Hillel Hayom

Reflections

Rabbi Danielle Stillman

Passover is here, and we are halfway through the spring semester. As with most years, there is so much activity going on that it seems we barely look up, and then suddenly we are preparing for our campus seder, and the last Shabbat when we celebrate our seniors is just around the corner. There is even evidence of spring pushing up through the ground!

What have we been so busy with this year in Jewish Life? Learning, teaching, and traveling. This past fall semester I taught a curriculum from Hillel International called “Kol Yisrael: Home and Homeland.” Students and I met once a week to read and discuss sources related to the relationship between American Jews and Israel, to patriotism and Zionism and Jewish values. For winter term and into the spring, we shifted gears to a four-week workshop on Shabbat, “Shabbat for the Moment.” In this workshop students took in sources on the meaning of Shabbat, rest, and hospitality. They learned the background and function of Shabbat rituals that are traditionally done in the home on Friday evenings—the same ones we do on campus at Middlebury Hillel. They then hosted a lively Shabbat for other students with special attention to creating a beautiful and welcoming atmosphere and explaining the customs that many of us do each week without fully knowing why. The welcome they created at Shabbat, the open discourse about Israel and the Diaspora—all of this has infused the Hillel with a spirit of curiosity and exploration this year. Meanwhile, our four liturgy fellows have been meeting on Sunday mornings to gain background in the ways and meanings of the Friday evening Shabbat service as they sharpen their skills for leading Jewish prayer.

Over winter term, a group of Jewish and non-Jewish students headed off to Berlin and Warsaw for Professor Robert Schine’s class Confronting the Jewish Past: A Tale of Two Cities. Aaron Cohen ’25 gives us a taste of the weighty experience of traveling to Eastern Europe for this class in his reflection piece below. We will be screening the Oscar-winning film A Real Pain later this month in honor of Yom HaShoah—a way for these discussions about the Holocaust and memory in Poland and elsewhere to continue.

I have also been teaching and traveling this spring semester. In a team-taught course called Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, we brought 16 students to Ireland over spring break. We heard firsthand the many narratives and experiences in the Troubles from people with different identities, and we considered the benefits and costs of the peace process there. 

So many students are engaged in extracurricular learning—taking one of these Hillel classes or workshops, going to lectures, discussing an unassigned book together, leading prayer or ritual. The learning helps create and enhance our Jewish communal life on campus, and it is something they will take with them into the wider Jewish world.

Finally, in this issue we are sharing High Holiday sermons from this past fall. Hillel copresident Evie Happel ’26 shares her thoughts on the story of Sarah and Hagar through a feminist lens. My sermon focuses on Jewish teachings and practices that help remind us that we can always access more light, even at dark times when it may feel hidden. Both sermons remain relevant to our moment, even as we are midway through the Jewish year. 

May this Passover reveal the light of liberation for all of you, the promise of spring that comes with dipping parsley in salt water and watching a crocus push through the ground. May our remembering of our past, whether it is the Exodus from Egypt or the reckoning with the atrocities of the Holocaust, inform our present and future in ways that lead toward liberation for all people. A zissen Pesach—a sweet Passover—to all of you.

Reflection from Aaron Cohen ’25 on Confronting the Jewish Past: A Tale of Two Cities, a Winter Term Class

This January, I was fortunate to join Professor Robert Schine and a small group of students on an academic tour of Jewish history in Europe as part of the class Confronting the Jewish Past: A Tale of Two Cities. For a week in Germany, then a week in Poland, we met with journalists, museum curators, and other experts, and visited the many sites of Jewish flourishing and suffering.

This was more than a Holocaust history course. Yes, we pored over Hitler’s rise to power, the ensuing Nazi occupation of Poland, and the systematic killing of some of our ancestors, but we also took special interest in the ways life has marched on in the intervening years. How have the nations complicit in a genocide addressed their actions? How has Jewish life prevailed? We began with a wide lens. In the week leading up to the trip, we examined closely the act of remembrance. Our first assignment was simple: find a monument. And so we set out about Middlebury, searching out plaques or hunks of stone we’d passed countless times but never paused to consider. The goal was to better understand the ways we capture and memorialize the past, how we preserve significant moments and drag them along with us into the present. When we gathered to share what we’d discovered, the rich history of our little New England town came to life. Middlebury, we found, is full of reminders of the past, each one carefully designed and placed to convey a particular message.

Upon arriving in Berlin, we were handed an identical assignment. I settled on an understated group of statues just off a main street: a memorial for the Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943. Etched into brown stone were the defiant figures of German women demanding—and ultimately securing—the release of their Jewish husbands from detainment. In this small park, the artwork stood as a reminder of the rare and significant successes of resistance movements within Nazi Germany. 

The rest of the class fanned out across Berlin to investigate monuments of their choosing: statues of Jewish children boarding one-way trains, the very first memorial to “those persecuted by National Socialists,” and even the 1936 Olympic Stadium—the centerpiece of Hitler’s global propaganda campaign. To erect or preserve any of these monuments is a deliberate choice, and we spent much of the trip discussing the motivations behind these choices.

In Poland we continued our study and began exploring the subjects of responsibility and guilt. To this day, the question of Polish complicity in the Holocaust is hotly debated. Historians like Jan Gross, famous for his reporting on the horrors committed against Jews by Poles, continue to be harshly criticized by those eager to place the burden of guilt entirely upon Germany. In many cases Polish citizens had been given no choice but to comply with the occupying Nazi forces, but the fact of overwhelming Polish cooperation with the extermination of Jews suggests some level of shared responsibility. We witnessed evidence of this historical controversy all across the landscape, most notably in the fine print of plaques and signs that attributed every atrocity to Germany.

But while issues of guilt can be debated, physical remnants of this ugly history cannot. The concentration camp Majdanek, an eerily short drive from downtown Lublin, stands as a indisputable fact, a monument to the tens of thousands of people murdered within its fences. The grounds are immaculate and thoroughly preserved, the scenes of suffering and death readily conjured. Inside, you are transported, immersed, forced to consider the reality of persecution—only to glance up and notice a neat row of suburban homes pressed up against the perimeter of the camp. To me, this image was a perfect summation of all we had studied and witnessed: the seamless integration of a horrifying past within an entirely transformed modern landscape. It displayed the competing forces, the old and new, the challenge of moving forward without moving on.

And as I took this all in, I was deeply grateful for the guidance of Professor Schine, whose wealth of knowledge on the historical and philosophical context proved invaluable. This course not only taught me more than I believed one could learn in a month but also moved me, deeply. It helped me understand the weight of history, how delicately one must handle the facts of a bygone world—and how we, as Jews, as people, must make every effort to learn and retell history as it happened.

Finding Light in Hidden Places: Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon, 2024                 

2024/5785                  
Rabbi Danielle Stillman

Shana tova. It is truly good to see everyone gathered here tonight, on the cusp of another New Year, in community, together.

Tonight, I want to speak about light, but to do that this year, we need to begin with darkness.

Ma’ariv, the evening service that we are praying our way through right now, is my favorite of the three daily prayer services in Judaism. It has a kind of Goldilocks appeal—not as long as Shacharit, the morning service, beautiful as that is, and not as short as Mincha, the afternoon service, which is mainly the Amidah. At Ma’ariv, as the name implies, we welcome the erev—the evening, acknowledging that the light of the day is waning, that it will be dark soon. And because this disappearance of the light is scary for us, we remind ourselves with the Ma’ariv prayers that it is a daily, natural thing—part of the rhythm that G-d created in the beginning—and we pray for protection and safety through the night. I think this speaks to me because the evening light can be so beautiful—especially here in Middlebury, with the mountains turning purple and the tops of the trees lit as if on fire. It always feels like a sacred time, to be bathed in that glow—and it then feels especially poignant when the shadows overtake the light. Perhaps we feel it even more this time of year, when the days end so noticeably earlier, when our routines are just adjusting to a growing darkness. I love that there is a prayer time right then, allowing us to acknowledge this liminal moment between the day and the night, as light and dark mix together. Our ancestors clearly felt some trepidation around the impending dark.

As Jews we are accustomed to speaking about light primarily at Hanukkah, a time of physical darkness when we humans successively bring more light into the world each night. As the world around us creeps toward more darkness with the waning of the moon, we light another candle each day for over a week, ending on the darkest night of the month, in the darkest part of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, with the brightest candlelight.

But what about the times when the darkness is not just from the natural world around us? When there is a spiritual or human-made darkness that pervades our world and threatens to overcome light? Where can we find light, even at the times when it is hidden from sight? 

Light has always been the special purview of the divine in Judaism, a tool G-d uses to create and sustain the world. We read this in Genesis, the creation story of the world, whose creation we celebrate on Rosh Hashanah:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃” 

When God began to create heaven and earth— 

וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃ 

the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water— 

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃ 

God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 

וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָא֖וֹר כִּי־ט֑וֹב וַיַּבְדֵּ֣ל אֱלֹהִ֔ים בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ׃ 

God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

This light was part of a fundamental act of organization and therefore creation—forming meaning out of chaos, making sense of the world by separating light from dark. In our prayer service each morning we recall this act of creation. Following the barechu we say, “Yotzer or uborei choshech, oseh shalom uborei et hakol.” (“Blessed are you Adonai, ruler of time and space, forming light and creating darkness, making peace while creating all.”) We remind ourselves that this act of creation is renewed every day at dawn, and that both light and dark were created by G-d.

In another accounting of creation, the great mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as the Ari, elaborates on what happened in this moment of G-d creating light, in the story of the shattering of the vessels, or shevirat hakelim. A scholar of Jewish stories, Howard Schwartz, retells this story beautifully in a 2011 article from Tikkun magazine. He writes (and the masculine G-d language is his),

“At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring this world into being, to make room for creation, He first drew in His breath, contracting Himself. From that contraction darkness was created. And when God said, ‘Let there be light’ (Gen. 1:3), the light that came into being filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.

In this way God sent forth those ten vessels, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. Had they all arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But the vessels were too fragile to contain such a powerful, divine light. They broke open, split asunder, and all the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars.” 

Schwartz goes on to write about the nature of this light that was scattered:

“The light inside the vessels that shattered has a whole rabbinic history in itself.

It finds its source in a beautiful midrash about the light created on the first day. Here the ancient rabbis noticed an apparent contradiction between Genesis 1:3, where God says, ‘Let there be light,’ and the fourth day of creation, when God created the sun, the moon, and the stars (Gen. 1:16-18). If God did not create the sun until the fourth day, they asked, what was the light of the first day? The rabbis identified it as a primordial light, and there is much rabbinic speculation about where it came from. Some describe it as the light of paradise, while others say it was created when God wrapped Himself in a garment of light, as found in Psalms 104:2.

What happened to this light? God withdrew it from the world, and it became known as the or ha-ganuz, the hidden light. Some say it was taken back into paradise when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. The Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism, dating from the thirteenth century, says that this light was hidden in the Torah, and that whenever anyone studies the Torah with great concentration, a ray of that primordial light will come forth and enlighten them.”

There is a lot going on in this story. To start, I want to focus on the idea of the primordial light. What are its characteristics? In the midrash Bereshit Rabbah we learn, “Rabbi Yehudah son of Rabbi Simon said: ‘The light that the Holy Blessed One created on the first day, a person could see with it from one end of the universe to the other…’” Have you ever been on the summit of a mountain and able to turn slowly for a 360-degree view? There is a sense of vastness and perspective that we can’t experience from the ground. I imagine the power of this light allowing a person to see everything, to have a much larger and clearer perspective than we normally have access to. 

We learn in the same midrash, which brings together a number of verses from the Hebrew Bible that mention light, that this primordial light was so special, and the day of rest was so special, that G-d allowed it to remain during the first Shabbat.

“When the sun set on Shabbat eve, the Holy One blessed be He sought to put away the [primordial] light, but He accorded honor to Shabbat. …That is what is written: ‘God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it’—He blessed it with light. When the sun set on Shabbat eve the [primordial] light continued to function. … Because ‘His light is to the ends of the earth.’… It is as it is stated: ‘But the path of the righteous is like a dawning light, growing brighter until the day is established.’ … Light emerged from them and he recited a blessing over it. That is what is written: ‘Night for me is light.’ What blessing did he recite over it? [Blessed be God] Who creates the lights of fire (borei m’orai ha esh).”

So now we also know that this light remained during Shabbat, although it did not affect the rhythms of light and darkness in the natural world. The sun still set on Friday night. And we know that light played a role in the designation of Shabbat, the separation of it from the rest of the week. G-d blesses Shabbat with light, much as we light and bless the candles that signal the beginning of Shabbat, and G-d recites the same blessing over the light that we use to bless the Havdalah candle at the end of Shabbat, “borei m’orai ha esh.”

With such a strong, foundational light pervading the world, how is it that this light can come to be hidden? Bereshit Rabbah goes on to say this:

“Once God saw the perverse actions of the people of the generation of the flood and the generation of the dispersion, God got up and hid [this light] and reserved it for the righteous in the future. … As it says, ‘And [God] withheld from the wicked their light, and the haughty arm shall be broken.’” 

The story that Howard Schwartz refers to pins the hiding of the light on Adam and Eve eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What both that story and the midrash have in common is a human action of straying from G-d’s ways or acting perversely that causes G-d to hide the primordial light from view. But this same midrash from Bereshit Rabbah on withholding the light from the wicked also points to how we can uncover or retrieve or increase that light.

“And from where do we know that [God] reserved it for the righteous in the future? … As it says, ‘And the path of the righteous is like a glowing light, that grows and shines until the arrival of day.’”

There is a sense in these texts that people who act righteously have more access to, and therefore increase, the primordial light in the world. Their acts themselves might be the light. 

A few more texts that relate to this idea of light describe a path or method about how we can increase our own access to primordial light in the world today. When this light feels so hidden by the wrong actions of humans, how can we create the conditions to uncover it and let it light our way?

First, I think we need to become aware of the existence of this underlying light in the universe and remind ourselves that it is there. Here are some examples from Jewish ritual of how we can do that. In our morning service, before we even begin to pray, many people follow the tradition of wearing a tallit, or prayer shawl. As we prepare to put it on, we say a blessing over the act of wearing tzit-tzit, the fringes on the four corners of the shawl. It is also in our liturgy to think about the tallit as similar to the garment of light that G-d wraps G-d’s self in, reciting the phrase about G-d: “You are robed in glory and majesty, / wrapping Yourself in light as in a garment, / spreading forth the heavens like a curtain.”

We also say, “Just as I wrap my body in a tallit, so may my soul wrap itself in the light of Your [God’s] presence” (Machzor Lev Shalem, 34).

By both remembering that G-d used the primordial light to wrap G-d’s self, and then noting that our wrapping in a tallit is an imitation of this and therefore wraps us in G-d’s presence which is light, we physically and verbally enact a moment of connection with this primordial light. Perhaps daily prayer and wearing a tallit are not in your practice, but I find just imagining myself wrapped in a garment of light to be a powerful reminder of light in the world.

As we saw earlier, the act of lighting candles for Shabbat, Havdalah, and Holidays can also become moments of connecting with this light. In the rabbinic law and its Medieval codification, lighting Shabbat candles is not an optional act. We are commanded to bring light into the world through this mitzvah, even when it is not easy. In the Babylonian Talmud’s tractate Shabbat 23b:3 we read,

“When a person is poor and must choose between purchasing oil to light a Shabbat lamp for his home or purchasing oil to light a Hanukkah lamp, the Shabbat lamp for his home takes precedence. … That is due to peace in his home; without the light of that lamp, his family would be sitting and eating their meal in the dark. … Similarly, if there is a conflict between acquiring oil to light a lamp for his home and wine for the sanctification (Kiddush) of Shabbat day, the lamp for his home takes precedence due to peace in his home.”

Maimonides reiterates this in his legal text, the Mishneh Torah, where he writes,

“The lighting of Sabbath lights is not of free choice, to light or not to light as one chooses, nor is it the kind of religious performance that an individual is not called upon to make a special effort. … Even if one has nothing to eat, let him go begging at the doors, buy oil, and light a lamp, forming an integral part of Sabbath delight.”

I am struck by the force of this commandment to light the Shabbat candles. Making Kiddush and eating a Shabbat meal and lighting Hanukkah candles are all commandments as well, but we see here a hierarchy where Shabbat candle lighting comes first. Perhaps it is for the sake of Shalom bayit (peace in the home), which is not just a lack of strife but a general positive and comfortable atmosphere in the home. But I think that the act of lighting the candles is important here too. Kindling candles at the beginning of Shabbat reminds us of that primordial light that continued to shine on the first Shabbat of creation. G-d blessed Shabbat with that primordial light, just as we bless it when we light the candles. With this act, we are not just bringing the small flames of candlelight into the world, but also the luminous light of creation. The light that widens our perspectives so much that we can see from one end of the world to another. We can truly see in this light, and with the lighting of the Shabbat candles we can remind ourselves each week that the light, often hidden from view, still exists.

Remembering the primordial light is no small thing. It requires slowing down, even stopping to engage in these ritual reminders that Judaism offers us—or in any reminder that might work for you. It may require taking note of beautiful and kind things you see happening in the world around you. It may require going out of your way to ritually produce light in order to remind yourself to look for the metaphorical moments of light. The first step is to remember, notice, and uncover the light that underlies everything, but is often hidden from us; hard to see.

Another idea related to this light is that we ourselves can increase it if we engage in deeds of righteousness. “Deeds of righteousness,” or Tzedek, sounds pretty lofty and self-aggrandizing, so let’s just call it “being a good person,” or “acts of loving kindness and compassion,” or “acts of doing the right thing in the world.”

Again, in this same essay I quoted from earlier, Howard Schwartz writes about the original act of tikkun olam, or repairing the world. We think of this as related to social justice, but the original meaning was literally to return the sparks of light that were scattered in order that the shattered vessels could be repaired. He writes,

“That is why we were created—to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden. God created the world so that the descendants of Jacob could raise up the holy sparks. That is why there have been so many exiles—to release the holy sparks from the servitude of captivity. In this way the Jewish people will sift all the holy sparks from the four corners of the earth.

And when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the broken vessels will be restored, and tikkun olam, the repair of the world, awaited so long, will finally be complete. Therefore it should be the aim of everyone to raise these sparks from wherever they are imprisoned and to elevate them to holiness by the power of their soul.”

Human beings are called upon to be active in returning these sparks to their vessels through a process called tikkun olam, a process of finding and raising up sparks of light. We are partners with G-d in this divine repair. And as we repair the earth which is our realm, the heavens or divine realm will also experience repair. 

So in this dark time, when the light often seems to be hidden from view, I want to offer some questions we can take with us into the New Year. 

Where can you see the light hidden and how will you reveal it? 

How will you remind yourself of this light when everything seems dark? 

Can you try to see other humans in the fullness of the primordial light, allowing you to see as far as one end of the world to the other, to take in each other’s full stories and humanity?

How will you increase light in the world and be part of raising the sparks and repairing the broken vessels?

Working with the primordial light in these ways is no small task—in fact, it is enormous. We should not undertake it alone, but rather help each other—becoming each other’s reminders of light. May we all merit to be uncoverers and increasers of light in the New Year.

Shana tova.

Student Rosh Hashanah Morning Sermon, 2024

Shana tova, everyone! 

My name is Evie Happel, Class of 2026, and I am currently serving as copresident of Middlebury Hillel. I feel so honored to have been asked to give the sermon today, as Rosh Hashanah is one of the most meaningful holidays to my own Jewish practice.

This is now my third round of High Holidays at Middlebury, and each year I have taken on a new purpose. In the past, I have been focused inward, understanding myself as I was, amidst the transition from high school to college, hometown to new home, dependence to independence. Or, I was writing myself resolutions for the new Jewish year, anywhere from “Drink more water” to “Let things go.” But, this year feels different. Perhaps it’s because I’ve taken on this large leadership role in the Jewish community; perhaps it’s because I’m at the point in college where the teenage self-centeredness wears off and I begin to try to find my place in the world; perhaps it’s because I’ve finally healed the emotional unrest that has kept me from feeling proud of who I was going into the New Year in the past. 

This year, internal reflection and renewal remain important to my practice. However, I see myself as part of something larger than what I’ve seen before. Since last Rosh Hashanah, there has been political tension on campus, heightened anxiety, burnout, and more. In the next month, we are preparing for one of the most important elections in American history. This Rosh Hashanah, I am asking, How can I be a part of this new beginning? As we celebrate the year past and think forward, how can we set this year apart from the rest? Why is this a New Year?   

If you know me personally, you’ll be completely unsurprised by where I turn for answers. If you don’t know me well, I offer you now a deeper part of myself, which I access when I feel disorder, uncertainty, fear, and doubt. 

Judaism has always been my main source of consolation. In the past two years, though, I have added to this a host of radical, liberatory thought, including feminist and queer studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, disability studies, and more. What these disciplines all have in common is their transformative nature. As we welcome in the new Jewish year, I turn to these for something transformative, something that will allow this New Year to be new.

There is a specific Torah chapter that we read on Rosh Hashanah day. Not a portion, but one chapter: Genesis, Chapter 21. In this chapter, the Lord grants Sarah the ability to have children. She joyfully bears Isaac and subsequently kicks her handmaid, Hagar, who bore Ishmael to Abraham when Sarah was barren, out of their home and into the wilderness. 

That’s a lot going on in just 34 verses. As we know, Ishmael, the son of Hagar and Abraham, goes on to be a father of Islam. There is such a fascinating representation of both female relationships and Israelite-Egyptian, or Israelite-Arab, relationships in this passage. In studying this chapter, I turned to Jewish feminist scholars and theologians. Why do we read this at the turn of the New Year? What can we learn from this that would bring us closer to peace, love, and the right for all to simply be? 

The answer is transformation and renewal. In Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holidays, author Ruth Behar argues that “the purpose of Sarah and Hagar is to awaken in the Jewish listener both the humility and courage to stand before the cold winds of self-scrutiny, an act essential to the spirit of the Days of Awe.” 

Additionally, Rabbi Amy Eilberg, the first woman to be ordained by the Conservative movement, wrote a 2012 piece for T’ruah, an organization with the slogan “the rabbinic call for human rights.” She also offers a feminist reading of the story of Sarah and Hagar, applying many key elements of modern feminist theory to Jewish text. She writes, “Reading the text through a feminist lens, we are pained by the way in which the two women, both of degraded status in their society because of their gender, turn on one another.  One can hardly blame the oppressed person for her anger, and of course, Sarah acted out of her own despair at her inability to validate her own worth, in traditional society, by bearing a child.” To explain her thoughts further, I have pulled from my knowledge of feminist studies as well as the text itself.

Feminism, explained briefly, is a way of thinking, a set of ethics for living, based on the emancipation of women and gender-queer folk from the patriarchy, a male-centered world, and heteronormativity, a world that values only those who can uphold the standards of a traditional male/female relationship and family. Abraham and Sarah were tasked with the continuation of their lineage; to have as many children as there are stars in the sky. Sarah, specifically, was named the honorable title “mother of nations.” However, when we come to realize that Sarah is too old to have children, her own purpose has been complicated. Here, the translation of text literally says Sarah “gave [Hagar] to her husband as concubine” (Genesis 16:3). What could have been a beautiful moment of nontraditional reproduction, family life, and deep connection is broken by power dynamics and expectations for women. Hagar is forced into the position of surrogacy, and, though the text does not explicitly say so, many interpretations believe that she held it highly over Sarah’s head. Rabbi Amy Eilberg writes, “When Hagar becomes pregnant, she responds with understandable, if unfortunate, human emotion, gloating over her own ability to conceive.” Overall, the status that Hagar has as a slave is leveled up when she can perform an expected female role, when she can give something to Abraham that Sarah cannot, while Sarah begins to be devalued. 

Then, once G-d grants Sarah the ability to have children, in this Chapter 21, Hagar becomes an ordinary slave again, and Sarah, perhaps because she no longer wants to think of her past degradation, throws Hagar and the child out. “Cast out that slave-woman and her son,” she says, “for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

This tension between women, I and many feminist scholars argue, comes not from their genuine dislike for each other, but from the expectations a patriarchal society places on them. Ruth Behar asks, “Might it not be possible that Sarah had hoped Hagar would feel for her as a woman?” Additionally, had Sarah been encouraged and free to embrace her womanhood, not in spite of but with acceptance of her age and reproductive abilities, she may have been able to see Hagar for their similarities rather than differences. Though there remains the power imbalance of slave to master, had Sarah lifted Hagar up, even and especially after Sarah was given the ability to conceive, what could have happened? Would Hagar have been thrown out? Would Ishmael and Isaac have grown up together? Would Jewish and Muslim communities have been more inclined to take care of each other? What about Israelis and Arabs?
Now, do not mistake me for blaming centuries of conflict and violence on one biblical story and the patriarchy. In fact, it is completely understandable that, under patriarchal terms, Sarah would feel insecure and be quick to act on one who has what she lacks, and Hagar would feel proud to have a status that her enslaver did not, however oppressive it may have been. But this is my point: pointing fingers is unproductive.

Instead, I posit, along with Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Robin D. G. Kelley, Paulo Freire, Nathaniel Norment, and so many other scholars of radical liberatory thought, that to lift any individual up out of oppression is to lift yourself out of oppression. To free one group is a step toward justice for all. How beautiful is it that we can share the earth with the descendents of Abraham, whether they be descendants of Isaac or descendants of Ishmael. How beautiful it is that life can be brought into the world. 
In this New Year, I encourage you to transform your perspective. Beginning with the feminist teachings of the Torah and this critical moment in the Jewish cycle, stand up for women’s reproductive rights and freedom, for women’s ability to chose to bring life into this world or to not; stand up against antisemitism, stand up against Islamophobia, stand up against violence, stand up for peace. If there are other people, other rights, other issues on your mind, stand up for them too. Stand up for our earth, stand up for our communities, stand up for life. If you feel like Sarah, use all your might to lift up Hagar. If you feel like Hagar, use all your might to lift up Sarah. 

If all you hear right now is a passionate college student, with idealistic dreams, who’s much too deep into liberal arts and critical theory, that’s OK. That’s what I am. I hope, though, that I can offer you some of my optimism. 

I wish you all strength in the New Year. To embody transformation. To be a part of creating something new, for yourself and for many generations to come. 

Thank you, and shana tova.