On the two days of Rosh Hashanah, Jews around the world read two different stories from the Book of Genesis. On the first day, we read about Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness. On the second, we read the Binding of Isaac. The stories are very different. The people are different. The circumstances are different. But there is one moment in each reading that I cannot stop thinking about.
On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Hagar has run out of water. She and Ishmael are alone in the wilderness. Believing that her son is going to die, Hagar places him beneath a bush and walks away. “Let me not see the death of the child,” she says. She sits at a distance and cries.
Then the Torah tells us:
The verse does not say that God suddenly created a well. It says that God opened her eyes and she saw it. The commentators make an extraordinary observation on these words. The sages teach us that all people are considered blind until God opens their eyes. The well could be there, the answer could be there, and still we might not be capable of seeing it.
Hagar is overwhelmed by what is directly in front of her. She sees an empty water skin. She sees a child she believes is dying. She sees a future that appears to have disappeared. God sees something else. Then He allows Hagar to see it too.
There is also something deeply human in the way God responds to her. Hagar has reached the point where she cannot even sit beside her own child. She moves away because she cannot bear to watch what she believes is coming. And yet God does not reject her in that moment. He hears Ishmael. He calls to Hagar. He tells her not to fear. He tells her to get up, take hold of her son, and continue. Then He opens her eyes.
The following morning in synagogue, we encounter another parent and another child. Abraham stands on Mount Moriah with Isaac. He has bound his son to the altar and raised the knife when an angel calls out and stops him.
Once again, the answer is there.
Jewish tradition goes even further. Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, an 11th-century Jewish scholar from France and one of the most important commentators on the Bible and Talmud), citing earlier rabbinic sources, says that this ram had actually been prepared for this purpose since the six days of Creation.
Hagar’s eyes had to be opened. Abraham had to lift his eyes.
Perhaps that is one of the messages hidden in the juxtaposition of these two Rosh Hashanah readings. Sometimes the greatest difficulty is not that God has abandoned us or that there is no path forward. Sometimes we simply cannot see it yet. Rosh Hashanah is filled with moments when we cannot see very far ahead. We enter a new year not knowing what it will contain. We pray for life, health, livelihood, peace, and blessing without knowing what the coming months will actually bring. Hagar reminds us that despair can narrow our field of vision until all we can see is what is going wrong. Abraham reminds us to lift our eyes. Neither story suggests that the danger was imaginary. Hagar really had run out of water. Abraham really stood with his son bound before him. Faith does not require pretending that frightening circumstances are not frightening. Rather, we are meant to leave room for the possibility that what we see is not everything that is there.
In fact, there may already be a well. There may already be a ram.
Sometimes the prayer we need at the beginning of a new year is simply this: God, open our eyes.
