Congregation Netivot Shalom

Rosh Hashanah Drash

October 4, 2005 / 1 Tishrei 5766

Cathy Shadd

Sarah, the focus of our reading today and the matriarch of our people, has had more girls named after her than any other woman in the Torah. She is famed for her hospitality, her piety and her devotion to Abraham. When I was asked to give the drash today, I welcomed the chance to get to know Sarah more deeply. I have been interested in Sarah ever since I converted to Judaism almost five years ago and like all converts, became a bat Sarah v’Avraham, but the more I studied today’s Torah reading and the more I thought about her actions with Hagar and Ishmael, the more conflicted I felt about Sarah and about having my Jewish name say that I was her daughter. My own mother, of blessed memory, felt like a much better example of the values I try to live by. The pivotal episode in today’s story, when Abraham, at Sarah’s insistence, sent her maid Hagar and Hagar’s son Ishmael off into the desert with only bread and a skin of water to sustain them, is deeply disturbing. Sarah’s act seems just plain cruel. The more I read the story, the more questions I had about Sarah’s behavior. Why did she do it? What could prompt someone famed for her hospitality towards strangers to treat family members so shabbily? What can this story teach us and why do we read it today, as we enter the holiest time of our year?

To briefly review the background to today’s story, Sarah loyally followed her husband Abraham to a new land. God promised Abraham offspring and a nation, but he and Sarah had had no children. Sarah offered her Egyptian maidservant to Abraham, saying, “Perhaps I shall be built up through her.” Hagar conceived, causing Sarah to feel lowered in Hagar’s esteem. Sarah treated her harshly causing the pregnant Hagar to run away, but an angel sent her back with promises of offspring too numerous to count and a son Ishmael. Later, God promised Abraham a son by Sarah, also destined to be the father of a great nation.

In today’s reading, God remembered Sarah and she gave birth her son Isaac. Abraham hosted a celebration to mark Isaac’s weaning at which Ishmael did some sort of “playing” which so angered Sarah that she told Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael. Abraham was distressed by Sarah’s directive, but reassured by God that Ishmael will also father a nation, he sent his firstborn son and the boy’s mother, supplied with only bread and water, off into the wilderness. The water ran out and a crying Hagar left Ishmael under a bush to die. Again, God intervened, promising to make a nation of Ishmael and opening Hagar’s eyes to see water nearby.

Sarah’s treatment of Hagar is shocking. Casting a pregnant woman out into the unknown elements and then later sending both her and her son alone into the wilderness are unconscionable acts. Hagar had been with Sarah for ten years. They were part of the same household. Ishmael was Sarah’s stepson, her husband’s son, Isaac’s half brother. Even at age 15, the age assigned him in midrash, he was still a boy. Is this any way to treat anyone, never mind family members? After concluding that they will both die, Hagar’s placing of Ishmael alone under a bush and her pained wail to the firmament are heart wrenching. God may respond and take care of them, but the trauma of their experience of being cast out and forced to contemplate death alone in the wild is the direct result of Sarah’s actions. How can we make any sense of this senseless inhuman act?

In their struggles to understand Sarah’s treatment of Hagar and Ishmael, ancient and modern commentators have both condemned and excused her. From the beginning, Sages have flatly declared that Sarah’s behavior was not good in the eyes of God. But while some note that Ishmael’s “playing” might mean literally just that, others have interpreted the word as referring to deeds like sexual abuse and idol worship, activities which Sarah could reasonably have viewed as very damaging to Isaac. Modern rabbis have written that Sarah’s removal of Ishmael was actually good for Ishmael in that it gave him the space he needed to fully develop his own individuality and self-image, space he would not have had under Abraham’s roof where Isaac was the heir apparent and primary focus of his father. Others write about the conflict being more than a personal conflict between two women, and say that since it concerned the establishment of a nation, Sarah was justified in protecting Isaac against corrupting influences.

Having read all this commentary, I am still troubled. For all of us, the descendants of Sarah, and for me, whose Jewish name is permanently connected with hers, it is very hard to make sense of her behavior. For all of us who are someone’s children, and for those of us who are parents of or who know and love children, how can we make our peace with a woman, a mother no less, who cast a child out into the wild? For weeks I was unable to get anywhere with this story. Every Friday night when my husband and I blessed our two daughters with the words “may you be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah,” I inwardly cringed at the mention of her name. The story bothered me in my gut, and yet, in the end, it was there, in my gut, that I experienced my first moments of understanding Sarah.

What I started to feel was her fear. Only a very deep, all consuming fear could have driven Sarah, famed for hospitality, to abandon two members of her own household. While there are dangers in projecting our understanding of human nature onto Biblical characters, I think a deeper identification with them humanizes them and moves us to learn something from them. It feels to me that Sarah’s fear literally got the best of her, that it was so all encompassing that she lost her ability to feel pious, loyal, or hospitable.

I believe that fear causes a lot of our conflicts with others and keeps us from living more emotionally whole lives. I am not talking here about the kind of momentary fear which we feel in our veins when we nearly hit another car on the street or the kind which surges in our stomach when we stand before group of people making a speech. I am talking about the kind which is so big that it is in not in our body, but in our being. The kind which reverberates in ways which may in flashes draw our attention, but which actually lies buried but huge, deep within us. The kind which causes us to feel powerless. The kind which gets us stuck in some unwanted pattern in our lives.

What is the most basic human fear? I think it is the fear of loss. Loss is the most painful and unsettling part of life, and yet it is also an integral part of life, making it ever present. We are surrounded by birth and death. We are both gaining and losing moments of our life every instant. The fear of death is obviously the biggest loss we fear. None of us wants to die or have anyone we love die. But there are also a whole host of other losses which we fear– the loss of our health, of our job, of our feeling of security and well being. We fear the loss of someone’s regard or love. We fear being unwanted, being rejected. I was discussing the power of fear with a friend the other day who paraphrased for me something he’d read. He said the two biggest fears that drive human behavior, which I think both stem from the core fear of loss, are the fear of losing what you have and the fear of not getting what you want. I think Sarah fell prey to both of these.

So what was Sarah so afraid of? I think on the deepest level, she was afraid of losing her son, the child she spent the better part of her adult life longing for. Imagine having found a soul mate, with whom you shared a dream and for whom you were willing to repeatedly uproot yourself, and not being able to make a family with this partner? Then the family you tried to make (Sarah with Hagar and Ishmael) got off to a bad start. And then miraculously, in what you feel to be your twilight years, you conceive. Sarah gave birth to a healthy boy. Imagine her pouring all her pent up longing into the baby, loving him with every fiber of her frail being. And then, she sensed some kind of danger– what exactly, she probably couldn’t even have articulated. Her dream must have felt so within her long empty grasp. She must have been so afraid of something happening to her son. And on another level, she had big plans for Isaac. Sarah wanted to prepare her son for his role as a leader and her fear of something interfering with this must have blinded her and caused her to not see what she was doing to Hagar and Ishmael.

I think her actions had consequences not only for her children, but even for us today. Children often inherit the unfinished business of their parents. Our unresolved emotions seep through our parenting into our children, even showing up several generations later in what one psychologist has called “ghosts in the nursery.” Others who study human behavior have suggested that we unconsciously program emotional reactions and behaviors in our children. They have written that the roots of the most severe human problems are generations deep. Sarah’s behavior hurt not only Ishmael and Hagar, but also Isaac, who, as far as we know from the Torah itself, was reunited with his half brother only at the burial of their father. And here we are thousands of years later still not reconciled fully with Ishmael’s children. There is so much fear in the world today and the results of it are so destructive.

When I felt that I understood Sarah from a visceral place, I felt connected to her for the first time in any meaningful way. I too have felt paralyzed by fear. For me, it was so big, I literally couldn’t see it. When I was in my twenties, my beloved brother, my major soul mate at that time of my life, died in a car accident. Something inside me stopped dead. I had been raised in the shadow of loss, as had several generations of the matriarchs in my family, including my mother. My great grandmother lost two of her children quite young and within a week of each other. And her daughter, my grandmother, lost her youngest child as a little boy. Both my great grandmother and my grandmother suffered a lot and were never able to fully embrace life again. I imagine it was safer for them to focus their emotions on a deceased child than to fully attach themselves to their living ones. These were the women who raised my mother and when my brother died, my mother withdrew into a place I couldn’t go and something in me too froze.

Ten years later, I couldn’t even say my brother’s name without crying. Someone I felt close to, but who experienced me as distant, helped me a lot when he told me that I seemed stuck in the past. He gently suggested that it was time for me to re-embrace life. He was right and it took a lot of time, tears, and effort. I met and married my wonderful husband Dov in my late thirties and it was a huge victory over my fear of loss for me to become a parent, not once, but twice. Turning to God to strengthen me and my family, converting to Judaism, and embracing this community are huge victories over my detachment from life. Being in a relationship with God helps me to live in a place of love, not fear. I am trying to raise my girls out from under the shadow of loss and the fear of loss, and in the warmth of love and trust in life and in God.

Now that I understand Sarah more as a mother full of fear for her child, I feel closer to her and having my Jewish name linked with hers no longer feels so uncomfortable. I stand here today with two names, reflecting two heritages, both rich and instructive. I am Cathy Shadd, the daughter of Karene Vollrath Shadd, a wonderful woman who taught me by word and deed to be generous, to think carefully before I talked, to appreciate what I had, and to help make the world a better place. She taught me to always try my best and that way, I could never really fail at anything. And I am Rina bat Sarah v’Avraham. My nominal Jewish mother was a trailblazer, a partner in trying to change the world. Her famed perpetually open tent flaps and warm fire, welcoming strangers from all directions, and her loyalty to her lifelong partner, have inspired me to open my own home and heart more and to really treasure the loyal partnership I have with my husband. Sarah has also shown me the danger of reacting to people from a place of fear, and the ways we both inherit this reflex and pass it on to our children. I feel very blessed to have the benefit and example of these two women.

What in this story can help us at this time of year? T’shuvah, the process of returning to our higher selves, requires us to go deep into ourselves, to plumb our very depths and to examine not just our actions, but also the causes of them. We may have to dig down several generations deep to get to what is really underneath some of our behaviors. When we do this, we may bring out into the light some of our deepest fears. The struggle to penetrate our fears and to grapple with them is a lifelong process, but at this time of year we have a special motivation to and a framework for engaging in this effort. The rewards are potentially enormous.

Nachmanides wrote that everything that happened to the patriarchs (read patriarchs and matriarchs) is a signpost for their children, that this is why the Torah elaborates on the events of their lives. The moment Sarah panicked and banished Hagar and Ishmael was a crossroad in all of their lives and in ours as well. Had she behaved differently, our whole history may have been different, right up to today. But she did what she did, and it is our task to learn something from her life which will help us move ahead in ours. We cannot erase or remake her past any more than we can erase or remake our own, but we can take something from her example to help us in our lives, right now. As we look into ourselves, trying to understand why we do the things we do, we can also try to really see the people in our lives, people who, like us, may be struggling with their own fears. We are all mirrors for one another and we are all b’nai Sarah, struggling to balance our past and our present so that we can move more soulfully into the future.

In the coming year, may we continue to untangle the chain of fears we carry inside us, and may we all do our part to heal the wounds inflicted on the world by our collective fears.

L'shanah tovah tikatevu!