Rosh Hashanah 5779 Tobias Divack Moss Hagar’s Disorientation A question for the parents here, or anyone who has cared for a little one. Can you remember that bittersweet moment when you hoisted the child up on your shoulder, and said to yourself, “ooph! Never again, this kid is just too old, too big for this.” No doubt that last shoulder ride occurred well before the child was sixteen, the likely age of Ishmael in the story we read today. Hagar gave birth 14 years before Sarah did. So Ishmael must have been around sixteen years old at the festival for Yitzhak’s weaning. The Torah says that Ishmael makes some playful, perhaps inappropriate, gesture to Yitzhak, which infuriates Sarah. Sarah forces Avraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael. In a scene that hardly seems possible, the text says that Avraham sends Hagar away carrying water, bread, and big ol’ Ishmael on her shoulder. This sounds like an unbearable load. Just a verse later, Hagar tashlech et ha-yeled—tashlech like tashlich. Hagar casts off Ishmael under some small trees. Many interpreters and translators try to avoid the physical implausibility of the scene. Some say, no no no, this actually took place earlier, when Ishmael was still a toddler; others pick up on ambiguities in the Hebrew verbs and grammar, and contend that Ishmael was just walking along with Hagar. I too see the implausibility of the scene and these textual ambiguities. For me, they point to the central theme of this story from Hagar’s perspective: disorientation. Hagar’s expulsion marks an unanticipated, unfathomable moment that completely upends her station in life, her worldview, her role, her purpose. In such moments of disorientation—the death of a loved one, losing a job, learning of an illness, the breakdown of an intimate relationship—in those deeply disruptive moments we don’t see things as they truly are. Desperately, we grasp at some understanding of an unintelligible moment. In Hagar’s disorientation, she no longer sees her son as a sixteen-year-old adolescent on the brink of independence, a na’ar in the Hebrew. Rather, she reverts back to basic motherly instincts; Ishmael is just a yeled again, a little boy, perhaps even just a toddler in her eyes. In this delirium, it’s no wonder that Hagar gets lost in the desert. When their water runs out, she casts Ishmael under a tree, and sits off a ways so as not to see him die. Hagar cries to God. The way in which God remedies her disorientation is instructive. First, God orients her towards purpose: Arise, stand up that adolescent, na’ar, hold him by the hand. I will make him a great nation. Then, in the following verse, God opens Hagar’s eyes. She sees a well, one that was perhaps there all along.
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