Words of Torah

Seeing Her: Hagar

By Rabbi Barry Katz

In sixth grade, my English teacher taught me to look for the protagonist in every story. “Know them and you will understand the movement of the narrative,” she advised. It took me several years to learn that while the protagonists are important, sometimes great meaning is to be found in the actions of minor characters.

When I read Parashat Vayera, I have to remind myself of this. Appropriately, I read it carefully, focusing on Abraham, Sarah and Isaac and even Ishmael. But most of the time I skim past Hagar. She is, after all, the handmaiden, not Abraham’s real wife. Her son is the troublemaker. She mocks Sarah. Her role seems secondary, an intrusion into the stories that resonate so easily for me. But, as Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin notes, Hagar is a pivotal figure in biblical theology, “She is the first woman to be told that she would have a child, the first woman to hear a Divine promise to her descendants. She is the first woman to weep for a dying child. She is the first person visited by an angel. Not only this, she is the only person in Bible who has the gentle hutzpah to name God, E-l-roee, God Who Sees. She is, therefore, a new and radical Adam, taking over the power of naming and applying this power even to the Name.”

In spite of all of these attributes, Hagar is largely unseen. Rabbi Salkin points out that one of the ironies of her life is that she names God, but the only character in the story who calls her by her name is the angel. To Sarah she is the amah, the girl. To Abraham she is the shifhah, the servant, the help. “She is a poor, homeless women, the bag lady, the resident alien, the single mother.” She is all that is cast out.

In a sense, Hagar represents all of the people whom we choose not to see. Think of the people with whom you interact, but really don’t know. The man who sells you your coffee in the morning, the attendant who sweeps the hallway, the worker who scans your credit card at the supermarket. Consider the older person, the person with some physical limitation that you ignore because you can’t imagine what you might have in common with them. Each of these is a potential Hagar- part of our lives, but invisible.

Hagar is also a kind of photographic negative of our own selves. Her story could have been our story. Like us, she was a slave. She knew heartache. She yearned for a connection with God. Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible extends the comparison between Hagar and the Jewish people. Hagar experiences an Exodus but it is an exodus without liberation. She wanders in the wilderness but there is no Sinai awaiting her, no promised land in the distance. She is us, but different, a slightly distorted version of our own image. If we were not burdened by the political implications of who Hagar’s descendants are, I wonder what our tradition might have done with her character.

Finally, Hagar is the part of us that sometimes we cannot see. The first time Hagar leaves Sarah, she does so on her own. In the desert she sees the angel who will send her back and save her. The second time, when she is cast out, she cannot see the well right in front her. What accounts for Hagar’s sudden “blindness?” Perhaps it is that Hagar came to see herself through eyes of Sarah and Abraham. And they never really saw her. For so many reasons, they could not really see her and she accepted their limited view. When we act independently and strongly we see. When we have insight into our own selves, when we understand our weakness and embrace our strength, we can glimpse hidden parts of ourselves.

The song Superman by Five for Fighting, describes how we all look for some part of ourselves that we know exists but can’t quite find. One stanza of the song describes, tongue in cheek, how even Superman experienced this feeling: I’m only a man in a silly red sheet/Digging for kryptonite on this one way street/Only a man in a funny red sheet/Looking for special things inside of me/It’s not easy to be me.

There is nothing silly about that sense that is so familiar to some of us, maybe all of us. It’s not easy when we can’t really see ourselves. Unless our eyes are open we cannot perceive. Unless we see others as unique and distinct from us, we cannot make real and empathetic connections- we are alone.

We read the story of Hagar twice a year, once on Rosh Hashanah, and then again a few weeks after the holidays end. At the beginning of the year, it’s important to reclaim the essential, flawed humanity of one of the Bible’s less popular characters. Once the year begins, we remind ourselves that it is possible to find that humanity in surprising places. Sometimes even in ourselves.

Rabbi Barry Katz is the spiritual leader of the Conservative Synagogue-Adath Israel of Riverdale. An ordinee of JTS and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Rabbi Katz co-led our Taglit-birthright israel trip in January 2005. A talented calligrapher and all-around mensch, Rabbi Katz and his family are currently on sabbatical in Jerusalem.

[Posted 10/24/06]