Of War, Terrorism and Other Family Disputes

On social media today, positions are hardening, tempers are flaring and friendships are ending over the tragic events in Israel and Gaza. A terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas, the political organization that controls the Gaza strip, has resulted in has resulted in unspeakable carnage, cold-blooded murder and victimization of innocent civilians, including taking of children as hostages. In retaliation, the Israeli government has promised a siege of Gaza, home to 2.2 million people, that would include shutting off the fresh water supply as well as electricity. An inexcusable act of genocidal terror is met with an unjustifiable threat of more genocide.

Piling on the wrongs has no chance of resulting in a right, but mention that at your own peril. War is hell.

The attack on Israel is said to have resulted in the most Jewish deaths in a single day since the Holocaust. That is beyond shocking, beyond reprehensible. As everyone knows, it is also the latest episode in a struggle that has lasted on-and-off for thousands of years in a tiny corner of the globe that cannot support the passions that are bound to it.

Last weekend, as I was trying to make some sense of the news, I came across an essay by Jonathan Sacks, the late theologian and author who served for many years as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. The essay is titled, “On Judaism and Islam.” It is part of volume 1 of Sacks’ series of reflections on Torah, collectively titled Covenant and Conversation.

The essay turns on three intriguing moments in the telling of the story of Abraham, the founding figure of both Judaism and Islam (Christianity attaches to Abraham via its Jewish roots).

The first incident is that when the servant who had been sent to secure a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac was returning with the young woman, Rebecca, she spotted Isaac, who had “returned from Be’er-lahai-ro’i.,” and was on his way to meditate. Be’er-lahai-ro’i was the place where Hagar, the slave who bore Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, was found by an angel when she fled during her pregnancy from abuse by Sarai. The angel directed her to return to her home with Abram and Sarai, promising her to “multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. This same angel instructed Hagar to name her son Ishmael, “because the Lord has listened to your affliction.” Hagar herself named the place of this encounter because it was the place where God saw her. Thus God both heard and saw this abused slave girl, who had been impregnated without her consent and then tormented for supposedly being ‘uppity’, and promised her a reward through her offspring.

The ancient site of Be'er-lahai-ro'i

Immediately following the episode introducing Isaac to Rebecca is the revelation that after Sarah’s death, Abraham married again, to a woman named Keturah, who bore him six children. We are given no details about Keturah, but we do get a genealogy of the next few generations of Abraham’s offspring through her children, and are told that when Abraham died, he left “all that he had” to Isaac, but that before his death, he had given gifts to “the sons of his concubines,” and sent them away from Isaac, “eastward to the east country.”

A video about Keturah

Finally, Sacks notes that the Torah tells us that when Abraham died – recounted immediately after the story of Keturah and her children -- his sons Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury him (nothing is said about whether his children by Keturah are there). But there’s a detail that Sacks did not note that adds intrigue: “After the death of Abraham, God blessed Isaac his son. And Isaac settled at Be’er-lahai-ro’I,” the very place where God’s angel encountered Hagar. And immediately after this statement, we are given the names of the sons of Ishmael, whom we are told are “twelve princes according to their tribes.”

The Burial of Abraham (1728) by Gerard Hoet

People familiar with the work of the ancient and medieval Midrashic Jewish scholars (the sages, in Sacks’s words) knows that they took the words of the Torah as a jumping-off point for their teachings. Where they saw gaps and discontinuities in the Bible’s narratives, they did not hesitate to jump in to fill those gaps. The narratives recounted above are not explicitly connected, although they occur in a short space in Genesis chapters 24-25; they are quite literally slammed together as in a collage. The sages provide the missing links that turn the collage into a cohesive picture.

The French scholar Rashi is the most prominent of several rabbis to consider these connections. The theory expounded by Rashi and his peers is that Keturah was in fact the same person as Hagar, who had been sent away with Ishmael to the Arabian peninsula. Noting that many figures in the Hebrew Bible have multiple names – Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah, Jacob was renamed Israel, Moses’s father-in-law is called Jethro, Reuel and several other names, Solomon was also called Jedediah – they say that Hagar was called Keturah because “her acts gave forth fragrance like incense (ketoret).”

In the sages’ telling, after Sarah’s death, Isaac engineered the reconciliation of Abraham with Hagar, renamed Keturah, bringing his far-flung family back into one whole.

Why is this relevant to this week’s events? For one thing, Jews trace their lineage back to Abraham through Isaac, while Muslims trace their lineage back through Ishmael. The sons’ appearance together at Abraham’s burial suggests reconciliation, further supported by the sages’ interpretation of the final years of the patriarch’s life.

Sacks finds in this an optimistic message for our times: “Yes, there was conflict and separation; but that was at the beginning, not the end. Between Judaism and Islam there can be friendship and mutual respect. Abraham loved both his sons, and was laid to rest by both. There is hope for the future in this story of the past.”

It will take more than hope to get us through the current strife. It will take hard work, difficult understanding, and a willingness to find new ways to look at age-old hostilities.

On Kindness to Strangers

Having immersed myself for the past several months in the judicial and political elements of Torah, I find it impossible to view certain current events without recalling imperatives and admonishments in the Bible.

This weekend has been full of horrors in the Middle East that recall millennia of hostilities among the people who call that part of the world their home – the Israelites and Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites and so many other nations that fought over these territories for reasons not terribly different from what we witness today.

But my thoughts recently have been more consumed by issues of immigration and refuge, which have reached a fevered intensity in the United States over the past several months. Politicians of all stripes agree that we are in the midst of an immigration crisis. Some call for closing of our borders, others for greater attention to the causes of migration from places like Haiti and Venezuela. What strikes me most is that few call for kindness to these strangers in our midst, one of the Bible’s most urgent and persistent commands.

My own community, Quincy, Massachusetts, last month saw a neo-Nazi rally targeted at an immigrant shelter at a local college, a counter-protest the next day, and a few days later a tumultuous town meeting at a school auditorium that brought out 500 or so residents, all determined to be heard and few interested in listening.

“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him,” God tells Moses in Exodus 22, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Strangers – also referred to as sojourners and resident aliens – are named over and over again, along with widows and orphans, as disadvantaged people to whom we should show generosity, sympathy and brotherhood. Often, God’s exhortations on this subject are framed in the notion that, as in the quote above, the condition of these strangers is akin to that of Israelites in the kingdom of Egypt.

But in a society that is quick to evoke the Ten Commandments as well as sexual and behavioral prohibitions named in the Torah, there is next to no acknowledgement of this requirement that we show kindness to strangers in our midst.

Instead, the mainstream effort appears to be centered on ensuring that these people get nowhere near us.

Hospitality to travellers has been a core value in the Middle East since time immemorial. The sin of Sodom was not, as is so often supposed, homosexual activity but rathe failure to of the Sodomites to show hospitality and respect to the angels whom Lot welcomed as strangers into his home.

How is it that we have lost track so thoroughly of this basic requirement from God, in a population that largely claims to be believers in that same God?

I’m not going to argue that the world hasn’t changed enormously in the three millennia since the Torah was set down on paper. The world is vastly more populated, as well as politically, economically and technologically more complex than that of the Biblical-era Israelites. But in human terms, we are largely the same as our long-ago ancestors. We live, die, scratch out a living, raise families, seek safety and shelter, provide for our children and our aging loved ones, and interact with those around us in ways very similar to those distant predecessors.

One of the reasons the Bible remains so central to our society is how shockingly familiar the emotional lives of the ancient Israelites are to our own. Reading about the rivalry between Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, Sarah and Hagar, we connect immediately to the conflicts in our own personal lives. Moses’s many frustrations with the people he is leading to freedom, as well as the skepticism and stubbornness of those people, are nearly identical to feelings we encounter today. Is anyone surprised that the first person born on Earth turns out to be the first murderer?

While I don’t take the Bible literally, I do find it useful to discuss it as if its stories are real. I do the same thing with other great literature. We continue to read Dickens, Eliot, Fitzgerald and the other great writers because there is so much resonance in our own lives with the experiences of their characters.

So in that spirit I want to suggest that the reason God finds it necessary to repeat over and over again the requirement of hospitable and generous behavior to strangers is exactly because it is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to most people. We hardly need reminders to do what we were going to do anyway. As Jesus put it near the opening of the earliest Gospel, “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17)

We need reminders to care for the needy – for the strangers, widows and orphans among us – because it is both easy and tempting to ignore them. They get in the way of our easy enjoyment of life. Historically, churches and government institutions have provided reminders. But we live in an age where some churchgoers complain that teaching the words of Jesus amount to liberal indoctrination. (see “Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus,” Newsweek, 9 August 2023). Meanness has overtaken charity in much of our discourse.

It is unlikely that public policy would ever reflect exactly the teaching of the Bible – and I would be the first to complain vociferously if it did so – but I believe that in the past it informed public policy in a way that has largely disappeared. Today, we fight to post crosses and the text of the Ten Commandments as a substitute for thoughtful consideration of the meanings of religious teachings.

The Bible is used as a weapon rather than as a guide. When that happens, there may be little room for kindness to strangers.