A Way Forward After Trauma

On the Rosh Hashanah Torah Readings

Elliot Cosgrove, (RS ’99) Rabbi, Park Avenue Synagogue (Manhattan), Author, For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today

In a year marked by trauma, war, and enmity, we approach the holiday season in search of a language of reconciliation. The story of our people’s first family, as told in the Rosh Hashanah Torah readings, provides the beginnings of a new vocabulary by which even the most intractable conflicts can begin to thaw.

The Torah reading on the first day of Rosh Hashanah relays the story of the birth of Isaac and the expulsion of Hagar and her son, Ishmael. Plucked from obscurity by God, Abraham and Sarah are commanded to give life to a people, be a blessing to all of humanity, and go to the Land of Canaan. But Sarah is barren; she can’t bear children. Who will receive the blessing? Who will inherit the land? The promise must be fulfilled, so Sarah finds a concubine for Abraham, Hagar, a woman whose name literally means “the stranger.” Hagar gives birth to a son, Ishmael, and—although everyone enters the arrangement with the best of intentions—the sting, for reasons all too human, is too much for Sarah to bear. Even after Sarah is eventually blessed with her own son, Isaac, the tensions mount. In Ishmael, Sarah sees both a physical and economic threat to her son; Ishmael’s continued existence presents a challenge to Isaac’s claim to the land. As for Hagar, she sees in Isaac the promise once destined for her son, Ishmael, slipping away. Things come to a head, and at Sarah’s behest, Hagar and Ishmael are banished from Abraham’s home—their lives saved by the intercession of a well-timed angel and the appearance of a life-giving well, in Hebrew, a be’er. There is no record of Abraham and Ishmael ever speaking again; their relationship, understandably, would never be the same.

The Torah reading on the second day of Rosh Hashanah relays a story no less traumatic—the tale of the binding of Isaac. The same Abraham who pleaded on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, who put himself on the line to save his nephew Lot, somehow sees fit to heed God’s command to set Isaac on the altar, a near-death experience again averted only by the intercession of another well-timed angel. Sarah was so horrified, the Rabbis explain, at her husband’s willingness to sacrifice their only son that she herself dies of heartache. So traumatized was Isaac by the whole experience that he never again spoke to his father. That angel may have saved Isaac’s life, but the relationship between father and son was sacrificed at the top of Mt. Moriah.

Given that Isaac and Ishmael go on to give life to two nations, one Jewish and one Arab, this telling cuts close to home—especially this year. Two brothers share a lineage and share a claim to a land. Two brothers are estranged from one another, estranged from their parents, and estranged from God’s promise. It is a tragedy of generations, filled with distrust, violence, heartache, and the hardening of hatreds, a tragedy whose ripple effects play out to this very day.

Bleak as our story is, the Rabbis offer a sliver of redemption and the possibility of reconciliation. As noted, following the trauma of Mt. Moriah, Abraham and Isaac never speak again. The father and son who went up the mountain together go down separately. Abraham returns to Be’er Sheva. But where did Isaac go? The answer comes shortly thereafter in the scene where Isaac meets his bride Rebecca: “And Isaac returned from Be’er-lahai-roi, for he had settled in the region of the Negev” (Gen. 24:62). “Where is Be’er-lahai-roi?” the Rabbis ask, “And what was Isaac doing there?” It was, according to the Midrash, the home of Hagar—that same well, that be’er, that saved Hagar when she almost perished. Why would Isaac—who no doubt suffered the posttraumatic effects of nearly being killed by his father and who was still mourning the death of his mother, Sarah—go to see Hagar, the woman whom, by a certain telling, he had every right to resent? Because, the Rabbis teach, Isaac wanted to reunite his stepmother, Hagar, with his father, Abraham.

It is an astonishing turn of events. The very thought that Isaac’s first act of personal agency in the wake of his own trauma was to reunite his father with Hagar. What courage it must have taken for Isaac to approach Hagar. Even more incredible is to consider Hagar. How brave it must have been for her not only to receive Isaac, but to follow him back. The hatred she must have had to wrestle, considering that from her perspective, it was Isaac’s birth that prompted her exile. But, according to the Rabbis, that is exactly what happened. After all those years, Hagar returns and remarries Abraham. Our broken first family becomes less broken. Despite all the trauma, bitterness, and pain, these people somehow get it together and find hope in the darkness.

History may not repeat itself, but biblical history does rhyme—at least for rabbis—especially when it comes to the eponymous forefathers of our present-day nations. We would do well to muster within ourselves, individually and as a people, a little bit of our forebearer Isaac. A survivor of trauma who, nevertheless, built a vocabulary for the future. Remember the hurt and hold the pain, and yet find a way to put one foot ahead of the other. It is not everything, it might not even be much of something, but maybe it is a place to start. And God knows, we are all in need of a place to start.

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