The Primal Trauma of the Jewish People
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This Dvar Torah was written by Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin, the co-founder/co-director of Wisdom Without Walls: an online salon for Jewish ideas. His most recent book is Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer (CCAR Press). He invites everyone to Wisdom Without Walls’ next conversation – “Forbidden: A 3,000-Year-Old History of Jews and the Pig.” Wednesday, November 19 at 7 pm. wisdomwithoutwalls.org/jordan-rosenblum
An Israeli friend and teacher tells the following story: He was about to make a sandwich for his young daughter – using a well-known luncheon meat.
When he told her what he would be serving her, she asked him: “What’s a post-trauma sandwich?”
You get it, of course. Israelis, even young children, know what it means to live in a post-trauma time.
So, let’s talk about post-trauma.
Jews have been living that way since the very beginning.
It was on the morning when Isaac awoke and sensed something was different.
The camp was too still, the air too empty. Someone was missing.
He asked his father, and Abraham said nothing. He asked his mother, and Sarah said nothing. He asked the servants, who only pointed into the desert.
And in that moment, Isaac understood. Hagar and Ishmael were gone.
“Where?” he asked.
“To Beer-lahai-ro’i,” one servant whispered.
Isaac had heard of that place. He knew the story.
Even before Isaac was even born, his family was already haunted by pain.
Abram and Sarai — soon to be Abraham and Sarah — were childless.
In desperation, Sarai gave her Egyptian handmaid, Hagar, to Abram, that he might have a child through her.
When Hagar conceived, Sarai’s pain hardened into jealousy. She mistreated Hagar so severely that the young woman fled into the wilderness.
An angel appeared to her and asked two of the most fundamental questions ever uttered in Torah: “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
Those are the questions that every generation of Jews has asked: Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going?
The angel tells Hagar to return home, and to name her child Ishmael — “God hears.”
Hagar then names God El-ro’I — “the God who sees me.”
She becomes the only person in all of Torah to give God a name.
The place where she encounters God is called Beer – lahai - ro’I — “the well of the Living One who sees me.”
Even, and especially, in the wilderness, God sees. To quote the modern cliché: Hagar feels seen.
Years later, in Genesis 21, Sarah gives birth to Isaac — Yitzchak, “he will laugh.”
During the celebration for Isaac’s weaning, Sarah sees Ishmael “metzachek” — playing or mocking, what young kids often do.
Sarah demands that Abraham cast Hagar and her son into the wilderness.
Abraham hesitates, but God tells him to listen to her voice. And so, with a heavy heart, he gives them bread and a skin of water and sends them away.
When the water runs out, Hagar places her child under a bush and walks away. She cannot watch him die.
Hagar weeps — and heaven hears.
“Do not fear,” says the voice of the angel, “for God has heard the boy’s cry.”
Her eyes open, and she sees a well. Ishmael lives. He will go on to father twelve tribes, long before Jacob ever does.
Perhaps that is when Isaac begins to understand that blessing should not be a zero-sum game.
So, when Abraham later leads him up Mount Moriah, Isaac says nothing.
Perhaps he already knows that this family has a pattern: that sometimes the beloved must be bound, and sometimes the forgotten must be exiled.
Isaac survives, but he carries the silence with him.
Later, the Torah tells us something curious: “Isaac had just come back from the vicinity of Beer – lahai - ro’i.” (Genesis 24:62).
Why was he in that that place?
Rashi, the great medieval commentator, quoting the midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 60:14), suggests that Isaac went there to bring Hagar back to Abraham — to mend the family fracture.
Ramban (Nachmanides), the medieval mystical commentator, suggest that it was his place of prayer.
Either way, Isaac returns to the place of the wound. He does not erase it.
Genesis 25: 11 - Vayeshev Yitzchak im Beer-lahai-ro’I, which JPS translates: “And Isaac settled near Beer-lahai-roi.”
But there is a better translation: “Isaac lived with Beer-lahai-Roi.”
He lives with all that that place implies: exile and reconciliation, sorrow and sight.
He cannot fix what was broken, but he can live in relationship with it.
We are the descendants of Isaac, who lived with the awareness that his family’s story was marked by pain, a people that remembers both laughter and loss, and yet, resilience sustains us.
This Shabbat Vayera, we hear the call: Go to your own Beer-lahai-ro’i. Go to the place of rupture and turn it into a place of prayer.
Seek out the ones who were cast out of your own life — the friend, the sibling, the stranger — and let them know they are still seen.
Because to live as a Jew is to believe that God still hears the cries in the wilderness—and that we, God’s partners, must listen too.
