Hagar or Sarah?—D’var Torah,Va-Yera, Genesis 21:9-21
September 14, 2007
by Rabbi Gerry Serotta

2nd Day Rosh Hashanah 5768

This portion is about family conflict within the ancestral family that are part and parcel of the traumas we still confront between and among the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, especially between Isaac and Ishmael and their descendants, the Jews and the Arab peoples. But, this year I thought we might focus briefly on Hagar and Sarah. Who are our sympathies with as we read this story of the conflict between Sarah and Hagar?

Surely, if we are honest, our sympathies have to be with Hagar for she is the underdog; she is the persecuted one. And, if you read the Torah portion carefully, it is clear that God’s (and perhaps Abraham’s) sympathies are with her, too. Even though Sarah is the ancestress of the Jewish people, God is on the side of the persecuted.

All sorts of rejected women have found their stories in Hagar ever since. The Biblical scholar, Phyllis Trible in her book, Texts of Terror says about Hagar that “She is the faithful maid exploited; she is the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class; she is the surrogate mother—dismissed when her baby is delivered; she is the resident alien without a green card and without any legal protection; she is the divorced mother with child; she is the shopping bag lady; she is the welfare mother.”

So per Professor Trible, this powerful story is not just about Hagar, who lived in a particular place and at a particular time; it is about all who are torn by rejection, desolated by the pain in their lives, and paralyzed to do anything about it.

So twice a year, once during the regular Torah reading and now chosen for reading on Rosh Hashanah, the tradition and the Torah make us confront her story, perhaps so that we may have some awareness of what all these people go through, and so that we may think about our responsibilities to them.