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| Photo: Lora Reehling |
Betsy Teutsch
Vayera covers a lot of territory. My focus today is on Vayera’s power dynamics and disparities, who is privileged and who
disadvantaged, in the relationship of
Sarah and Hagar, mistress and slave. The
Torah later celebrates the People of Israel’s liberation from harsh enslavement
as our foundational myth, but what we witness here is domestic bondage, more intimate
and nuanced, and not questioned - though
commentators have noted the connection between Hagar being an Egyptian and the
Jewish people’s subsequent enslavement in Egypt. 1 + 2 Since Abraham and Sarah are the parents of the Jewish people, we look
at things from their viewpoint.
Last week in Parshat Lekh Lekha, Sarah invited
Abraham to consort with her slave Hagar, to produce an heir for Abraham via
surrogacy. Sarah’s slave’s child will become Sarah’s child, problem solved;
Hagar seemingly has no agency in this transactional consorting. Hagar conceives
– succeeding where her mistress has failed. The relationship between mistress
and slave quickly goes south.
The conflict seems to
be about Hagar’s behavior towards Sarah, not Hagar’s relationship with Abraham;
the text implies little contact between Avraham and Hagar after the deed is
done – recall that he is indifferent to Sarah banishing her. (And indeed, most
slave-owning men did not need their wives to instruct them to consort with their
slave women.)
When Hagar asserts
herself and belittles her mistress, Sarah abuses Hagar--quite harshly--even
though giving Hagar to Abraham was Sarah’s plan. Sarah complains to her husband;
in a very histrionic ultimatum she insists he choose between her and the
son. Avraham is surprisingly passive,
given that in this week’s parshah he argues for the saving of Sodom and
Gomorrah’s innocents. He basically just shrugs “Whatever” and tells Sarah to do
what she thinks is necessary in this matter. Sarah’s harsh treatment of Hagar
causes her to flee. 2 An angel convinces Hagar to return, explicitly
instructing her to submit to Sarah’s mistreatment; in exchange Hagar’s is
promised that her son will head a great nation.
In Parshat Vayera, Isaac is born to Sarah –
a story familiar to us from Rosh Hashanah. When he grows, Sarah sees his
half-brother Ishmael playing with Isaac. Originally conceived to be her
surrogate son, she now views him as competition for her biological son Isaacs’
inheritance rights. Sarah once again tells Abraham to cast mother and son out,
and this time Abraham does so himself, albeit with some reluctance. Ishmael is
referred to as HaYeled, “the boy”, though the chronology of the story suggests
he is older. Hagar and Ishmael survive, but are permanently banished from the
Sarah-Abraham family.
These stories display a
complex of privileges conferred by class and gender; race may play a factor,
but it is unclear that Hagar, an Egyptian, is a slave due to racial factors.
Hagar enjoys a temporary stretch of being superior to her former superior – but
then she is thrown out of the system altogether. Hagar enters the canon in
large part because of her surprising and vexing assertion of her new-found
advantage. She is the paradigm of uppityness. While the text humanizes Hagar
and empathizes with her trials in the wilderness, it does not fault Sarah for treating
Hagar harshly; it simply tells the story. The jury is out as to whether the
tellers of the story think Hagar deserved punishment for not knowing her place
or if they think Sarah had it coming.
We all learn our place
in the world through constant – if unconscious—reinforcement, socialization,
and training. If we are in the majority, and/or in a privileged position, we
notice inequities less than if we are in a minority or non-privileged
situation. Occasionally there are moments when we become aware of disparities.
Here are a few from my relatively privileged life.
·
I am
around 4 years old. Our babysitter, a retired farmwife named Mrs. Peterson, is
taking care of me; my mother is off doing some volunteer work. Mrs. Peterson
takes me to her friend Winifred’s apartment where they and some other old
ladies play a card game called Canasta. I have never been in an apartment. Mrs.
Peterson tells them that my mum is working the Rummage Sale at the Jewish Temple.
They perk up and throw their cards on the table. “Jews’ rummage! Let’s
go.” My mother and her fellow Fargo
Hadassah volunteers are very surprised when I appear at the Rummage Sale.
·
I am 7 or
8. My older brother’s room has a funny postcard hanging on the door, “Genius At
Work”, with a lot of messy ink blotches printed on it. My sister and I have no
such funny postcard on our room. We get the message: Older Brother is a genius.
Clearly that is why he just sits at the table after dinner while we girls clear
the dishes.
·
I am in 4th
grade. Our cleaning lady, a kindly lady named Ruby Summerfeld, must have moved
or retired because when I come home for the midday meal – this is the 1950’s! - my mother is serving
lunch to a new cleaning lady. Mrs. Thorstensen weighs about 300 pounds; her
breathing is heavy and labored, and she is a bit scary. When I return to school,
I make absolutely sure to avoid making eye contact with her son Harlan, my
classmate.
·
David and
I live in an Upper West Side brownstone. Our neighbors, The Reverend and
Patricia Huntington, invite us to Sunday supper. I brief Patricia about our not
eating meat. She asks why not, and I explain we keep kosher. She recalls that
her grandparents, missionaries in Africa, often encountered people with food
taboos. She also mentions that her grandparents’ were very proud to always eat
whatever was served to them, even bull eyeballs. We admire a large oil painting
hanging in their living room and they fill us in on its provenance. “That’s a
scene from Huntington, Long Island – the town is named for some of our
ancestors.” We do not invite the
Huntingtons back – ever.
·
It is 30
years later. My cleaning person asks me to recommend a summer camp for her
daughters, whose uncle has offered to pay for them to attend. I am weirded out.
The only not-Jewish camp I know if is for Quaker hippies and I can’t imagine
her daughters socializing with the children of anyone I know. I mention the name of the camp, Dark Waters,
and – uncharacteristically for me - never ask her what happened.
·
Around the
same time we are invited to a brunch with physicians, executives in the
pharmaceutical industry and their highly-educated wives. In the course of
discussion I mention that SAT scores correlate to family income, a fact I had
recently learned and found compelling. I am roundly jumped upon. America is a meritocracy! I realize I have just committed
a major faux pas.
I was born white,
upper-middle class, Jewish, and female. Whiteness and upper-middle class status
are both unearned, privileged positions, nationally and even more so globally.
Being female is a relative disadvantage, though one can debate how much it is
over-ridden by being white and affluent. Jewish is a complex identity, often –
but not necessarily-- tied to class and racial privilege, since a majority of
Jews are white and financially comfortable, up there with Episcopalians. Of course we have a long history of
persecution and in some places in the world experience very real anti-Semitism,
but much ink has been spilled teasing out Jewishness from the other identities
we all integrate.
Beneficiaries of
unearned privileges typically do not notice them – a major point in the article
by Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack.
They are daily, ordinary experience. Likewise, people in the majority, in
whatever situation they are in, rarely notice minorities. Those in a position
of privilege are generally clueless about the experience of unprivileged
people. Even the Dali Lama confesses he didn’t give a thought to his mother
carrying him around on her shoulders for hours every day.
Being privileged
doesn’t mean you’re bad – people don’t choose privilege and more than people
chose poverty. They generally are born into it and insulated from thinking of
it as incredible luck like Ann Richardson, describing George W. Bush: “born on third base and
he thought he hit a triple.”
A lot of this
discussion is in the framing. When
FairTrade coffee was being introduced, I described the concept to our son
Zachary, always an advocate for social justice.
He responded, “Well, I guess the regular stuff is ‘unfair trade coffee’
“. Not surprisingly, the term Unfair
Trade Coffee has not caught on, nor has “unfairly advantaged” taken off as a
descriptor of those who enjoy unearned privilege. According to Rav SpellCheck,
“underprivileged” and “disadvantaged” are
words. “Overprivileged" and "overadvantaged" are not.
While beneficiaries of
unearned privilege may be blissfully unaware of it – a privilege in itself –people
who are unfairly discriminated against are well aware of it, enduring an
unending barrage of undermining actions 3, both subtle and crude. Masters
are often surprised to learn their slaves don’t love working for them and being
part of their family4. Sarah’s plan had been that Hagar would
gratefully hand Sarah the fruit of her womb and maybe be the baby’s wet nurse,
not claim motherhood, agency, and higher status. Sarah seems blindsided when
Hagar asserts herself and insults her; one can speculate that Hagar is
mirroring the way she herself has been treated by Sarah.
In our world,
privileges come in many forms. Here is a short list, and people could add many
more. Some members of our community, in fact, have put a lot of work and
thought into these issues. In addition to the major disparities of race and
gender, there is:
Heterosexual privilege: until recently, and still in most of the world,
same-sex couples cannot show off their wedding pictures in the office, talk
about their sweeties, and if they kiss their partner in public, they are
accused of promiscuity. These are just a
couple of the daily oppressions – there are thousands of them.
Native-born citizens have huge privileges not available to
immigrants – knowing the ropes, speaking the language, having the right forms. Unless, of course, you are a Native American.
Age is a large privilege, until it becomes a detriment. Younger children
are intensely aware of the privileges received by the bigger kids. This seems
to be plugged into our human nature. Birth order has enormous effects on lived
experience.
Education & Literacy confer privileges, and the more affluent you
are, the better the quality of education you have access to, along with the
length of time you spend being educated.
Military exemption privilege: since our military system is
“voluntary”, our safety and rights are defended by those who need jobs and the
potential benefits the military provides, in exchange for risking their lives
and having no control over where they are deployed.
Fame/Legacy privilege is pretty obvious. Hard work and achievement
matter in the United States, but name recognition gets you on short lists. Many
have made the observation that the truest form of affirmative action is legacy
admissions of mediocre students.
A few questions for
discussion:
1. Is Hagar a role model for resistance to oppression, or a cautionary
tale that resisters will be punished?
2. Share a time you were aware of your own unearned privilege, or your
lack of it.
3. Some of us here are activists on this issue: share ways people can
work for a fairer world.
4. Does acknowledging privilege demand that people give some of it up,
and is that even possible?
------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes: Thanks to Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer for bringing them to my
attention.
1 "Drive out this
slave woman and her son" - ["Drive out"
appears] thrice in the Bible: "Drive out this slave woman", "Drive
out the scoffer" (Proverbs 22:10), "When he
sends you free, it is finished - he will drive, yes, drive you out from here"
(Shemot 11:1) - Drive out this slave woman and her son, and then you will
have driven out the scoffer, and because Sara drove Hagar out of
her home, she was punished, and her descendents were enslaved and had to be
driven out of Egypt. (Baal Haturim, Bereishit 21:10)
2 All who
have been oppressed can also oppress.
Sarah our
mother oppressed her Egyptian maidservant Hagar. Sarah
was barren and she wanted a child. She gave Hagar, her Egyptian maidservant,
to Abraham as
a wife. When Hagar conceived and became pregnant Sarah grew lesser in her eyes.
So Sarah oppressed her and Hagar ran away, as it says:
"V'ta'aneiha Sarai v'tivrach
mipaneyha" (Genesis 16:6)
Pharaoh
the Egyptian oppressed our people when they dwelled in Egypt.
The
Israelites descended to Egypt and lived there….And the Egyptians treated us
harshly and oppressed us; they imposed hard labor on us as it says:
"Vayarei'u
otanu mamitzvrim va'y'anunu
va'yitnu aleinu avoda
kasha." (Deuteronomy 26:6)
This you
should never forget: the same word used for Hagar's oppression at the hands of
Sarah is used for the Israelites' oppression at the hands of the Egyptians.
Rabbi Tamara
Cohen, Mayan Haggadah (following on Nachmanides)
4 Masters
are often surprised to learn their slaves don’t love working for them and being
part of their family – Micah Weiss, Seder commentary
For Further Reading: Recommended by Dr. Andrea Jacobs:
From
the NYTimes (suggested by Sue Sussman)
What
‘White Privilege’ Really Means - GEORGE YANCY and NAOMI ZACK
