It has always struck me that the Torah and Haftarah readings for Rosh HaShannah place the heroines of our biblical story at their center. Sarah, Hagar, and Hannah each confront the future through the vulnerability of motherhood: the longing to bring children into the world, and the deeper, enduring struggle to keep them safe within it.

Their stories are not identical. But each contains a cry that reaches beyond the limits of ordinary language. And perhaps that is one of Rosh HaShannah’s most urgent invitations: to learn again how to hear the cries that matter most, and to let them move our hands toward the work that must be done.

Consider Sarah, whose apparent absence from the Akedah (the Binding of Isaac) is one of its loudest features. Abraham rises early to carry out the impossible command to bind Isaac. But Sarah is not consulted. She is not given a voice in the text. How could she possibly have no voice in the fate of her own child?

Perhaps that is precisely the point. So many readers have imagined Abraham hurrying to leave before Sarah might see him, because if she had seen him – if she had understood what........

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