# The One Who Sees Me

> The first time the Torah uses the phrase "an angel of the Lord," the angel does not appear to

By David Raitan · 2026-10-22 · Parashat Lech Lecha · https://torahmeirah.com/en/parasha/lech-lecha/lech-lecha-5787

The first time the Torah uses the phrase "an angel of the Lord," the angel does not appear to Abraham.

This is the parsha of Abraham. It opens with the call that begins Jewish history. It contains the promise of the land, the covenant between the pieces, the changing of his name and the covenant of circumcision. If anyone in Bereshit deserves a visitation, it is he. Yet the first angel of the Lord in the Torah is sent to someone else entirely. She is an Egyptian slave woman, pregnant, running into the desert on the road back to the country she came from. She is foreign, she is owned, she is in flight. And after the angel has spoken to her, she does something no one in the Torah has done before. She gives God a name.

Why her? Why does the Torah give its first angel, and the first human name for God, not to the founder of the faith but to the woman at the edge of his household?

The answer lies in a word that runs through the chapter like a thread, and which is easy to miss in translation. The word is *ayin*, eye.

Watch how the story moves. Sarai, childless, gives her maid to Abram. Hagar conceives, "and she saw that she had conceived, and her mistress was lowered in her eyes." Sarai protests to Abram that "she saw that she had conceived, and I was lowered in her eyes." Abram answers, "Your maid is in your hand. Do to her what is good in your eyes." Sarai afflicts her, and Hagar flees.

Three pairs of eyes, and not one of them sees another person. Hagar, newly pregnant, looks at her barren mistress and finds her small. Sarai looks at the look and feels herself diminished. Abram, asked to judge, declines to look at all, and hands the matter over to someone else's eyes. The chapter is honest about this. It does not divide its characters into those who look down and those who are looked down on. Everyone in the house fails at seeing.

And then, in the wilderness, "An angel of the Lord found her by the spring of water, by the spring on the road to Shur." The word for spring is *ayin*. It is the same word as eye. Hagar, who has been looked at, looked past and looked down on, is found at the eye.

There is a second detail, quieter still. Read the chapter for Hagar's name. The narrator uses it. But Sarai never does. To Abram she is "my maid." Abram never does either. To Sarai she is "your maid." She passes between them as a possessive pronoun. The first person in the story to call her by her name is the angel. "Hagar, maid of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?" It is also the first time anyone in the chapter asks her anything.

The commentators did not soften what happened in the tent. Ramban is blunt. Our mother Sarah sinned in afflicting her, and Abraham sinned in permitting it, and God heard Hagar's affliction. Radak goes further, and his language picks up the chapter's own thread. Sarai acted, he writes, neither according to ethics nor according to piety. Not ethics, because even with Abram's permission she should have held back. Not piety, because it is not fitting for a person to do all that lies within his power to one who is under his hand. He cites the sage who said, how beautiful is forgiveness at the moment of power. Then comes the sentence that closes the circle. What Sarai did was not good in the eyes of God. Abram had said, do what is good in *your* eyes. The Torah measures it by other eyes.

Rashi, reading the name Hagar gives, draws on the Midrash. *El Ro'i* is the God who sees the humiliation of the humiliated. And then Rashi adds something that ought to stop us. Hagar was not surprised to see an angel. In Abraham's house, the Sages said, she had seen them often. Angels came and went, and she showed no fear. What astonished her was to see one *here*, in the wilderness, after she had left.

She had seen angels in that house.

No one there had seen her.

We have, in our own time, a philosophical vocabulary for what the chapter describes. In a celebrated essay published in 2001, the German philosopher Axel Honneth took his starting point from Ralph Ellison's novel *Invisible Man*, whose narrator is invisible not because no one can see him but because people refuse to. Honneth's argument is that social invisibility is not a failure of perception. The eyes work perfectly well. Invisibility is something we *do*. It is an act of looking right through a person, and it tells them, without a word spoken, that they do not count as someone to whom anything is owed.

Which is precisely what happens in the tent. Abram and Sarai do not fail to notice Hagar. They discuss her, decide about her, hand her from one to the other. They know exactly where she is. What they do not do is see her.

Here is the distinction the chapter draws, and it is one we live inside every day. It is the difference between seeing and seeing through. Seeing through is compatible with attention, with management, even with care of a kind. It is not compatible with a name.

The lesson here is one the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent his life teaching. To truly see another person, to stand before their face, is already to become responsible for them, before we have chosen anything at all. The angel shows us what that looks like.

It is striking what the angel does and does not do. He does not dissolve the household or overturn its order. His first command is a hard one, to go back to her mistress, and the tradition has wrestled with it ever since. But he sends her back changed. She returns with a promise for her descendants. She returns with a name for her son, Yishmael, "for the Lord has heard your affliction." The child is named not for a God who sees but for a God who hears, and the root of *oni*, affliction, is the same as the word for what Sarai did to her. And she returns with a name for God, the name of the very thing that had been missing from the house. The One who sees me.

The Torah's own name for her is instructive too. *Hagar* sounds, to Hebrew ears, almost exactly like *ha-ger*, the stranger. The Sages counted that the Torah warns us about the stranger thirty-six times, more than about almost anything else. "You know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The irony is not lost on the text. The first stranger in Abraham's house was an Egyptian, and the family that would one day be strangers in Egypt learned the lesson first by failing it.

The chapter reaches us wherever people are present and not seen. The cleaner whose name we never learned, the carer who is spoken about in the third person in the room where she is working, the colleague who takes the minutes and is not asked what she thinks. In families it happens to the elderly parent whose needs are discussed across the table as though she had left it. In societies it happens to whole groups of people whom it is convenient to count and inconvenient to see. None of this requires cruelty. It requires only that we be busy, and important, and sure that someone else is looking.

And the chapter does not let us cast ourselves only as Hagar. We are also Sarai, stung by a look. We are Hagar, looking down from a moment's advantage. And we are Abram, above all Abram, saying *do what is good in your eyes* so that we need not use our own.

Years later, when Isaac first appears to meet Rebecca, the Torah tells us where he is coming from. He is coming from Be'er Lachai Ro'i, the well of the Living One who sees me, Hagar's well. The son of Sarah went back to the place where the woman his mother had driven out was found. Whatever he was looking for there, he knew where the seeing had happened.

The angel found her at the spring, and the spring was an eye. The God of Abraham is first named by the one whom Abraham's house looked through, and the name she chose was a verb of vision. Each time we stop and ask the person in front of us where they have come from and where they are going, we are drinking from that well.