Vayera
Genesis 18:1–22:24
II Kings 4:1–37 (Sephardic: 4:1–23)
Imagine you’re having an argument with your spouse. You think you understand each other. Then it deteriorates. She wants you to do what she feels so strongly about. You hesitate. She insists she knows the situation. You recognize she might be right, but you have mixed feelings.
Then you hear a voice. It’s the same voice you followed when you walked away from your land and your father’s home. You argued with it when you fought to save your nephew and his family’s lives; you obeyed it when you circumcised yourself and your sons. And yet it never sounded quite like this: “Everything that Sarah says to you, listen to her” (Genesis 20:12).
Everything, you wonder? Why “everything”? She didn’t ask for everything! How about everything about a certain issue? Everything always? But you hold back. In spite of your great stature, you put your idea of the future and your heartache aside, and you get up early the next morning to do what you dread.
Our story started a couple of weeks ago, about a loving couple who are not only husband and wife but also blood relatives, best friends and partners in their life mission. Yet even in this seemingly shared harmony there are challenges, among them God’s promise of succession to Abraham. After years of waiting for an offspring, Sarah begins to wonder: Maybe God meant that blessing for Abraham but not through her? Maybe he is the one who would be the “father of many nations,” and not the two of them together? She decides to give Abraham her maidservant, Hagar, the first surrogate mother.
What happened behind the written words? Did they talk about it? Did they work out the details? Was it a surprise to him? To her? Was Hagar sent one night? Or maybe she suggested it, seeing her mistress’ distress? And Abraham, did he know what was coming? Was he surprised? Did he just say “Yes, dear” to whaever happened next?
Nowadays, there are pretty strict laws for such an arrangement, but this was a first with many unknowns. Neither of them probably knew what having a child would mean to them. Their seemingly stable household turns fragile. Many later midrashim retell how Abraham sneaks out at night to go see Hagar even after she is cast away from his home, and, according to others, Abraham marries Hagar after Sarah’s death and has many more children with her.
But we’re not there yet. At this point in the story, a younger woman has just birthed an energetic boy for the old couple who have been waiting for a son for decades. Initially, everybody is happy (Genesis 21:5-8). Then Sarah notices something about the kid’s behavior. The boundaries — or lack thereof — become blurry. The laughter of joy turns to mockery.
Now what? We can see Sarah’s struggle: It was her idea; no one told her to do that. Then again, she had no idea this is how things would turn out. All of a sudden, she realizes the magnitude of this one single event in their lives. She could lose her husband, she is going to lose her nearest female friend, and as for the child? He is not what she had in mind as an heir to the spiritual path they had carved so carefully. And he endangers her own son.
Sarah is telling Abraham to send the woman and the child away. We don’t know what he says, but we know “it’s very bad in his eyes” (Genesis 21:11). This is when God intervenes.
I’m not sure anymore if God’s intervention is a compliment to Sarah. Is she that weak that she needs God to step in between her and her husband? Or is she so powerful that she has such an ally?
Abraham is going to get up “early” one more time: when he is instructed to take “his son, his one and only, the one he loves, Isaac, and … offer him as a sacrifice” (Genesis 22:2). Was that also part of the “everything” Sarah told him to do and he followed as commanded, or did she not know of the upcoming precarious journey of her husband and son, which she might have objected to?
The greatness of the story is not only in the written words, but in the space between them, and in our ability to learn from it and relate it to our own life, still today.
Michal Kohane is the director of the Israel Center of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. She has served in leadership roles throughout Northern California and holds advanced degrees in studies of Israel, psychology and education. She can be reached at [email protected].