There is Hagar: we see her sitting
in the wilderness, weeping. Her mistress Sarah has banished her, fearing that
Ishmael would usurp Sarah’s son Isaac’s inheritance. Abraham – Hagar’s master –
Ishmael’s father – sent them away, with only a skin of water and some bread.
And now the water is gone, and Hagar can’t bear to watch her child die of
thirst. She lifts up her voice and weeps. And God opens her eyes. She looks up
and sees a well of water. It was there all along.
There is Abraham: we see him up
on the mountain. His arm is raised, the knife in his hand. Isaac, his son, is
bound on the altar beneath him. He is about to sacrifice his own son. But an
angel calls out to him, stopping him at the last possible moment. Abraham looks
up and sees a ram caught in the thicket. It was there all along.
Vayera – “and it was
seen.” This is the name of the Torah
portion assigned to this day of Rosh Hashana.
“And it was seen.”
What did we see this year – in
our own hearts, and out there in the world?
How might we have we averted
our gaze, and from whom?
How might we have looked
directly at reality, eyes unobstructed?
In what ways have we been blind
to what was there all along, waiting to be seen?
The Torah portion assigned for
this day is itself very hard to look at. We have Abraham and Sarah banishing
one of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael. And then we have Abraham brought to the verge
of killing his other son, Isaac. These are not fun stories – they are violent
and sad, and in the case of Abraham’s almost sacrifice of his son, very hard to
understand. Every year I try to find a way to not have to talk about this Torah
portion – it is so difficult and so dark – and every year, it reappears in
front of my eyes. I can’t seem to make it go away.
But perhaps this is precisely
the kind of story we should be wrestling with today, this day when we are
supposed to take a magnifying glass to our own lives and the world and see what
is really there. Because we know that this is really hard. Hard not to look
away, especially when what’s there is sad or painful or broken.
As many of you know, over the
past several years I have been studying and practicing mindfulness meditation
in a Jewish context. Part of mindfulness meditation is to regularly sit still
and quiet and watch the mind, noting what is there –whether pleasant or
unpleasant. One of the most challenging aspects of this practice is to stay
with the unpleasant when it arises. Whether it is doubt or anxiety, anger or
sadness, the mind will typically try to flee the unpleasant. Instead of staying
with that unpleasant feeling, the mind will do things like make plans to fix
the unpleasantness, or start blaming myself or blame someone else, or find
something more pleasant to think about, or find some reason to stop sitting –
maybe go get something to eat or get something accomplished! I have found
though, that when I can notice the unpleasant and then just allow myself to sit
and feel that feeling, it eventually fades away – it is only a temporary
visitor.
Over the summer as the cycle of
violence escalated in Israel and Gaza, I had many opportunities to watch how my
mind handles unpleasant thoughts and feelings. For the first couple weeks of the hostilities,
I found myself obsessively scrolling through Facebook, reading article after
article, analysis after analysis, hour after hour. After too many late nights
of this, I found myself emotionally and physically fatigued. This was not a
wholesome way of dealing with the unpleasant!
It’s interesting, because I was not avoiding
knowing about what was happening. But by watching Facebook, I was actually
avoiding watching my OWN experience of what was happening – the fact that I was
feeling scared, angry, sad and anxious.
And I was not alone. During the
period when the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers’ bodies had not yet been
found, a congregant admitted that she had been checking Facebook and newsfeeds
every time she had a spare moment during her work day, and then into the night.
What helped her to stop this cycle was a memorial service that we held at the
synagogue. She shared that having a delineated time and space set aside to
pray, reflect and feel helped her make a choice. Even though she couldn’t
actively do anything to solve the situation or make it go away, she also didn’t
have to obsess about it anymore.
I too found that after being
still and looking right at my thoughts and feelings about the situation,
whether in preparing and delivering sermons, leading that memorial service, or
facilitating a dialogue about the situation, I felt free of my Facebook
obsession. After sitting with and
looking at the heaviness and the confusion, after talking about it, singing and
praying about it, allowing my heart to break and tears to flow, I was no longer
overwhelmed, and the impulse to distract myself melted away.
Many of us try, whether
intentionally or unconsciously, to avoid sitting with our own brokenness. We
cover over the pain or confusion with consumption and busyness. Or we look away
from the brokenness to our Facebook feeds and other forms of distraction.
Our sacred calendar is
therefore so very wise. It gives us this Season of Awe to practice quieting
down, reflecting, and sitting with whatever arises when we look back at this
year. We are invited to do teshuvah – to turn, with compassion, towards the
un-whole. And for a delineated time, we get to know the unpleasant pieces of
our lives – whether it is regret, jealousy, fear or pain, loneliness or grief.
Perhaps the stories from Torah
and the music and the prayer can even allow our hearts to break open. Over the
years, folks have shared with me, usually sheepishly, that they often find
themselves crying in synagogue services, and they don’t know why. There are so
few times and spaces in our lives when we feel safe letting our hearts break.
This can be one of those places.
In our Torah portion, when
Hagar runs out of water in the desert, she can’t bear to look at her child as
he suffers – so she casts him a distance away, under a bush. But then she lifts
up her voice and begins to weep – she allows herself to be with her pain. This
is the moment when transformation occurs – God immediately enters the scene and
opens her eyes. Now that she is seeing clearly, she realizes she has a choice –
she can retrieve her child, drink from the well, and find a way forward.
“Vayera” – and it was seen.
When the broken pieces of our
minds and hearts lie out in the open we are no longer overwhelmed. We can see
clearly and are free to examine the pieces. Having done so, we know our
thoughts and feelings for what they are – temporary visitors. Change - choice –
teshuva, turning– is now possible.
Another scene, earlier in our
Parasha, that always breaks my heart, is when Abraham sends
Hagar and their young son Ishmael off into the wilderness. Sarah orders her
husband Abraham to banish these outsiders, to protect Isaac’s inheritance. And
God backs her up. Separation is necessary for the future of both Isaac and
Ishmael’s peoples. Abraham knows this, and God assures him that Ishmael, like
Isaac, will be the father of a great nation.
The Torah tells us that, “the
matter distressed Abraham greatly.”[1]
Nevertheless, Abraham gets up
early the next morning, takes some bread and a skin of water, and gives them to
Hagar. The Torah tells us, “He placed them over her shoulder, together with the
child, and sent her away.”[2]
Abraham knows what he has to
do. At the same time, he knows that he is causing great suffering, and this distresses
him. It is so hard to watch.
“Vayera,” “and it is seen.”
It is striking that the Torah would
tell the story in this way. The text clearly intends to evoke empathy within us
as we watch Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. Remarkable - that we
read this story, about the suffering of non-Jews precisely on one of the most
important days of the Jewish year. Hagar is in fact from Egypt, the land of our
people’s mythic enemy. Precisely now, as we look within ourselves and reflect
on our actions and experiences in the past year, our tradition asks us to gaze
closely at the suffering of the enemy.
The past summer I felt this tension
that Abraham is feeling - the pull between knowing what you have to do to
protect yourself and knowing that it will cause others to suffer.
As we learned of the murder of
the 3 kidnapped Israeli young men and then watched Hamas shoot rockets as far
as Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, it was clear to me that Israel had to defend itself
and that this could not continue. The towns in southern Israel such as Sderot
and Ashkelon had been living under fire for years already, and now a huge segment
of the population was running for cover and spending way too much time in bomb
shelters. This time it really hit home:
two of my cousins were wounded in the first week of the ground invasion and
ended up in a hospital in Beersheva. The ophthalmologists are fighting to save
Ishay's eye, and
Yoav is undergoing
physiotherapy for a leg injury and was told that it will take a year to get
back to good health. Israel clearly had to do something, and I did not feel the
need to apologize for Israel’s response.
At the same time, I felt like I
was staring into the abyss.
And Abraham reached out for the
knife to slay his son.
The death and destruction that
the Israeli airstrikes caused in Gaza was horrifying to watch. It was painful to
look directly at the fact that they were killing hundreds of innocent
civilians, so many of them children. We cannot avert our gaze from the reality
of that suffering.
When I look back at the Gaza
war this summer, I understand that this is what it means for the Jewish people
and the state of Israel to have political and military power. We can finally
defend ourselves. But when we spill innocent blood in our own self-defense, our
hearts cry out. And the world, and perhaps we too, hold ourselves to an
impossible standard. Like Isaac, we are bound so tightly. We are in an
impossible position - trying to protect
ourselves and act morally when the enemy uses children as human shields.
And yet, at the last possible
moment, God stays Abraham’s hand. Abraham lifts up his eyes, and there is a ram
caught in the thicket. At that last possible moment, Hagar lifts up her eyes,
and there is a well of water. Perhaps Hagar and Abraham are teaching us
something here – that there is another way. Both of them are caught up in what
they think is the only way – they are only seeing one way forward – lifting the
knife, casting the child away.
My mindfulness teacher, Rabbi
Sheila Peltz-Weinberg, was in Israel this summer during the rockets and the
sirens and the airstrikes. When she returned, she reflected with me, that the
most confused state is the state of war. War is the ultimate state of not
seeing clearly.
Perhaps Hagar and Abraham are
teaching us that if we would lift our eyes and see clearly, we would see that
we do not have to give over our children or other people’s children to a cycle
of violence and retribution. There is a way back. There is a choice. We have
done it before. We can see our enemy, talk to our enemy, and yes – someday – perhaps
at the last possible moment - make peace with our enemy.
Our rabbis teach us that the
well and the ram were both created at the beginning of time, on the eve of the
seventh day of creation – at the last possible moment of creation. That moment
also happens to be the eve of the very first Rosh Hashanah.
Sometimes, we have to bring
ourselves to the very edge of the abyss, into the depths of confusion, of
striking out and striking back and casting away before we can see clearly. But the
answer has been there all along. All we have to do is lift our eyes out of the
abyss, and it can be seen. And then we can grab the ram by the horns, take a
long drink of water from the well, stop sacrificing our children, and bring what
we all need – some wholeness, some peace.
