The Sins of Abraham and Sarah
And What the Torah Demands We Learn From Them
This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re working our way through Genesis these days.
TW: Sexual Abuse
People often refer to Abraham’s audacious voice in the Sodom story to laud his bravery, to hold him up as a role model for the fact that we can all challenge God, and to talk about the importance of tempering our lofty ideals with mercy. That’s real. Abraham merits that.
And yet. Abraham has the opportunity to do this very same thing at other times at critical junctures in his life, and he fails, utterly.
Before we explore that, however, some backstory on Sarah and Hagar.
Sarah was Abraham’s wife; she had traveled alongside with him from Ur, leaving behind her own home, her own kinfolk, to follow her husband to the land of Canaan.
After they are there for some time, however, Abraham and Sarah are forced to journey to Egypt because of famine in Canaan—a foreshadowing of the later story of Joseph and his brothers.
As they’re on their way, Abraham asks Sarah to tell those in power in the Egyptian court that she is his sister, not his wife; he's afraid that Pharaoh would kill him in order to have access to her. So, instead, he chooses to offer his wife to the man in power.
Imagine the betrayal, here.
Sarah’s consent, here, is fuzzy at absolute best; women in the ancient Near East had very few options without patriarchal protection, and Sarah has already left both her homeland and her adopted home by the time she is on the road to Egypt. As a vulnerable stranger with only her husband to rely upon, she was not in the best position to refuse his decision to send her to Pharaoh’s bed.
She is, in this chapter of Torah, given no lines to speak, no voice. She rendered only in passive, objectified ways. Pharaoh’s courtiers “saw how beautiful she was”, she “was taken,” into Pharaoh’s palace, because of her “it went well” (Genesis 12:15-16) for Abraham. She does not say or do; she is silent. She is acted upon.
God, displeased, apparently, with this sexual abuse, plagues Pharaoh with great afflictions. Pharaoh, angry as he uncovers Abraham’s deceit, sends the couple out of Egypt, and they take the wealth they have accumulated with them in their exodus. (Genesis 12:17-20) Once again, we see that the Torah here is not terribly subtle in its foreshadowing of the Exodus story—Plagues! Getting sent out! Taking spoils! Though, notably, the enslavement of this story is of a sexual kind.
Abraham’s betrayal and Sarah’s experience, here, drives home the force of a story that takes place a few chapters later. Sarah, we learn, is unable to conceive, so she “gives” Hagar, an enslaved woman in her household, to Abraham as reproductive chattel. If he is sexual with Hagar, she suggests, perhaps she and Abraham will have a child “through her.” (Genesis 16:2-3)
Hagar is the non-citizen. Even her name is a wordplay on her outsider status, as the Hebrew for “the stranger” or “the non-citizen” is ha-ger—spelled the same way as her name in an alphabet (without vowels, which weren’t included in ancient Hebrew). Her national identity marks her—Hagar the Egyptian, Torah calls her.
We don’t know her backstory, but we do know that she has come to be enslaved; while the Torah says that she became Abraham’s wife, there’s no indication that she consented to coition and pregnancy, that she had any alternative but to be “taken” into reproductive servitude. Like Sarah in Egypt, she is not recorded as speaking as arrangements are being made for her to enter her enslaver’s bed.
And, then, she is cast out when she poses a threat to privilege.
For, when Hagar became pregnant, Sarah grew jealous and “afflicted her” (Genesis 16:6)—in Hebrew, it’s the same verb that is used in the beginning of the Exodus story (Exodus 1:11-12) to explain the oppression by the Egyptians of the Israelites. These parallels and allusions to the Exodus are right up on the surface; in the story of Sarah and Pharaoh, the Egyptian mistreats the Israelite. In the Hagar story, the Israelite oppresses the Egyptian.
The Torah doubles-down on siding with Hagar. After she’s expelled from Abraham and Sarah’s home, she has an encounter with an angel and ultimately gives God one of God’s names. (Genesis 16:13) She's the only woman in the Torah who does so. Ishmael, both in utero and, when she is expelled from Abraham and Sarah’s house a second time, later, gets blessed.
Hagar, the Torah tells us, is OK. She didn't do anything wrong.
Hagar. Hager, the stranger, as in
“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:34)
and
“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20)
All those verses later on in Torah about our obligation to care for the non-citizen speak of hager, the stranger. Because we too were gerim—strangers—in Egypt.
Again, it’s not subtle.
It’s as though the Torah is telling us:
"Sarah didn’t learn from her own experiences of exploitation—on the contrary, she then harmed another woman in almost the exact same way when she gained some power.
The mere fact of experiencing oppression is sometimes insufficient for providing the necessary empathy for others.
So, then, after the entire Israelite people endure profound oppression, we will have to spell out very clearly that harming others is unacceptable.
Just in case suffering does not open you to empathy, to understanding of your obligation to care for vulnerable people, to the importance of wielding power responsibly, it will be made very, very explicit.”
As a result, the Torah commands us at least thirty-six times—thirty-six! More than any commandment in the Torah--to love, care for, celebrate with, and treat-as-equals hager, the stranger/non-citizen who resides among us.
That's our job. To care for the vulnerable who came to us because home wasn't viable anymore.
Sarah wasn’t cared for when she was a stranger.
Neither was Hagar, or the Israelites under Pharaoh.
Our obligation now, however, is—should be—clear.
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This is a powerful reading. Thank you.
This line struck a chord with me especially in terms of the concepts of harm, healing, reparative and restorative justice, compassion and tshuva that I'll be taking with me into the month of Elul and the HHD season:
"The mere fact of experiencing oppression is sometimes insufficient for providing the necessary empathy for others."
While this is true certainly, and with the hopes of not being overly semantic and pedantic, I'd argue that there's another line to add here. Because sometimes - experiencing oppression isn't just insufficient, but can be a direct obstacle to showing the necessary empathy for others - most particularly when wounds go unhealed, without repair or even acknowledgement. There's that new adage "hurt people hurt people" and we see it played out over and over again with the highest of stakes all throughout human history and in the smallest or petty ways in our own lives and interpersonal relationships. From major wars to the retaliatory withholding of emotional support to our friends or loved ones we feel didn't give us enough support when it needed it (and 100s of other examples) it seems that far too often we humans respond to hurt, harm and trauma by inflicting hurt and harm upon others. Perhaps an additional reason we see this message repeated 36 times is that it's so hard to hear when our own wounds still ache.
Wounded animals become fiercely defensive and lash out and humans are no different. Was Sarah ever permitted to heal? Did anyone ever even acknowledge what she went through? How much did she internalize patriarchical notions that women's bodies belong to those in power? Did she, like so many other women in stories as old as the ability to storytell (I was thinking about Medea, and Lilith and Babayaga and more yesterday for unrelated reasons), get through what happened to her by making a vow that next time she would be the one in the position of power - no matter who she hurt along the way? Do we not see this ideal in so many of the stories we tell about what a "strong woman" looks like? Isn't she most of the time the badass who slays her enemies (and who frequently steps on the backs of other women to get to do so)?
As always I have more questions than answers - but how do we subvert this narrative and how do we get to a place where empathy isn't just something we are told 36 times we should have when we still haven't healed or repaired the harm? And of course - (again as Elul and Yom Kippur approach this is more present in my thoughts) how do we take steps to heal and repair the harm we ourselves have caused? Can we ask for "civility" or empathy from people who have suffered egregious harm at the hands of a government and society who has yet to even acknowledge, let alone repair that harm (looking at you America and our inability to even pass HR-40, let alone make even just a formal apology for slavery)? How long can we just sling injustices back and forth (looking at you Middle East, and others too of course that I have even less background on - but India/Pakistan, Ethiopia/Eritrea, The Balkans, Catholic/Protestant conflicts in Europe and the UK for centuries, England/Ireland - these really are just a few examples there's lots more) until we stop justifying them and start making peace from a place of empathy? How long will we tell stories with anti-heroes who we celebrate for the harm they do because we seem to place ruthlessness above compassion? How do we change the narrative to focus on repair rather than retaliation?
How have we done this in our own lives in countless tiny ways - I did this recently when I had sought help from one friend to help another friend dealing with grief and loss. I let my disappointment in them, honestly not for not helping, but for telling me they would help and then not following through and wasting a full day where I could have just done the thing myself if they had been direct and just said no (I literally told them to say no if they couldn't do it because there were others to ask and I respect that not everyone is always able to help - just don't jack me around). But they did - they said they would do a thing, didn't do it - got mad at me for reminding them to do it and wasted precious time before finally saying - "why can't you just do it?" And then a week later they asked me for help (on a thing I could have actually worked out) - and I just said no - pretty pissed off that they treated me the way they had before and then expected me to hop to when they needed a favor. I did do the thing that I had most wanted from them, to just say no straight up without wasting their time by saying yes when I had no intention of following through, but I did allow the hurt they had done to me (a small and petty one compared to my other examples - but my point is that this is both high stakes and low stakes) to cause me to refuse my empathy and help and I'm gonna have to unpack that.
Btw - this is all meant to be an addition to Rabbi's point - not a criticism of it - it is Rabbi Ruttenberg's previous articles and twitter threads and lectures etc on the topic of forgiveness, tshuva and apologies that inform most of these thoughts and questions rolling around in my brain.
Thanks as always for listening.
Sarah - she/hers
Rabbi, thank you for this reflection. It strikes me as remarkable that despite how patriarchal the redaction of Scripture was and the interpretative history is, God keeps managing to poke in these disruptions, if only we will listen! The call is always there to read more closely and spot how much we are, or have been, in the place of the stranger, however much those with privilege try to hide that (and I must very much recognise my own complicity with the hiding).