Just over two weeks ago, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That oration is, for good reason, one of the most renowned in American history. Less well-known is the fact that its most famous portion was not in King’s prepared remarks. While King had previously preached about his dream for America’s future, doing so on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was unplanned and extemporaneous, as though inspired from on high. But it turns out that King wasn’t channeling that day so much as remembering, inspiring and guiding us by repeating words that had inspired and guided him.
According to important recent scholarship from Rev. Dr. Courtney Pace of Memphis Theological Seminary, King actually first encountered the powerful sermonic refrain of “I Have a Dream” in 1962, almost a year before the March on Washington (Freedom Faith, 30). That summer, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, often better known by its acronym SNCC, was deeply engaged in a campaign to register Black voters in southwest Georgia. SNCC’s work was fraught with danger; activists and community members risked their lives to combat the widespread disenfranchisement that was endemic to the Jim Crow South. The night of September 9, 1962, white supremacist terrorists torched two African American churches that had been supporting and cooperating with SNCC’s campaign, burning them to the ground (Pace 30).
The next day, a prayer vigil was held at the ash heap that was once Mt. Olive Baptist Church. King came down from Atlanta to participate. No one recorded or transcribed King’s remarks at that service, perhaps because he was upstaged by one of SNCC’s local leaders, a young African American woman from Philadelphia named Prathia Hall. As Hall led the group in prayer, asking for God’s help “to be free so our children won’t have to grow up with our heads bowed,” she offered a vision for an inclusive and just society, and punctuated her description with the phrase, “I have a dream.”
King was apparently so inspired and moved by Hall’s remarks that he sought and received her permission to use the phrase in his own preaching – including his famous oration at the March on Washington (pace 60). Now, more than 60 years later, Hall is beginning to get the recognition she deserves as one of the great heroes of the Civil Rights movement and shapers of American history.
The dream Hall shared at that prayer vigil was rooted in what she called “Freedom Faith,” the belief that God wants all people to be free, and equips and empowers those who work for liberation (Pace 1).
I am guessing that most of us have never heard of Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall. I admit that I hadn’t heard of her before this summer. But the more I learned about Hall’s Freedom Faith, the more Jewish it sounded to me. Over and again, our Torah and tradition depicts God as the power within, between, and beyond us that inspires, guides, and sustains those who work to advance a world where all children can grow up with their heads held high, where all people are equally able to flourish and participate in the decisions that shape their lives and communities. After all, the foundational and central narrative of our faith is the Exodus. The God we are called to serve is, above all, a God of liberation.
Seen from this perspective, it ought not be surprising that Freedom Faith is at the heart of this Holy Day. In today’s Torah portion, our matriarch Sarah gives birth after many frustrating, fruitless decades trying to have a child of her own. Abraham names the boy Isaac.
And they all live happily ever after. The end… Right?
Unfortunately, no.
Remember that Abraham actually already had a son, Ishmael, whom he had conceived a few years earlier with Sarah’s Egyptian slave, Hagar. Let me underscore that – Hagar was Sarah’s slave. We commonly gloss over that uncomfortable fact, perhaps because we are understandably hesitant to impugn the moral integrity of our ancestors. Sarah was an enslaver?! How could we say such a thing?!
But here’s the thing – the Torah itself makes it plain. It asserts that Hagar was, in fact, a slave, in every painful sense that the term evokes. And Hagar’s subjugation – under the dominion, no less, of the mother of the Jewish people – is crucial for us to understand the meaning and message of today’s Torah portion.
But let’s back up for a moment. Who is Hagar? What do we know about her? Well, the Torah itself tells us very little. We aren’t told anything about her background or upbringing, other than the fact that she is an Egyptian. In fact, we very likely don’t even know Hagar’s name, at least her real name. As contemporary womanist biblical scholar Wilda Gafney points out, the name Hagar is a masculine Hebrew word “meaning ‘foreign thing’” (Womanist Midrash, 34). It is doubtful, Gafney argues, “that her Egyptian parents gave her such a name.” Think about it: can you “imagine an Egyptian mother naming her child ‘alien’ in the language of the people to whom she will be subjected in servitude” (34, 40)? It is more likely, Gafney explains, that Hagar, The Foreign Thing, is what she came to be called after she entered Abraham and Sarah’s Hebrew-speaking household. That the Torah would identify Hagar in this way – stripped of her real name and referred to, simply, as a foreign thing – is significant. It highlights the fact that, in the eyes of her enslavers, Hagar is just an other; nothing more. Certainly not their equal in status or basic worth.
That Abraham and Sarah see Hagar this way is evident from the moment she enters the narrative. Hagar is introduced in the opening verse of Genesis chapter 16. Immediately, in the very next verse, Sarah proposes giving Hagar over to Abraham as a surrogate wife, using Hagar’s presumably fertile body to do what Sarah in her desperation believed she could not do alone – produce a child to fulfill God’s promise that they would birth a great nation. Abraham agrees to Sarah’s proposal, but it is noteworthy that we are not told whether Hagar consented. After all, to Abraham and Sarah, Hagar is just a slave, their personal property, an object that could be used as they wished, her body a mere empty vessel that, in the words of Gafney, could “be colonized to gestate the hopes” of our patriarch and matriarch (34).
Because Hagar is “just a slave,” the child she bears and eventually births is not hers. Legally, the child becomes Abraham and Sarah’s firstborn son and legitimate heir. Abraham names the child Ishmael, Yishma’el, meaning God listens – God has answered the couple’s prayers, given them a child and heir, and fulfilled God’s promise.
But having a child by virtue of a legal fiction was never Sarah’s first choice. And no matter what the paperwork said, in Sarah’s eyes, and perhaps in the eyes of the rest of the world, Ishmael would always in some inescapable way be, as she puts it in today’s Torah portion, “the son of that slave woman” – inherently less than, like his birth mother.
Moreover, as Gafney points out, being “an infertile woman in a male-dominated world…imperil[s Sarah’s] status,” while Hagar’s status is elevated by her fertility. In other words, Sarah’s plan to protect her status by using Hagar’s body ironically had the unintended consequence of making her and Hagar closer to social equals.
The equalizing effect of Hagar’s fertility must have made Sarah deeply insecure. And, as we know from both history and current events, insecurity breeds oppression. It’s a tale at least as old as the Exodus story: The growing Israelite population in Egypt makes Pharaoh and the Egyptian people insecure, and they respond by enslaving the Israelites.
Not coincidentally, the Torah reports that Sarah begins to abuse Hagar as soon as Hagar becomes pregnant, and goes out of its way to tell us that Sarah’s mistreatment of Hagar was serious, even using the exact same term, anah, that it uses to depict the oppression of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt. The Torah wants us to know that Sarah wasn’t just mean to Hagar. She treated Hagar just like the Egyptians treated the Israelites – with cruelty and brutality.
That context is crucial to understanding today’s Torah portion, which begins with the birth of Isaac. When Isaac is born, Sarah at long last gets the son she really wants, the one that is not half-slave, the one that represents the promise of her restoration at the top of hierarchies of class and status where she sees herself as rightfully belonging.
Almost immediately, Sarah moves to radically and permanently reestablish what she perceives to be the proper order of things by discarding and destroying Ishmael and Hagar. Sarah demands that Abraham send Ishmael and his mother away, saying “גָּרֵ֛שׁ הָאָמָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את וְאֶת־בְּנָ֑הּ / cast out that slave-woman and her son / כִּ֣י לֹ֤א יִירַשׁ֙ בֶּן־הָאָמָ֣ה הַזֹּ֔את עִם־בְּנִ֖י עִם־יִצְחָֽק׃ / for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” Make no mistake: to send an enslaved woman and her child out into the wilderness – even with the limited resources that Abraham ultimately provides them – is to send them to their deaths.
My objective here is not to impugn or indict Sarah. Indeed, given her history, given her context, given the circumstances of her life, how she must have felt is completely understandable. Recall that prior to this story, Abraham had twice given Sarah over as a sex-slave to other powerful men in order to secure his own well being. And in her male-dominated society where women were valued primarily as mere tools for procreation and male sexual pleasure, Sarah was likely clear-eyed in her assessment that her infertility diminished her status, indeed her very worth as a human being.
No, I do not for one moment begrudge Sarah for how she felt. But I am also mindful of what she forgot – she forgot that God had rescued her and her family from tyrannical oppression in their native land; she forgot that God had twice liberated her from her own enslavement with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; she forgot that God had led her nephew Lot and his family safely to freedom when Sodom was destroyed. Sarah forgot that God had routinely and repeatedly shown God’s self to be a force for liberation.
Yes, Sarah had been victimized. Yes, Sarah had been traumatized. Yes, Sarah had been hurt. But trauma can constrict the moral imagination, and hurt people hurt people. We ought not begrudge Sarah for how she felt. Yet we must also be mindful of the terrible cost of what Sarah forgot. Sarah forgot about Freedom Faith. She forgot that hers was a God who works to support those who suffer. She forgot that hers was a God who loves kindness and hates injustice; who always sides with victims against their victimizers, always opposes oppressors, and always facilitates freedom. And it’s precisely in the moment where Sarah’s Freedom Faith falters that people get hurt.
Sarah’s trauma and pain blinded her to other possibilities that were available to her, other choices she could have made. Instead of using her own privilege to lift herself up at Hagar’s expense, she could have used her position and relative power to stand in solidarity with Hagar and lift her up. Sarah could have recognized that liberation is not a zero-sum proposition, that in fact none are safe and free unless all are safe and free. The tragedy of the story is that Sarah responds to her own oppression by oppressing others, rather than partnering with them to dismantle the entire oppressive system.
It is telling that Sarah’s role in the drama ends with her expelling Hagar and Ishmael. The Torah doesn’t mention Sarah again until it reports her death. There is similarly no “happily ever after” for Abraham or Isaac. Soon after Abraham consents to cast Hagar and Ishmael out to die in the wilderness, God instructs him to kill Isaac, perhaps as poetic justice, and then never speaks to Abraham again. As for Isaac, according to many of the traditional commentaries, his near-death on Mt. Moriah, which we read about tomorrow, leaves him permanently damaged, both physically and emotionally. And his children and grandchildren are doomed to spend most of their lives at each other’s throats, and also locked in endless cycles of conflict with their neighbors, including with Ishmael’s descendants, which tragically endure to this day.
True, Abraham and Sarah get the empire they are promised through Isaac, but it is lonely, fractured, and perpetually vulnerable. Civilizations in which liberty, equality, and rule of law are secured only for a privileged few all ultimately collapse under the weight of their own injustice. People will not stay oppressed forever. The only way to the Promised Land is together.
How might the story have turned out if Sarah made different choices? What if Sarah had seen her and her family’s fate as bound up in Hagar and Ishmael’s? What if instead of allowing her insecurities and past traumas to make her cruel to Hagar and Ishmael, she had realized that the path to securing her and her family’s future could only be through generosity, care, and concern for their wellbeing?
As if to invite us to ask those questions, the Torah continues Hagar and Ishmael’s story after it diverts our attention from Sarah. Sent off into the wilderness to die, Hagar and Ishmael wander until they run out of water. Near death, Hagar starts to cry. And then something extraordinary happens: as Hagar bursts into tears, God appears, reassuring her that not only would God save them from death, but that God would indeed fulfill the promise of making Ishmael into a great nation. God enables Hagar to find life-sustaining water, and accompanies them to safety. Hagar and Ishmael ultimately return to Egypt, their ancestral homeland, where Ishmael finds a wife and begins the journey of establishing a great nation of his own, in fulfillment of the Divine promise (Gafney 44).
If that story sounds familiar, it’s because it is in fact an “inverse parallel” of our own exodus narrative. In the exodus narrative we recall and celebrate each Passover, Egypt is the oppressor and Israel is the oppressed. But in this version, the roles are reversed: the Egyptians are abused by the Israelites; the Egyptians flee to the wilderness, where they encounter and forge a covenant with God; and the Egyptians are ultimately restored to freedom in their homeland.
In both exodus narratives, people are treated as inconvenient objects by those who exert power over them. In both stories, people are demeaned and dehumanized; used, abused, and discarded; broken, vulnerable, and desperate. But the same group of people are the oppressors in one story, and the oppressed in the other. What doesn’t change is God’s role. In both stories, God meets the oppressed in their suffering, affirms their humanity, responds with intimate and immediate presence, and provides spiritual and material support.
The God of the Torah, in other words, is not a parochial, national deity. The God of Israel is also the God of Egypt. Yes, God redeemed Israel from Egyptian oppression. But today’s Torah portion reveals that God also redeemed Egyptians from the cruel abuse of Israelite tormentors. True, when we are oppressed, God does what God can to support our struggle for liberation. But it is not with us exclusively that God always keeps faith. It is not us exclusively who God will always deliver. Rather, God will always take the side of the oppressed – whether or not that is the side we are on. And if we’re on the wrong side, God will actively oppose us, equipping and sustaining those who are struggling for their freedom from us. Today’s Torah portion reminds us that the God of our tradition is in fact the God of Freedom Faith – a God who wants people, whoever they are, to be free; a God who equips and sustains those who work for freedom; and a God who opposes those who don’t.
Our tradition has us study the story of Sarah and Hagar today of all days because Rosh Hashanah is a day devoted to recalling and recommitting ourselves to Freedom Faith, declaring what we believe and dedicating ourselves to enact those beliefs with our lives.
For proof, look at the prayers we say on Rosh Hashanah: Throughout today’s service, we declare God’s universal sovereignty. When we assert that God alone is supreme, we are also affirming that all peoples, under God, are fundamentally equal.
Similarly, today’s liturgy highlights the expansiveness of God’s sphere of concern, asserting that God is equally mindful of all humanity, not just the Jewish people. Indeed, according to tradition, Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of the whole of humanity, not the Jewish people alone, hence the Talmud’s assertion that all who dwell on earth, not just the Jewish people, pass equally before God’s consciousness on Rosh Hashanah. Of course, God already and always knows this. But how readily we forget. So on this day, we remind ourselves of the axiom that Jew as well as non-Jew is created equally in God’s image, that we are all God’s children, equally and infinitely beloved by our Heavenly Parent.
And alongside liturgy that reminds us today of what we believe, we sound the shofar to underscore the implications of those beliefs. According to tradition, the shofar’s sound is meant to evoke a cry and a call – a cry that alerts us to the brokenness of our world and a call to do our part to repair it. It is meant to rouse us to recognize that if all peoples are fundamentally equal, then to regard or treat anyone as inferior is to reject a basic principle of faith.
Tradition holds that it is the shofar’s sound that heralds redemption. It is the sound that brought down the walls of Jericho, opening our people’s path to the Promised Land. It is the sound that announces the year of Jubilee, when all debts are forgiven and all slaves are set free. And it is the sound that will declare the advent of the coming world, where all will be safe and free.
To sound the shofar today, then, is to proclaim our steadfast belief in that coming world, our yearning for that world, and even more importantly our commitment to bringing it into being. Teka ba-shofar gadol l’heiruteinu, we declare in our worship today – the sound of the great shofar is for our freedom. And even in a year such as this one, when the sanctity of Shabbat precludes us from physically sounding the shofar, this is still Yom Zikhron T’ruah, a day for holding the sound of the shofar in our memories and moral imaginations, a day for its clarion call to penetrate our hearts, stir our souls, and inspire our Freedom Faith.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom from the insecurities and fears that can transform us from victims into victimizers, abused into abusers, oppressed into oppressors.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom from the dangerous delusion that we can elevate ourselves by diminishing others.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom to realize that our fates are intertwined, that our liberation is bound up together, that redemption is only possible when all are redeemed.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom to join with one another, and with a God who wants all people to be free, as partners in perfecting the world.
Let us this day hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom, so that we may speedily and in our time bring about the day for which we pray today, the day we realize our equality and unity under the sovereignty of the One Who Humbles the Haughty,
The One Raises Up the Lowly,
The One Who Releases the Bound,
The One Who Redeems the Poor,
The One Who Helps the Weak,
The One Who Answers Those Who Cry Out;
The One Who Fights for Freedom.
For on that day, all will be One, and our name One.
So May it be Your Will. Amen.
Rabbi Michael Rose Knopf 