soul.
We do it in part because we are urged to explore every recess of the soul, to do a
heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. We reflect on all the ways we’ve come up
short, we examine our faults, and we offer no excuses. We take full responsibility for
who we are and who we are not.
To do that authentically, we must go into the wilderness with Hagar. We must be the
mother, who commits the unthinkable sin of abdicating her essential responsibility
toward her only child, which she does out of her own panic-stricken refusal to witness
the child, who she loves more than anything and who is essentially her home and her
life, die before her eyes. Reading this text today, we must learn what it means to be
vulnerable, and what value there is in vulnerability.
What do Jews know about vulnerability? Well, for starters: 36 times in Torah, the text
states, “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
An essential aspect to being Jewish is to identify with the stranger – the foreigner, the
minority – those who are most marginalized in our society. Hagar is the embodiment of
the stranger. In fact her name, Ha-gar means the stranger, the foreigner.
Well, you might think, that is nice from a humanistic, social justice perspective. We need
to be able to empathize with the poor, the widow, the orphan, the homeless, the
differently abled. We need to recognize that by a turn of fate that person could well be
ourselves. We need to have a sense of humility about how incredibly blessed we are in
so ways simply because we live the United States, or simply because we have a house
to come home to. We need to examine our privileged lifestyle so that we don’t take
unfair advantage of the ger, the stranger, in our midst and unintentionally perpetuate
oppression in any form.
But I think the story of Hagar is telling us something different today. We are reading this
text today because we are being challenged to feel the fear and the helplessness of
Hagar. A helplessness that exists within each one of us because we are all human and
we are frail. We all face a certain death. We all face an uncertain tomorrow. None of us
Rosh Hashanah 5773 — September 17, 2012
By Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy
Page 3
can say that we would do what is right and courageous if we believed we were facing
certain death. Were we in Hagar’s shoes, none of us can say that we would not commit
the same sin.
This text is teaching us that feeling uncertain or confused, being vulnerable, is essential
to being human. Each of us knows it, which is not to say we like it. We each have an
innate urge to protect ourselves from danger and push away feelings of uncertainty,
confusion, and vulnerability. That’s understandable; it’s a survival mechanism.
Jewish tradition encourages questioning, doubt, even fear and trembling. Yirah, that
feeling that renders us feeling small and fragile, the feeling we get when we hear the
shofar, is considered a path to knowing God. Today, we are urged to feel the fear of
Hagar.
I believe, in fact, that this is the role of religion: To encourage to us become comfortable
with being vulnerable, with not knowing. Who or what is God? We don’t know. Does
God exist? We don’t know. How did the world come to be? We don’t know. Who wrote
the Torah? We don’t know. What is the deal with all the terrible acts people do in the
name of religion? We don’t know. Sometimes religion helps us with the answers,
sometimes it doesn’t. Regardless, to be a religious person is to live as gracefully as we
can in the mystery.
Here is what I do know: Our lives are so precious, and we are so frail. We are imperfect;
we often do the wrong thing, usually with good intentions. Life is short, and if we are to
live lives of meaning, we must apologize to others and to ourselves, and move forward
as best we can. By being defensive, by closing ourselves up in our homes, by refusing
to be wrong, by holding on to grudges, by being afraid and remaining in that fear we do
not grow.
In the Talmud, Tractate Sotah 5a, we read, “Any person who possesses haughtiness of
spirit, the Holy One, blessed be God, declares, ‘I and he cannot both dwell in the
world.’” Does this mean that in order for God to be present in the world, we must be
brought low, we must feel broken? Does that mean God is not there when we are full of
confidence and pride? As I understand this statement, when we let go of “knowing”, of
“being right” and allow some degree of uncertainty in our lives, we allow God in.
Why do people cling to certainty, sometimes beyond all reason? There are a perplexing
amount of religious zealots in this world, not to mention birthers and Holocaust deniers.
The sociologist James Aho, who has written about the hyper-certain mind, asserts that
those who are willfully blind and ravenous for certainty are relieved of “angst”, which he
defines per the philosopher Martin Heidegger, as dread about nothing in particular – the
contingency or precariousness of existence. Angst, he says, “is not new, but
Rosh Hashanah 5773 — September 17, 2012
By Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy
Page 4
electronically mediated psychic mobility has made it more widespread. As a result, all of
us seek harbor in something firm, imperishable, and certain: a “thing” or a “person” on
which to stand; foundational principles (say, that Constitution), founding fathers, faith
fundamentals.”
The popular conservative Jewish columnist Daniel Gordis wrote a moving article last
year called “A Tale of Two Funerals,” about how it is too easy these days to push away
from any view we disagree with. He describes two different funerals: one that took place
recently, that of a great rabbi in Israel, that was attended by 100,000 of his black-hatted
followers, and the other funeral, that of the famed author I. L. Peretz that took place 100
years ago. According to published reports, “each of the splintering political, religious,
social and cultural groups was officially represented in the procession – Hebraists and
Yiddishists, observant Jews and all manner of secularists, Zionists and socialists and
Territorialists in all their tangled branches, conservative community leadership and
radical workers’ opposition.” Contrast that funeral with the rabbi’s funeral, whose
passing went virtually unnoticed outside of his ultra-Orthodox community in Israel.
Gordis asserts that a funeral such as I. L Peretz’s could take place today, because there
is no person alive who is admired by a true diversity of people – these days, people look
up to others who they agree with. Gordis writes, “…increasingly, I fear, we take
seriously those people who are more or less like us. We embrace (and then “like” on
Facebook, or forward to others) the views of those with whom we agree, and disparage
(and don’t “like” or Retweet, and never forward) the views of those whose views we
don’t share. How different we are from the sages of the Talmud, who carefully
preserved the opinions of those with whom they disagreed, including even those
opinions that were ultimately rejected. Our sages understood that even the “losing”
positions had something to teach, that there are moral and strategic insights to be
gleaned even from those whose conclusions we do not share.”
We have a difficult task set for us in this day and age, especially in an election year: to
deliberately put ourselves in situations where we are among people who are not like us,
with whom we disagree and differ with, sometimes sharply. Perhaps, as Gordis says,
“we ought to start with reading, reminding ourselves that the important reading we do is
not the reading with which we agree, but the reading that actually makes us think.” If we
are to truly grow, grow our heart, grow in spirit, we need to become Hagar, at least for
today.
But why? What good does it do us? Because the place of vulnerability can also be the
place of transformation. In that scary, awesome place, if we listen to God’s voice calling
for us, we can open toward a path that we are called to be on.
Rosh Hashanah 5773 — September 17, 2012
By Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy
Page 5
Turning back to our parsha today, God comforts Hagar in her fear and says that her son
will indeed live and become a great nation. God then “opens her eyes” at which point
she sees in front of her a well of water.
Now, the question is, was the well there in front of her the whole time or Did God
magically make the well appear there in that moment for Hagar and her son to drink
from? Or was Hagar, in her fear and desolation, blind to the source of nourishment that
was right in front of her?
I am inclined to believe the latter, as the text purposefully states that God caused
Hagar’s eyes to open whereupon she saw the well of water. Rabbi Reena Spicehandler
declares that this miracle is spiritual, not physical or supernatural. Whatever your
concept of God – Hopemaker, Accompanier, Guide, Breath—this God is a God that
caused Hagar to realize that she was not helpless, that she could provide comfort and
nourishment to her child. This God opened her eyes to the realization that she was
pushing away her child because of her feelings of fear and vulnerability, and this God
brought Hagar back to the realization that her son needed her.
I think oftentimes when we see another person in a vulnerable state, we behave
cautiously and perhaps keep our distance. Our parsha today says, No! Remember that
this person has the same needs as you – be kind and remember the Talmud’s
statement – kol yisrael arevim zeh bah zeh - we are each responsible for one another. I
hope that we can count on each other as we move forward together into this new year,
holding one another through the pain of grief and transition, and celebrating with each
other milestones, holy days, and new growth.
We are so frail, our days are numbered, and we need each other more than ever. Let’s
remember that. Shana Tova. May this be a Good Year for all of us, together in this
community.