Rabbi's Writings

Chavurat Lamdeinu

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TEARS

Ruth Gais
Rosh HaShanah
Shacharit
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
1 Tishri 5766
Chavurat Lamdeinu, Madison NJ

TEARS

I want to start this morning by thinking about the story of Hagar and Ishmael which
we have just read. It’s a painful and complicated story of primal emotions; jealousy,
love, betrayal, despair, and redemption. I’m not going to talk about the behavior of
Abraham and Sarah, though there’s certainly lots to talk about there. This morning, I
want us to study what happens to Hagar and Ishmael once they are expelled from
the tent of Abraham and left in the wilderness of Beer Sheva. (Gen. 21:14-19) When
their water is gone, Hagar leaves the child Ishmael under a bush to protect him from
the sun, and goes and settles herself at a distance, unable to watch her child dying
from thirst. She bursts into tears. Va tisa et kola vateiv’ch – she lifted up her voice
and wept.
What happens next.? How long did she weep? What was she weeping about- did
she think as she sobbed of all the bad things that had happened to her, did she focus
on the seeming inevitability of the death of her child and her own death there in the
desert? Or were her tears, tears without conscious thought, an unending stream of
anguish? Did she eventually stop and was there no answer, just the indifferent
silence of the desert or perhaps a harsh, keening wind that mocked her sighs?
The text, typically, does not tell us. What we are told next is puzzling. What we might
expect to hear is “God heard the cry of Hagar,” But instead, the text reads, “ God
heard the cry of the boy, Va’yishma Elohim et kol ha na-ar.” There are undoubtably
good historical explanations for this discrepancy- the scribe meant to write Va’
yishma Elohim et kol ha-na-arah- God heard the voice of the young woman.,.” or
some such explanation. Indeed, the Septuagint, the earliest translation of the
Hebrew Bible into Greek, has the reading, “and he ( the boy), not she, or Hagar, lifted
up his voice and wept,” which also solves the problem. But today, we will not let
ourselves be satisfied with such explanations. Today, we look at the text with the
eyes and hearts of our ancestors, and seek meaning from the words as they are
found in our sacred Torah. Today we are interested in tears, not manuscript
variations. So we still ask, why did God hear the cry of the boy, but not Hagar’s?
Whatever Hagar’s cries were, A rabbinic tradition answers our question, telling us
that God heard the cries of both of them – Hagar’s loud and audible sobs and also
the silent cry of her child, who was perhaps too weak to cry out loud for himself.
We learn from this that God hears those who cry out in behalf of another as well as
the silent, internal cries of the one who cannot cry out and whose cries we humans
do not hear..
. After God heard the cry of the boy, an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and
asks her the same question we just asked, “Mah lach, Hagar,-what’s bothering you,
Hagar?” The angel doesn’t wait for an answer but comforts her, “Don’t fear,
because God has heard the the voice of the boy, where he is.” Come, lift up the boy
and hold him by the hand.”
“God has heard the voice of the boy, where he is.” A strange sentence. What does
“Where he is” mean. We learn that God hears us “where we are.” We can be in a
synagogue, or in our homes, or clinging to a cliff, or dying of thirst under a scraggly
desert bush. It doesn’t matter. God can hear us. We also learn that once we know
that God is listening, we can do what we didn’t seem able to do before. What
happens next may be a miracle or maybe not. God opens Hagar’s eyes, Vayiftach
Elohim et eineihah va’teireh et be’er mayim, and she saw a well of water. Was the
water there all the time but Hagar was too distressed to notice or did it suddenly
appear? The language of the text suggests that the water had been there the whole
time but she could not see it.When God hears our cries, we become capable of
finding what or whom we need.
As I wrote this, the phone rang. It was my friend Judit, calling from Jerusalem to
wish me a shanah tovah. She certainly is someone who desperately longs for a
better year. Only 6 months ago, her beloved husband died a brave, slow, painful
death. After exchanging news of our families and mutual friends, after she we hang
up, I am left with the sound of her sobs.
Suddenly the world is filled with tears. It has always been so but lately it is as if we
have been given new, super-sensitive ears and now we hear all the time cries
echoing and re-echoing around the globe. Today all those laments are funneled into
the sounds of the shofar, the sound of tears.: The shofar wails, gasps, sobs, cries. It
is the sound of the whimpering of Sisera’s mother as she, like so many mothers,
only dimly begins to understand the reality of her son’s death. It is the piercing sobs
of King David lamenting his dear, misguided son Absalom, It is the voice of the
Psalmist who cries over and over, To you Adonai I cry, my rock, do not be deaf to me.
For if you neglect me, I am like those who go down to the pit. Listen to my plea for
mercy, when I cry to you.” (Ps. 28) Maybe those were Hagar’s words, or Ishmael’s.
The sound of the shofar is all around us: The harsh cries of grief and misery we hear
coming from the distant tsunami-devasted shores of the Far East, the daily
incessant wailing from war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan, the many years of the tears
of all peace-seeking Israelis and Palestinians. The shrieks of pain from those
trapped by the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the almost inaudible faint whispers of
pain from those starving in Darfur, Nigeria, all around the world, the tears we ignore
everyday that come from our own neighbors in inner cities, our impoverished rural
communities and the unhappiness and pain of those as close to us as our dearest
family members and friends. These are the sounds of the shofar.
Who hears the sound of the shofar? If its harsh call contains all our cries and
shouts, who is meant to hear it? We are, of course. Maimonides tells us that the
shofar calls to us,. “Awake, you sleepers, awake from your sleep. Search your
deeds and turn in teshuvah. Rember your Creator, you who forget the truth in the
vanities of time and go astray all the year after vanity and folly that neither profit nor
save. Look to your souls, and better your ways and actions.” (Maim. Hilkhot
Teshuvah, III.4)
The shofar awakens us to what our ears have refused to hear and what our eyes,
like Hagar’s have refused to see and we must act. We must take what Abraham
Joshua Heschel calls a “leap of action” and not stand idly by as our neighbors
bleed. Heschel teaches, “What ought I to do? is according to Kant, the basic
question in ethics. The meta-ethical question, the deeper question, asks not only
what ought we to do, but what is our right to act at all?… We stnd on a razor’s edge.
It is so easy to hurt, to destory, to insult, to kill. Giving birth to one child is a mystery;
bringing death to millions is but a skill.. In the midst of such anixety we are
confronted with the claim of the bible. The world is not all danger and man is not
alone. God endowed man with freedom, and He will share in our use of freedom. The
earth is the Lord’s and God is in search of man. Man is responsible for his deeds,
and God is responsile for man’s responsibility. He who is a life-giver must be a
lawgiver. He shares in our responsibility> he is waiting to enter our deeds through
our loyalty to His law. He may become a partner to our deeds. (God in Search of Man,
p. 286)
We do know on one level what to do, and most of us have done it. For most of us, it
is relatively easy to help, to do the quick fix. We send money, we collect food and
basics and the like, some of us give generously of our time; I know of several who
have filled 18 wheelers with supplies and driven to Mississippi. All this is good and
necessary and part of our obligation to each other. But our leap of action is
grounded in something deeper, grounded in our glorious covenantal partnership
with God, who also hears the sound of the shofar, and it therefore requires more
from us. .
Our collective lament, channeled into those few wild notes is our plea to God to
judge us with mercy as well as strict justice, but it is more. It is a signal to God that
we are ready and eager to become God’s collaborators, God’s true partners in
creation. When God hears our cries, God will uncover our eyes and we will be able to
see and to do.
We learn in B. Ber. 5b that R.Yochanan once fell ill and R. Hanina went in to visit him.
He said to him, “Are your sufferings welcome to you?” R. Yochanan replied: “Neither
they nor their reward.”R.Hanina said to him, “Give me your hand.” He gave him his
hand and R. Hanina raised him ( cured him). Why could not R. Johanan cure himself?
They replied: The prisoner cannot free himself from jail.”
When Hagar distanced herself from her child, she could not save him. Even before
she saw the well of water, God commanded her to come close to the boy and hold
him by the hand. The water saves Ishmael from dying of thirst, holding on to his
mother’s hand revives his soul.. R. Yochanan cannot cure himself. Only the loving
strength of his friend liberated him from his illness. Our world is sick and we must
cure it. The cure must go beyond bandaids and aspirin. We must advocate for a
paradigm shift, systemic changes in how we operate as a society, not be content
and complacent and indifferent. In this period of cheshbon ha-nefesh, we must look
to the deeper ailments of our society, our planet, and leap into action.
Just as the voice of God guided Hagar in the wilderness, so too R. Hanina acted as
he knew God would want him to act. He took that “leap of action.” When Rabbi
Chanina’s son asked him what does the verse in Deuteronomy, “You shall walk after
the Lord your God (Deut. 13:5),” mean. Is it possible for a human being to walk after
God.? Rabbi Chanina answered: the meaning is to walk in the ways of God. As God
clothes the naked so do you too also clothe the naked. As God visited the sick, so do
you too visit the sick; as God comforted mourners, you too comfort mourners.”
(Sotah 14a)
Rabbi Chanina took that “leap of action.” So did Hagar. So must we. A “leap of
action” entails risk. What we do may have enormous consequences. We can cure
someone, we can let someone die. This is the place where our suddenly acute
sense of hearing has taken us. Now that we hear the shofar’s call, like Hagar, our
eyes are open. And what do we see?. We see suffering, we see need, we see
ignorance, filth, and despair.We see the divinity in each of our faces. Like Rabbi
Chanina, we are ready to take that leap of action- to hold each other’s hands, look
into each other’s face, into the face of God and come close to God as we walk in
God’s ways.
William Blake 200 years ago wrote this.
For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And love, the human form divine;
And peace, the human dress

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress
Prays to the human form divine;
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk or Jew,
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.

k.y.r.