You’ve probably heard stories about mothers lifting cars to save their babies trapped underneath, and perhaps you’ve wondered whether these stories are true.
This video from the American Chemical Society explains how the sympathetic nervous system’s response to fear or a stressful situation—a cascade of hormones, including adrenaline, noradrenaline, endorphins, and cortisol—allows ordinary humans to access reserves of strength, enabling us to lift or move heavy objects to save someone else. It’s not only mothers, or parents, who are able to summon the fight-or-flight response to protect their own children; all humans are capable of channeling this survival response on behalf of others.
However, this enhanced strength and agility is temporary, an autonomic response to situational stress. When the body is drained of these hormones and the moment has passed, all we have left are the stories about supermoms.
When retold with embellishments, they seem unbelievable, urban myths. Still, I believe these stories contain unassailable, emotional truths.
* * * * * * *
Here’s a story I heard in December of 2018, while participating in an immersion experience with rabbis and Jewish educators at the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a Jesuit faith-based organization that promotes migration with dignity by providing humanitarian assistance, education, and holistic accompaniment of migrants in Nogales, Mexico. We had just finished serving an early dinner in KBI’s comedor (dining room) to the migrants, who were sharing their stories about what had brought them to this place.
One mother began to share her family’s story. I remember asking her to speak slowly so I’d be able to understand her Spanish. Her story was unbelievable, and I believed every word she told me:
My husband was being pressured to pay more protection money to the cartel. I was so afraid for our daughters; the oldest is sixteen, almost finished with high school, a good student. One day, when our girls were walking home from school with friends, men with guns surrounded them, shouting at them and threatening them. One grabbed my eldest daughter by her hair and, holding a knife to her face, told her we needed to pay. Then he cut off her ponytail and sent a message to me and my husband: Next time it will be her hand. We left almost immediately. My oldest daughter wants to finish high school and go to college. I have an uncle in New Jersey, so we came to the border and asked for asylum, but they sent us back here to wait.
We were reluctant to end the conversation, but the sun was already setting and she needed to take her daughters to the shelter where they would spend the night. She confirmed what we’d already heard: there was no space for men in the shelters. She added that her husband would probably sleep in the cemetery, where most of the men slept undisturbed by the police patrolling the neighborhood.
After eating dinner and settling in for the night at KBI’s guest house in Nogales, Arizona, I couldn’t stop thinking about the stories we’d heard from parents who left their homes and jobs, fleeing violence, for a place where their children could live in safety. Those without the means to cross the border at an established port of entry to request asylum wandered in the desert with few provisions and little protection against the elements. Wearing layers of clothes, they carried backpacks with canned food, a family bible, and some photographs of home.
The Torah reading on the first day of Rosh Hashanah (Genesis 21:1-34) presents a similarly troubling story about a mother and child who are forced to leave their home. When Sarah insists that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away, Abraham is distressed. But, reassured by God that his son Ishmael will also become a great nation, he complies.
Early the next morning, Abraham took some bread and a skin of water, and gave them to Hagar. He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away… (Genesis 21:14)
In the late 1870s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in The Woman’s Bible:
In this scene Abraham does not appear in a very attractive light, rising early in the morning, sending his child and its mother forth into the wilderness, with a breakfast of bread and water, to care for themselves. Why did he not provide them with a servant, an ass laden with provisions, a tent to shelter them from the elements; or better still, some abiding, resting place? Common humanity demanded this much attention to his own son and the woman who bore him. (p. 40)
Abraham not only denies them adequate food and water for their journey, he fails to offer Hagar and Ishmael any words of comfort. As Phyllis Trible notes in her seminal book Texts of Terror, “Abraham himself does not speak.” (p. 22) Perhaps he is silenced by the enormity of sending his child into the desert with some bread and a single water sack.
Hagar also does not speak. She takes the meager provisions and her son, and leaves without a word.
Of course, one can hardly blame Hagar for her silence. As Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, pointed out: “Our sympathies are unmistakably drawn to them in some of the most powerful scenes of pathos in the Bible, Hagar cast out into the desert, the young Ishmael dying of heat and thirst.” (Not in God’s Name, p. 118)
“And when the water in the skin was emptied, she left the child in the shade of a bush and sat at a distance, saying, ‘Let me not see the child’s death!’ She sat vigil, raised her voice–crying out in despair–and wept.” (Genesis 21:15-16)
Contemplating the imminent death of her child, Hagar felt that she could not go on and did the only thing she could do. As Rabbi Sacks wrote, “We weep with them, feeling their outcast state. As does God…who hears their tears, comforts them, saves them from death” and blesses them.” (Not in God’s Name, p. 118)
God’s angel called out to Hagar from heaven, saying to her, ‘What’s wrong, Hagar? Don’t be afraid. For God has heard the child’s voice where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him.’ Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water, and let the boy drink. (Genesis 21:17-19)
When Hagar is alone and unable to see any possibility for survival, God returns her attention to her surroundings, allowing her to find the means to care for her child, and strengthens her resolve to live. Meeting Hagar and Ishmael in the desert where they are, God, like the Jesuits at KBI, provides holistic accompaniment to these migrants.
* * * * * * *
Six months after returning from Nogales, I met another mother and her son in the waiting area outside the Immigration courtroom in Atlanta. Samanta, the oldest of six sisters and the only one born in Mexico, was holding a large bag filled with papers in one hand and her son Joshua’s small hand in the other.
I greeted her in my limited Spanish and learned that she fled the southern state of Guerrero when Joshua was a baby, to be with her parents and sisters in Atlanta. Then I bent down to the floor to meet Joshua. Serving as a volunteer with the New Sanctuary Movement of Atlanta, accompanying asylum seekers at their hearings, I would spend the next few hours keeping three-year-old Joshua occupied and quiet in the courtroom.
There was pretty much nothing I could do for Samanta, whose case was complicated and had been rejected by lawyers as unwinnable. She faced almost-certain deportation and I had no power to change her circumstances. All I could do was meet her and Joshua where they were, to be present with them, so they would not be alone.
That was in June, 2019. In August, I returned to immigration court with Samanta and Joshua. This time, I’d agreed to give them a ride from their apartment to the ICE headquarters downtown, but I was surprised when Samanta’s aunt, Isabel, joined us. Isabel needed a ride to the ISAP office to have her ankle monitor replaced. I reluctantly agreed to the proposed arrangement and invited Isabel to sit up front.
Since I was not permitted to accompany Samanta and her aunt inside at the ICE office, I waited with Joshua outside the building. We stood under an umbrella in the light rain, eating snacks and laughing when the freight train rumbled past. It was a short drive from there to the ISAP office, but Joshua was fast asleep in the car seat by the time we’d circled the block to find an open meter. Samanta and Isabel were gone for 2 ½ hours while Joshua napped in my parked car.
I would have accompanied Samanta to her next scheduled hearing in November, but it was postponed, and then everything shut down during the pandemic.
* * * * * * *
More than seven years have passed since I first met Samanta and Joshua. I don’t know where they are now; I can only hope they are together and safe.
What I learned from the Jesuit priests and educators during my immersion experience at the Kino Border Initiative is that accompaniment is primarily the act of helping another person access their own inner strength—not to perform physical, superhuman feats, but to endure the emotional challenges of being human.
I remain convinced by Rabbi Sacks’ writings about Hagar and Ishmael that we’re meant to learn the lesson of imitatio Dei—mirroring God’s divine traits of goodness, by acting with kindness and compassion toward every one of God’s children—from all of these stories.
When we encounter another person experiencing fear or isolation, we can remind them they are not alone. We can hear each other’s tears and weep together, and we can open each other’s eyes to sources of life. We can strengthen one another by sharing our stories. These are not superhuman actions; rather, they are human interactions that draw us nearer to the Divine.