מבחן מסכם סיפורי אבות

Achti / Lynn Gottlieb
Achti
I am pained I did not call you
By the name your mother gave you.
I cast you aside,
Cursed you with my barrenness and rage,
Called you “stranger”/ Ha-ger,
As if it were a sin to be from another place.
Achti
They used me to steal your womb,
Claim your child,
As if I owned your body and your labor.
I, whom they call “See Far Woman” ( Sarah),
Could not witness my own blindness.
But you, my sister,
You beheld angels,
Made miracles in the desert,
Received divine blessings from a god,
Who stopped talking to me.
Only at the end, when I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife,
Only then
Did I realize our common suffering.
And I called out, “Avraham, Avraham, hold back your
knife!”
My voice trumpeted into the silence
of my sin.
Forgive me, Achti
For the sin of neglect
For the sin of abuse
For the sin of arrogance
Forgive me, Achti,
For the sin of not knowing your name.

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Hagar Writes a Cathartic Letter to Sarah as an Exercise Suggested by her Therapist / Mohja Kahf
Dear Sarah, life made us enemies
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
What if we both ditched the old man?
He could have visitation rights with the boys
alternate weekends and holidays.
Yeah, especially the Feast of the Sacrifice—
everybody has forgotten anyway
that it began with me abandoned in the desert
watching my baby dehydrate for days—
I dared God to let us die.
Anyway, you and I,
we’d set up house,
raise the kids,
start a catering business, maybe.
You have brains.
So do I.
We could travel.
There are places to see
besides Ur and this nowheresville desert
with its tribes of hooligans
No. Your lips always thin when you disapprove,
like the mother I can hardly remember
from before I wound up in your house.
I was barely more than a girl. You are the one
Who brought me there from Egypt.
You used to laugh back then. In those days,
You could bear to look at me.​​​​​​​
Oh, Sarah, you need years of therapy
Can’t you admit that what he did to me was cruel?
Admit it – for just one second
It won’t make you hate him forever
just long enough to know the world won’t fall apart.
Long enough to pity him, yourself, me
Laugh, Sarah, laugh
Imagine
God, the Possibility.
Sincerely Love,
Hagar

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