R' Mira Rivera: Hagar
Aug. 6th, 2020 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livFinal talk from Limmud which I didn't get round to writing up:
R' Rivera is a somewhat amazing person: a Filipina former professional ballet dancer who is now a Renewal rabbi working primarily with Jews of Colour. So I was really excited to learn some Torah with her, but I also found her teaching style a bit difficult to get my head round. She kept starting off topics and then sort of trailing off, as if leaving the audience to figure out the rest of what she had been going to say. I can imagine this is more effective in person than on Zoom; she was exceptionally emotionally engaging, and I expect her style helps a lot with encouraging learners to take ownership, especially if they're people who don't baseline expect their opinions to be taken seriously.
On the other hand she mentioned the halachic controversy over whether converts should consider themselves children of Abraham, but wandered off before mentioning the conclusion that in fact converts are even more children of Abraham than people with Jewish ancestry (since he was the first convert and the first to welcome converts), so if you didn't already know that, you'd have been left with an unnecessarily negative impression. And she mentioned an alternative system of text reading she uses with JOC, instead of the traditional PaRDeS layers, but she only explained the first two layers, which was a bit frustrating.
She started with a good question: what if you're a Jew of Colour but you're not Sephardi (from a southern European / North African origin) or Mizrachi (from the Middle East)? Where do you see yourself in texts? She said a lot of white-dominated communities doing 'outreach' to JOC talk about passages relating to loving immigrants and strangers. She wanted to talk about Abraham's concubine Hagar, most probably a Black Egyptian, whose name could possibly be read as simply 'the Stranger', and who is part of the origin of Judaism so not exactly an outsider being 'included'.
She mentioned the tradition which Rashi likes but Ibn Ezra repudiates, that Abraham's third wife, Keturah, is actually Hagar having returned. And Keturah is the ancestor of all kinds of non-Israelite peoples, perhaps including those from the non-obvious places where some Jewish people might have ancestors. Also the Islamic view of Hagar as a key figure, being the mother of Ismail, and also relating her name to the Hajj.
R' Rivera pointed out that many non-Western cultures have much more porous boundaries between family and everybody else, for example less likely to be shocked if a child is emotionally attached to a paid caregiver or a frequently visiting acquaintance. And a person who had helped raise the household's children when they were young might well return to the family to act as a carer for elderly people. The midrash where Rashi says that Keturah is actually Hagar relates her name to a word for 'reward'; her return when Abraham was elderly and widowed was a kind of reward. We had a bit of a discussion about a reward for whom, a reward for what.
R' Rivera is a somewhat amazing person: a Filipina former professional ballet dancer who is now a Renewal rabbi working primarily with Jews of Colour. So I was really excited to learn some Torah with her, but I also found her teaching style a bit difficult to get my head round. She kept starting off topics and then sort of trailing off, as if leaving the audience to figure out the rest of what she had been going to say. I can imagine this is more effective in person than on Zoom; she was exceptionally emotionally engaging, and I expect her style helps a lot with encouraging learners to take ownership, especially if they're people who don't baseline expect their opinions to be taken seriously.
On the other hand she mentioned the halachic controversy over whether converts should consider themselves children of Abraham, but wandered off before mentioning the conclusion that in fact converts are even more children of Abraham than people with Jewish ancestry (since he was the first convert and the first to welcome converts), so if you didn't already know that, you'd have been left with an unnecessarily negative impression. And she mentioned an alternative system of text reading she uses with JOC, instead of the traditional PaRDeS layers, but she only explained the first two layers, which was a bit frustrating.
She started with a good question: what if you're a Jew of Colour but you're not Sephardi (from a southern European / North African origin) or Mizrachi (from the Middle East)? Where do you see yourself in texts? She said a lot of white-dominated communities doing 'outreach' to JOC talk about passages relating to loving immigrants and strangers. She wanted to talk about Abraham's concubine Hagar, most probably a Black Egyptian, whose name could possibly be read as simply 'the Stranger', and who is part of the origin of Judaism so not exactly an outsider being 'included'.
She mentioned the tradition which Rashi likes but Ibn Ezra repudiates, that Abraham's third wife, Keturah, is actually Hagar having returned. And Keturah is the ancestor of all kinds of non-Israelite peoples, perhaps including those from the non-obvious places where some Jewish people might have ancestors. Also the Islamic view of Hagar as a key figure, being the mother of Ismail, and also relating her name to the Hajj.
R' Rivera pointed out that many non-Western cultures have much more porous boundaries between family and everybody else, for example less likely to be shocked if a child is emotionally attached to a paid caregiver or a frequently visiting acquaintance. And a person who had helped raise the household's children when they were young might well return to the family to act as a carer for elderly people. The midrash where Rashi says that Keturah is actually Hagar relates her name to a word for 'reward'; her return when Abraham was elderly and widowed was a kind of reward. We had a bit of a discussion about a reward for whom, a reward for what.
