> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://musically-novel.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Covenant Wouldn’t Stay Indoors - URL: https://musically-novel.ghost.io/the-covenant-wouldnt-stay-indoors/ - Published: 2026-07-10T13:03:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-02T17:06:06.000Z - Description: Sarah v. Hagar - Author: PETER SALTZMAN - Tags: The Tanakh Improvisations, Newsletter, #Migrated-1788368492164, #Import 2026-09-02 17:05 ## A Threatened Remnant In the [first post ](https://musically-novel.ghost.io/the-tanakh-improvisations/)of *The Tanakh Improvisations*, I mentioned one of my earlier Jewish periods: my thirties, leading up to my bar mitzvah at forty. Creatively, that period culminated in what I somewhat grandly called my mid-period masterpiece, *Kabbalah Blues*. There were also several years of keeping kosher, regular Shabbat dinners, our kids moving through their own age-appropriate b’nei mitzvah years, and the general atmosphere of a household trying, in its own imperfect way, to live inside Jewish time. Then things tailed off, Jewishly speaking. I’ve had several Jewish awakenings. This series was precipitated by another one. This time it is happening under pressure: antisemitism, Jewish survival, and rereading Genesis through the lens of a people promised vastness but living as a threatened remnant. Which brings me, oddly but inevitably, to Sarah and Hagar. ## The Future Does Not Arrive As I read through the Abraham chapters of Genesis, one thing kept bothering me. From the beginning, Abraham is promised land, descendants, and a nation — a people more numerous than the stars of heaven. Reading this now, I couldn’t help feeling, what, a certain emptiness in that promise. Really? A great nation? A people beyond counting? Look at us. To be sure, a great people, indeed a great nation. Numerous, though? Um… And it certainly didn’t start well. Sarah’s inability to give birth. The promise has been made, but nothing happens. Time passes. The future does not arrive. So Sarai tries to solve the problem herself by giving her Egyptian handmaid, Hagar, to Abram. *This* is how you get the great nation going? God promises Abraham a vast future, but the promise enters a household already stressed by time, infertility, power, and shame. Sarah tries to make the promise happen. Hagar becomes both instrument and rival. Abraham allows the arrangement and then allows the damage. The result is not fulfillment, at least not at first, but turmoil: contempt, jealousy, harshness, flight. The wilderness is not where the story begins. It is where the wound becomes visible. [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) ## Inside and Outside But that wound has many layers, and the ironies multiply almost immediately. Hagar is Egyptian. She is also enslaved. Generations later, Abraham’s descendants will be enslaved in Egypt. A reversal on a vast scale. Then there is Ishmael. He is Abraham’s son, but not the son of the promise. He is inside the family and outside it at the same time. Eventually, he will become the other — the child sent away, the child in the wilderness, the child who survives but does not inherit the covenantal line. And then, for most of Jewish history, we would become the ultimate other: dispersed, despised, tolerated, expelled, returned, expelled again, surviving in wilderness after wilderness. I don’t want to over-map this. The Torah is not a political chart for the future. But the echoes are hard to ignore. The first family of the promise is already a house divided by status, fertility, jealousy, power, and fear. The story is intimate, but it is never merely private. ## Built Up Genesis 16 begins with the Torah’s typical brutal simplicity: > Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. God has promised Abram descendants, but Sarai’s body has not cooperated. The future has been announced, but not delivered. So Sarai acts. She gives Hagar, her Egyptian handmaid, to Abram as a wife, hoping that through Hagar she might somehow be “built up.” It is easy to see the strategy and miss the agony inside it. Sarah is not simply arranging a household solution. She is trying to make peace with her own displacement from the promise. If Hagar bears the child, the future may arrive — but not through Sarah. The household will be built, but around the fact of her failure. So yes, she wants it. And no, of course she does not want it. Once Hagar conceives, the arrangement changes. What was supposed to solve the problem creates a new one. Hagar looks with contempt on Sarai. Sarai, wounded and humiliated, turns on Hagar. Abram, as he so often does in this part of Genesis, remains strangely passive. He seems to just watch, see how the whole thing plays out. And then Hagar runs. She runs into the wilderness. A messenger of God finds her by a spring of water. Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman, the outsider inside the chosen family, receives a divine encounter of her own. She is told that she will bear a son and name him Ishmael, because God has heard her suffering. Then Hagar does something bold: she gives God a name. “You are El Roi,” the God who sees me. She is not the chosen line, but she is not invisible to God. Then, in Genesis 21, after Sarah finally gives birth to Isaac, the original promise has arrived at last — but the earlier wound has not vanished. Ishmael is still there. Hagar is still there. Sarah sees something between the boys that disturbs her (in Friedman’s translation, they are “fooling around”), threatens her, enrages her, or all of the above. Sarah demands that this slave woman and her son be cast out. And so Hagar is sent into the wilderness again. ## Stuck in the Middle This improvisation came out in two distinct parts. I did not plan it as a literal retelling of Genesis 16 and 21\. Literal description is not the domain of instrumental music. It does not map one section to Sarah and the other to Hagar, or one section to the house and the other to the desert. But retroactively at least — and all discussion of improvisation is retroactive — it does feel like a kind of subtextual emotional retelling. ##### Prelude: Sarah’s Lament *(same music as in video above)* The first piece, **Prelude: Sarah’s Lament**, comes from that waiting. It is slow, free, searching, almost suspended: piano with acoustic bass, light drums, and a faint pulsing synth pad. Two lyrical themes develop and sometimes circle each other in counterpoint. It is Sarah before the action begins: the woman inside the promise who cannot yet carry it. ##### Feud: Sarah v. Hagar The second piece, **Feud: Sarah v. Hagar**, is faster, driven by an ostinato centered on the B below middle C. That B becomes a kind of pedal point in the middle of the piano, around which everything above and below revolves but never resolves: incomplete melodic motifs above, big McCoy Tyneresque chords below trying to create some supporting harmony. Drums, bass, synth figures, distorted electric guitar, and cinematic strings push the music toward increasing chaos, but the center holds. Or traps everyone. The music is troubled, energetic, unable to settle, but also unable to move beyond that damn insistent B in the middle. Stuck in the middle with… Which is not a bad description of the story itself. Everyone in this covenantal household — the primordial home of the Abrahamic religions — is moving and stuck at the same time. Sarah acts, but from a place of unbearable blockage. Hagar rises in status, but remains unfree. Abraham receives the promise, but seems helpless inside his own house. Ishmael is born, but into ambiguity. Then Isaac is born, but not into peace. Everything is in motion. And yet everything circles the same unresolved center: the promise has been made, but its fulfillment remains painfully out of reach. ## The Family Quarrel The promise has not failed. But it has entered history through a damaged narrative. Near the end of her chapter on Sarai and Hagar1, after presenting both sides of the interpretive argument — the tradition that faults Hagar, and the tradition that faults Sarai — Nehama Leibowitz makes this astonishing observation: > …Ramban denounces those who are over-generous in their pious declarations and noble decisions which are not followed up by practical steps to fulfill them, and who experience sudden surges of enthusiasm which are soon extinguished. “A good deed is only credited to the account of the one who completes it.” Had Sarah not wished to suppress her instincts and overcome every vestige of jealousy for her rival, had she not dared to scale these unusual heights of selflessness, she would not have fallen victim to the sin of “Sarah dealt harshly with her” — and there may not have been born that individual whose descendants have proved a source of trouble to Israel to this very day. Who knows? Wait. What? Is Leibowitz actually suggesting that the long Jewish problem with the descendants of Ishmael — and, more specifically, with Islamic antisemitism, present in many eras and especially grotesque now — has its roots in a family quarrel several thousand years ago? Is this “rivalry,” at some level, ultimately a family quarrel? Leibowitz is certainly not the first to suggest this, and she does slightly soften the claim with that final “Who knows?” Still, there are historical and theological threads here that make the idea difficult to dismiss entirely. At the very least, this ancient family drama becomes symbolic of what continues to unfold in the world today. Genesis itself identifies Ishmael as the father of tribes (possibly Arab, but that is conjecture). Later Islamic tradition claims that Muhammad traces his ancestry to Ishmael, and that Ishmael settled in Mecca. To my ear, that sounds like Islam attempting to authenticate its own genealogy deep inside the Jewish past, while simultaneously superseding it. This is fairly typical, and not only of Islam: take the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs and rebrand them as the forerunners of another tradition. Call it creative rebranding, cultural appropriation — a stupid phrase, but perhaps useful here — or something else. To my sensibility, it still feels like an ongoing attempt to make Jews historically unnecessary. But I suppose everyone does this at some point. Jews later did something similar with Esau, Isaac’s disinherited son, turning him retroactively into the ancestor-symbol of Rome, the great enemy of their time. Christianity did it too, in a different and far more consequential way, by elevating Jesus while obviating the Jews who produced him. All starting with the covenantal family quarrel? No doubt this is symbolic. But this symbol, like so many in the Tanakh, has exerted force throughout history. ## All the Nations And yet, there is this line in Genesis 18: “Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.” And later, after the binding of Isaac: “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven… and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” But I keep coming back to that phrase: “built up.” Sarah gives Hagar to Abram because, as she says, “perhaps I shall be built up through her.” Built up how? As a mother? As a household? As a future? As the bearer of a promise that her own body has not yet been able to carry? Was this frustration? Nobility? Selflessness? Desperation? Some unstable mixture of all of them? Of course, Sarah is jealous. Of course, she is angry. Of course, Hagar, once pregnant, is prideful, resentful, perhaps contemptuous. On the personal level, the story is painfully human. But then I keep thinking of the larger promise: “And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” All the nations. Not only Isaac. Not only the direct covenantal line. Not only the child who stays inside the tent. Maybe Sarah’s offering of Hagar is not only a failed domestic arrangement. Maybe it is also, tragically and unwillingly, a literal embodiment of the promise moving outward. Sarah wants to be built up through Hagar, but through Hagar another people is built. Another line begins. Another part of Abraham’s future is carried into the world. That does not make the wound good. It does not make the casting out righteous. It does not turn bitterness into virtue. But it may mean that the blessing is larger than the family’s ability to contain it. The covenant begins inside one household, but it cannot remain there. It breaks open — painfully, wrongly, humanly — and the blessing moves outward through the very people the household cannot hold. The story, then, is not only about jealousy, exile, and inheritance. It is also about a promise too large for the family that first receives it. A promise that cannot stay indoors. --- ## Postlude: Future Memories I said the improvisation came out in two parts. But after completing those, I needed a postlude to calm, or at least answer, the chaos of the feud. Not resolution, exactly, but the sound of something continuing after the house has gone quiet. Thanks for reading Musically Novel! This post is public so feel free to share it. --- # THE TANAKH IMPROVISATIONS I’m collecting the tracks in an ongoing playlist. Click below…I’ve included a bonus track at the end. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7a/4b/7a4bd768-ae74-4aac-8606-8859beafad44/content/images/2026/09/17366b1c-e52c-4c1f-9ecd-0ddf7b1036c6_1254x1254-4.png)](https://soundcloud.com/saltp/sets/the-tanakh-improvisations?si=44ce6470ab7541958b5be215e6fae5b4&utm%5Fsource=clipboard&utm%5Fmedium=text&utm%5Fcampaign=social%5Fsharing) --- 1. Nehama Leibowitz, *New Studies in Bereshit/Genesis*, trans. Aryeh Newman, vol. 1, Lekh-Lekha 7, “Sarah’s Treatment of Hagar,” p. 157.