But Rebecca is a remarkable character. Isaac, let's face it, does not add much to the story of our people. He is the creme filling in the Abraham-Jacob sandwich. It is really Rebecca, not Isaac, who is the key player of that generation. She takes up the matter of our People's destiny and acts on it, just as Abraham did by leaving home, and as Jacob did by returning home.

God, perhaps through the angel, opens Hagar's eyes and she sees the well. There is no indication that this is a miraculous well. It is not Miriam's well that legend tells us appeared in times of need. In fact, there is no indication that the well "appears" at all. It is already there, and Hagar simply "sees" it. Much as Abraham, one chapter later, holding a knife over the bound body of his second son, "sees" a ram caught in a thicket, that he hadn't seen a moment earlier, and offers it as a sacrifice instead. Two children, each saved by sudden sight. In each case, no new thing appeared, unless that new thing was openness to a new possibility.
 

always identify with Sarah when I read her story. Don't we all have the unexpected in us? How often do we hold back from letting it out for fear of ridicule? "What will people think" trumping "what am I called to do?" And then how we bristle and steam at our self-made shackles!

Think of the first couple chapters of Torah as a collective early childhood memory. Unclear, confused, dreamlike. But full of wonder also.

In the play Angels in America, the character Louis is called upon to recite Kaddish for Roy Cohn, in the hospital room where Cohn had just died. Louis refuses, but Belize, friend and night-nurse at the hospital, says to him, about giving a foe the blessing of forgiveness: “It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy.”

Did Bil’am go with the intention of blessing? Or did he go with the intention of cursing? I think the answer is neither. He went with the intention of finding out what he would do.