What Abraham Starts, Hannah Completes

On each of the two days of Rosh Hashanah there is one reading from the Torah and one from the Prophets.

The Torah portions are Gen 21:1-34 - the miraculous birth in Sarah's old age of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael; and Gen 22:1-24 - the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

The Prophetic readings are I Samuel 1:1-2:10, the story of childless Hannah who finally makes a vow to dedicate the son born to her to the service of God in Shilo; and Jeremiah 31:1-19, about the ingathering of the exiles.

A theme running clearly through the first three is the complex interplay between parents, their love for their children, the sacrifices they make and God's response. The fourth reading, Jeremiah 31, also contains the verses:

So says the L‑rd: A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, for they are not.

So says the L‑rd: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is reward for your work, says the L‑rd, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy.

Unlike Hagar, Rachel is not "exiled" with her children. She remains behind, lamenting their absence.

I want to, however, speak of the other two and the connection between them. I have spent years wondering what went through Hannah's mind, what was the process that she went through as she wept bitterly for many years in her barrenness, before finally finding the way to pray in order to open her locked destiny as a mother.

Did you ever wonder if the later biblical figures had the stories of the earlier biblical heroes to draw upon? Surely Hannah knew the story of Abraham and the Akeda.

I imagine her drawing upon this story with its example of the ultimate sacrifice (that was not made in the end), whether conciously or uncosciously, in casting around to try to answer for herself what God's will for her could be, or what God might want her to do, in order to revert the harsh decree upon her. She hits upon the idea of doing a kind of Akeda - offering her son to God, in the best way she knows how. Not for death, but for life - for a life sanctified and elevated.

We see how once this idea arises in her, a calm descends upon her, and she finds the words and the way. Eli the priest accuses her of being drunk, but even that cannot shatter her calm, for she knows she has found the right path.

Ultimately God did not want Abraham to kill his son. God apparently only wanted to bring Abraham (and Isaac) to the very edge of religious devotion. The lesson for the world was: do not kill your children. This is not the way to serve God.

But it is in the Hannah story that this lesson reaches its culmination. God says, if you however wish to dedicate your child to Me (assuming it is the right child for it), then that is welcome. That is the evolved path. And it leads to the birth of the prophet Samuel.

From Abraham we learn the negative, what God does not want us to do. But from Hannah (inspired by the Akeda, perhaps) we learn the positive, what God wants us to do.
Most of us will not dedicate our children to temple service, and neither should we. But we can find a way to convey to our children that we are willing to let them go, however painful that is, if they need to evolve in ways that leave us behind.