Sources Cited in this Video:
Genesis 16, where we first meet Hagar.
Genesis 21, which Jews read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
A compilation of rabbinic teachings on Hagar.
In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael are expelled into the desert of Beer Sheva. Today, the only school in Beer Sheva that teaches both Jewish and Palestinian children in both Arabic and Hebrew bears Hagar’s name.
The “Hagar’s Tent” statue in Nazareth.
Other Stuff:
Last week I talked to MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan about how far-right leaders like Giorgia Meloni, who will likely be Italy’s next prime minister, use ostensibly populist economic language about “financial speculators” as a code for cultural resentments against Jews. We also talked about how hyper-nationalist politicians both flirt with antisemitism and embrace Israel at the same time.
Two terrific new pieces in Jewish Currents (to which you really should subscribe): The first, by Joshua Leifer, is about Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli politician who is making Kahanism mainstream. The second, by Mari Cohen, is about the battle inside “Israel studies”: between scholars who want to do academic research and donors who want to fund propaganda.
Two very different perspectives on Vladimir Putin’s terrifying new speech and how the West should respond.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, this is Peter. It’s another video. I’m gonna keep going with videos for a while. The response has been generally positive, I think, and we’ve got the transcription up, so please give me feedback. One person did write back and say that I use the word “right” a lot. I’ll say something, and then I’ll punctuate it with the word “right.” I wasn’t even aware I’m doing that so I’m gonna try to not do that as much but bear with me. I guess I’m learning I have more verbal ticks than I had been aware of. Before I start, this Friday we’re gonna have a couple of guests from this group called Parent Circle. It’s a group of Israeli Jews and Palestinians who have lost loved ones in the conflict. And there’s actually a group of them that’s been touring the American South, kind of learning about justice and reconciliation and equality from the experience of the American South. They’ve been in Montgomery and Selma, and we’re going to talk to a couple of those folks about what they’ve learned. I think it should be a really interesting, really powerful conversation.
I’m gonna talk today for a minute about the Torah reading for Rosh Hashana, which we just read last week. Now, I was a little anxious to choose this topic, to be honest, because I worry about this being kind of sectarian. And I definitely, you know, I’m very, very conscious of the fact that often times Jewish identity can be kind of used to exclude other people from conversations about Israel-Palestine—something that I really don’t like. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to feel that they were being excluded by these topics being kind of too Jewish. But this is kind of what’s on my mind these days, and I figured it was just better to kind of authentically express what I’m thinking about in this particular calendar period, you know, between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. I was also anxious because there are many, many people who are more knowledgeable than I am about Jewish texts. This is kind of a hobby of mine but it’s not something that I have, you know, as much expertise in as I hope to have in some areas. And I also worry that there’s always the danger that you kind of go into texts and Judaism, or any other religion, and you cherry pick what you want for your own political purposes, and I think that’s a problem. Any religious tradition speaks in many, many, many different voices, some of which may kind of fit with one’s own predispositions, and some which are deeply, deeply challenging. I mean there’s so much in Judaism that is enormously challenging to my kind of ethical framework. So, I want to just say that this is one reading. It’s a reading of this text that is appealing to me because of my own kind of ethical preconceptions, and there are many, many other readings that are equally as valid as these.
So, let me just say why I decided to talk about this. What I find fascinating about this—this is the Torah reading for Rosh Hashana. Rosh Hashana is often called the Jewish New Year, but it is, and it isn’t the Jewish New Year. The Jewish New Year is actually—when Jews start counting months, they start from the month of Nisan, which is the month of Passover. But Rosh Hashana is considered the anniversary of creation. So, in a way, it’s not the Jewish New Year. It’s actually what Jews think of as the new year of the whole world. Rosh Hashana has a very universalistic element to it. It’s less national, less the story of a people, of the kind of the national Jewish story than Passover, or Sukkot, or Shavuot, or Purim, or Hanukkah, and a much more a universal story. And I think the universalism in Rosh Hashana, particularly in the Torah reading for the first day, is really fascinating and kind of subversive, especially when read against the Passover story. Because the Passover story is so foundational, I think, to so much Jewish political discourse, right. It’s Jews are victims. The Gentiles are the oppressors. G-d sees our suffering. G-d liberates us, and Jews become a nation that goes on to having sovereignty. And this is an absolutely foundational text that whether they recognize or not, I think Jews often structure the world according to this idea. But the Rosh Hashana Torah reading turns this absolutely on its head in a way that is so subversive that I don’t think that often we as Jews wrestle with how
subversive the meaning of this is. So, as a little background to the Torah reading that you read on Rosh Hashana, in the Tora reading we meet this woman named Hagar. She actually is introduced earlier in Genesis, in the Chapter 16 of Genesis. The Torah reading is Chapter 21. But I want to just say something about the first time we meet Hagar first before I get to the Torah reading for Rosh Hashana. So, Hagar is an Egyptian slave living in the house of the Israelite patriarch, Abraham, and matriarch, Sarah. Just think about that. According to Jewish tradition, according to the to the Midrash, that Hagar is actually the daughter of Pharaoh. Now just think about how mind-blowing this is when you think about it in contrast to the Passover story, right. The Passover story is about Jewish slaves in Egypt being oppressed by Pharaoh. In chapter 16 of Genesis, we meet an Egyptian slave, enslaved by the Israelite patriarch and matriarch, and she is the daughter of Pharaoh, right? It’s a mind-blowing inversion, which immediately suggests, right, that this notion of slavery is not something only that can be done to Jews, but something that Jews can do as well.
And Hagar’s name is also fascinating, right? Hagar is very similar to “ha-ger,” which means in Hebrew, “the stranger.” The word that is used again and again to describe B’nei Israel, the children of Israel, when they are in Egypt, the famous line—some of you may know and it says it Exodus, and it’s repeated in various forms—says to the B’nei Israel, “you know the heart of the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Except here, the stranger, the slave is Egyptian. And the oppressors are not the Egyptians, not Pharaoh, but they are oppressing Pharaoh’s daughter, enslaving Pharaoh’s daughter. And the figures doing that are Abraham and Sarah, who are the patriarch and matriarch of what become the Jewish people.
And the parallelisms continue because Hagar is not only, as a slave, not in control of her labor, as a slave, he is also not in control of her body. This again evokes the Passover story very, very powerfully, right? We read in the Passover story that Pharaoh says that all the first-born Jewish males must be killed. And, so, then what happens with the baby Moses, right? Because in order to keep Moses from being killed, he’s hidden. And then who is he taken from? He’s taken by Pharaoh’s daughter. His mother loses control of her child, and the child is taken to be raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, which in the Jewish tradition is called “Batyah.” What happens in the story of Hagar? Sarah, the Israelite matriarch cannot become pregnant. So, she tells Abraham to—then called Abram—to have a child with Hagar, with the slave, and Hagar has her child taken from her, right, just like Moses’s mother Jochebed does, by essentially the figures that are playing the role of Pharaoh in this story. And the figures that are playing the role of Pharaoh in this story are, mind-blowingly, Abraham and Sarah, right?
So, this is all precursor to what happens in the Torah reading on Rosh Hashana, which is from Genesis 21—a little further in Genesis. And, so, in Genesis 21, we learn that Sarah actually does become pregnant on her own, after initially she couldn’t become pregnant, which is why she wanted Hagar to be a kind of concubine to birth a child for her, and she has this child, Isaac. And then she gets upset that Ishmael is having a bad influence on Isaac. There’s a lot of rabbinic discussion about what’s actually going on, and some rabbis do paint Ishmael in a very bad light, that he’s taunting somehow Isaac. But anyway, she says to Abraham, “you must expel a Hagar and Ishmael.” And Abraham—very much like he does in the famous Akeidat, the binding of Isaac—goes along with this for better or for worse, essentially does is he’s told, and does this terrible, terrible misdeed, right. This terrible thing which is in the case of the binding of Isaac, the almost slaughtering of Isaac. In this case, the expulsion right of Hagar and her son and his son, Ishmael. And, so, then Hagar and Ishmael are in the desert, right? You know, it’s not the Jews who are wandering in the desert—the Jewish ex-slaves—it’s the Egyptian ex-slave who’s now wandering in the desert with her son. And she’s gonna die for lack of water, right? The same thing that bedevils B’nei Israel, the Israelites, again and again when they have left their bondage in the desert. They repeatedly run out of water and call out to G-d or Moses calls out to G-d on their behalf. And just as G-d hears the children of Israel and gives them water, Hagar calls out to G-d, and G-d hears Hagar, and G-d provides water, and says, I will make of you a great nation—the same thing that G-d again and again says to B’nei Israel, to the Israeli people—I will make of you a great nation. Ishmael goes on to get a wife from where? From Egypt, right? From the land of his mother’s people. And back to Chapter 16 for a minute, the very name Ishmael—Ishmael is named by the angel by an angel. And the angel calls him Ishmael because Ishmael means “G-d hears him.” Hagar actually names G-d. You just think about how powerful and important—first of all, Hagar is the first woman in the Torah that G-d speaks to, but she’s not an Israeli, she’s not a what we would call a Jew. And not only does she talk to G-d, Hagar, but Hagar actually gives G-d a name. Just to understand how important of a figure she is. And what does she call G-d? One translation of the name that Hagar gives G-d is, you are the “G-d of seeing.” G-d sees Hagar.
Why do we read this? Jews read this on Rosh Hashana, in this most-holiest period of the year,
this story of a non-Jewish Egyptian slave—enslaved and then expelled by the foremother and forefather of our people—because we’re told that Hagar’s prayer to G-d in the desert after she’s expelled is so pure that it’s a model of prayer, a model to teach us how to pray. By the way, after Sarah dies, Abraham marries a woman named Keturah, who some in Rabbinic tradition say is actually Hagar to show that Abraham himself never lost this love of Hagar, and Ishmael and Isaac go again at the end after Abraham dies to bury him in Hebron. But I think it’s worth asking ourselves—there’s so many Torah readings that could have been read on Rosh Hashana and I think the question to ask ourselves—it seems to me—is, what is our tradition saying about our capacity to be not only victims who need to be liberated and heard by G-d, but also our capacity to be victimizers, to be oppressors, to play the other role. And why do we need to be told that G-d hears is not only our suffering, but G-d hears also the suffering of Hagar and Ishmael. Those who we afflict. Those who we impose suffering on in this kind of remarkable inverted parallelism to the way the Egyptians do to us. It seems to me, the message at least that I take away is that all human beings have the capacity to be to be victims and have the capacity to be oppressors. All have the capacity to be slaves and to enslave. But G-d—even though in Jewish tradition, we believe G-d has a special relationship with the Jewish people—G-d hears the suffering of all of them and cares about all of them. And since we are called to live to try to imitate G-d, then surely we also are called to hear the suffering of everybody, including those who we afflict, and not only to see ourselves as those who can suffer and deserve G-d’s attention. And there is in the city of Nazareth, largely a city of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a statue—Jim Zogby told me about this, I had not known this—but a statue of Hagar and Ishmael, called Hagar’s tent, of Hagar holding Ishmael and Hagar faces north. Hagar faces north because that’s the direction from which Palestinians were expelled, north into Lebanon during the Nakba, the catastrophe that came at the time of Israel’s creation. And it seems to me that Hagar’s story is also our story, that’s one of the key messages of the fact that we read this story on Rosh Hashana. That this is not only a Palestinian story, not only a story of non-Jews, this is our story that we need to own as well, and we need to own the fact that our tradition tells us that G-d hears Hagar, that Hagar is precious to G-d, and therefore that Hagar’s cry and the cry of the Hagars of today, the people all around the world, but especially Palestinians who are still suffering from that expulsion and oppression that exists today, that their cry is precious to G-d. And if we want to try to imitate G-d’s ways it must be precious to us, and we must hear. I’ll stop and I hope to see a lot of you on Friday. Thanks for listening.
What Jews Can Learn from the Story of Hagar