Dvar Torah Vayera 5785
And God spoke, saying shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?
And God said, “I will bring fire and brimstone from on high unto the plain of sodom and gomorrah for their sin is so great.”
And Abraham said, “Ok. Fine by me.”
And God said “Wait. Really? this doesn’t bother you?”
And Abraham said “Well, it’s really not my problem. I don’t know those guys and I’m really not involved. Besides, my tent is up here and so it really won’t affect me.”
And God said “Well I mean, I guess? But aren’t you concerned at all?
Concerned with the pain and suffering of others?
Or the moral implications of a God that delivers collective punishment onto an entire society? Or at least worried about the precedent set by a god that gets irritated by the failings and immoralities of humankind, and then just torches everything?”
And Abraham said, “I mean, I don’t see why it’s my problem. I have my own stuff to deal with.”
And God was silent. Fire began to fall from the heavens and the dull sound of screams could be heard in the distance.
And Abraham returned to his tent , and went inside, and closed the flap.
…
You are all familiar with the story of Abraham and God at Sodom and Gomorrah - and all of you are probably aware that my dramatic alternative retelling is not how it ultimately goes down. And it’s pretty clear why it doesn’t go down that way. For Abraham to talk back to God at a moment when God is poised to deliver righteous divine judgment on a pair of towns that have been judged to be wholly wicked is a defining characteristic of who Abraham is, and how we understand a central moral principle of Judaism, and that is: standing up and speaking out is a feature of our tradition, not a bug.
Moreover, the story of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah in my fanciful retelling is both shocking and not shocking. It’s shocking, because we’re so conditioned to Abraham standing up to God, to Moses standing up to God, and to our matriarchs and Patriarchs having exceptional relationships with God, that for Abraham to shrug and say ‘it’s not my problem’ unravels our whole notion of Abraham. And second, if God were to present a character in the bible with a moral choice only for them to respond ‘hey man, this really isn’t my problem’ is really a dog-bites-man story, and by that I mean, it’s not a compelling story. There’s a reason the local news likes to do feel-good stories of the man that won the lottery and paid off the lunch debt of the local elementary school, or the woman that went down a well to save the neighbors cat. Because that person had every reason to say ‘that’s really not my problem’, but they didn’t. Abraham’s act is even a little beyond that: God, the judge of all the earth, the arbiter of good and evil, says hey, heads up, I’m gonna wipe out some towns because they’re evil.’ And Abraham’s response is to question the judge and creator of everything.
But also, it’s not shocking, because sometimes good people do nothing. Sometimes, evil triumphs over good. Sometimes, we get a feel good story of an upstander in awful times, like in the movie Schindler’s List or Hotel Rwanda – a person who, at great personal risk, sticks his neck out for someone else. But those feel good movies exist because there are many, many human instances where people do not look out for one another.
By the way, Jewish tradition does have a guy who says ‘it’s really not my problem.’ His name was Jonah. When God tells him the morally right thing to do, he literally runs, or more accurately he takes a boat, the other way. There is a reason there are many synagogues throughout the world called ‘Benei Avraham’, but no synagogues called ‘Benei Yonah.’
There is never a time when asking questions about what is right and good and moral is out of place. It is always notable to stop and consider when we as individuals call something out that we see as immoral and unjust. But there is especially no time like the present and the immediate future. Because I think there are two forms of resignation that we might otherwise fall victim to. The first is that we might be willing to convince ourselves that something unjust or immoral really isn’t that big a deal - and so we will simply say ‘well, I don’t see the problem.’ This is akin to Abraham saying ‘well, I’m sure that destroying Sodom and Gomorrah is a reasonable thing to do’, even though in his stomach, he feels queasy about it. The second is for a person to conclude that it really isn’t their problem. It’s not my fight, Abraham could conclude regarding Sodom. Maybe one of God’s other prophets can stand up and call out the potential injustice of the situation.
This second issue touches on a complex problem for each of us, and one that pollsters attempted to analyze before and after the election in depth - and that is voters making choices in either their best interests or the best interests of those around them.
Abraham does not live in Sodom and Gomorrah, but his nephew Lot does. So perhaps he feels like he should involve himself in the affairs of the town by blood. But I’ve always understood Abraham to be an international man of justice. He’s not upset because God might kill a family member; he’s upset because God, his God, the God of justice, seems to be doing something unjust to non-Jews, which at this point in history, is simply everyone on earth other than Abraham and Sarah. Abraham does not concern himself with the national origin or otherness of the victims; he simply sees something that is wrong and he stands up to say ‘this is wrong.’
A classic interpretation of this week’s parsha understands that although Noach was called tzaddik be’dorotav – righteous in his generation – Avraham was in contrast simply a tzaddik - righteous in the absolute. Additionally, it is noted by the rabbis that while Noach is said to have walked with God, Abraham is said to have walked before God. The many commentators are interested in the distinction of why Noach is only so-so, but Abraham is elite in his righteousness. But there are some interesting alternative takes.
One fascinating take on this is from a rabbinic midrash in tanchuma, dated to around the 8th century CE. The text teaches us “Noach walked with God” - that the Holy One Blessed Be believed that Noach would not sink down to doing the deeds of the generation of the flood. This can be compared (mashal) to a king who had a child, and he would walk in the role of messenger for his father, and he would go before him on a path with deep mud, and the king relied upon him to not be swallowed up by mud. (Tanchuma 5)
So the standard take, for instance the one that Rashi takes, is that Noach was only sorta good. By comparison to a lousy miserable immoral generation of individuals, Noach was a neutral human, but in comparison to others, that makes him a tzaddik. However, this reading by the Tanchuma flips that idea on its head. In a generation where everyone is an unredeemable horrible wicked jerk, it would have been even harder for Noach to be ok. But God saw Noach and said ‘here is a man that, if he can walk through the mud, I can follow him.’ And so the king let him walk, and he walked.
Abraham is described not as walking with God, but before God. God said ‘here is what I’m going to do.’ And Abraham said ‘Yeah, no, don’t do that, that’s wrong.’ In this moment, we can understand that perhaps God, in the post Cain and Abel, post-Noach and the flood evolution, is still figuring out how to manage humanity. The moral absolutes of the 10 commandments and the 613 mitzvot are still well off in the distance. God has seen small scale evil and widespread evil and God is tinkering with notions of justice. And Abraham responds with protest.
Of this the 19th and 20th century mussar rabbi, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, taught this:
Behold, before us, after all of the wondrous and grand and powerful deeds that we saw in Noach, in his walking the path of the Holy One Blessed Be to do hesed for all the world together, to feed them and to provide for them and care for them, etc. And on account of this, it was said of him with great praise “Noach walked with God.” In any event, there is a higher level than this further that one can claim, because Noach only walked with God, and not before God. Thus his strength was bad, that he needed help. For there are upper reaches of spirituality, which has no end or limit. And a person, it is in their nature to go higher and higher constantly, without any stopping.
In other words, to Rabbi Nosson Tzvi, Noach was a great and holy man, a baal hesed, who tried to get other people to stop sinning, and was a provider and caregiver to both humans and animals. And that he was a good person even when the influences around him were bad. And yet Abraham was an even better human, because while Noach needed God alongside him to make it through, Abraham walked in front of God, with no need for support. But then Nosson Tzvi goes even further to say
. כי למעלות הרוחניות אין קץ וסוף ;והאדם נתבע לעלות ולעלות תמיד בלא הפסק כלל.
‘For there are upper reaches of spirituality, which has no end or limit. And a person, it is in their nature to go higher and higher constantly, without any stopping.’
Which is a totally radical thing for any rabbi to say. It’s not that Noach was so-so, and Abraham was great, so be like Abraham. It’s that Noach was great, and Abraham was even better … And you can be better than Abraham. It might be presumptuous, but I will add my understanding here: Abraham had that one moment to stand up for justice, and he’s a tzaddik. But perhaps there were other moments that he did not seize upon, but that others might have. You can be like Abraham. But you can also, potentially, be better than Abraham. There is no absolute tzaddik. There is only higher and higher.
And in this context, the standing up is important, and the fearlessness is important. Just the other day, you may have come across the same news item that I did - a video of an incident that took place in the New Zealand house of commons. A right wing party in the parliament was attempting to pass a bill that would undo a treaty from 1840 called the Te Tiriti o Waitangi - which was the basis for a certain degree of indigenous Maori rights to both land and leadership. Rising in opposition to the proposal on the parliament floor, Representative Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke begins to speak. But after a few words, she tears up a piece of paper, and (SING) she begins singing, and then breaks into a shout ‘ah Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!’ - at which point several other Maori politicians stand and take the floor and begin to do a haka, which is something of a Maori war dance that many of you rugby and soccer fans will be familiar with. And the gallery begins to sing and chant the words to the haka with them. In the midst of this the speaker of the parliament looks utterly pained and says aloud ‘oh don’t do that’ before being completely drowned out.
That moment - when house speaker Gerry Brownlee, a decidedly pale and not Maori individual, reacts with horror to the official way of proceeding in business by saying ‘oh don’t do that’ - is a fascinating one for me. He knew what was coming - that the normal order and decorum of the chamber was about to go all to hell - and he couldn’t stop it. That the moment went viral on social media and that people around the world now know about the attempt to undo the Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a testament to the power of standing up. Protest is powerful, even when its result is hard to immediately measure. In fact, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is told to us in Genesis 18 even though, ultimately, Abraham did not save the town. The message then is that sometimes an examination of what is just and unjust will conclude unsatisfactorily. That does not mean you do not examine future moments which might be a miscarriage of justice.
A few years ago, there were many such protests. There was the women’s march, and protests against the so-called Muslim ban, and marches regarding police brutality around George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and Antwon Rose, and marches against forced separation of families who crossed the US-Mexico border and were applying for asylum. And there have been vigils for gun violence, and marches and demonstrations in Israel regarding the role of the courts and maintaining democracy, not to mention marches to bring home the hostages. And in many of these cases, one might argue that protest was ineffective. Roe v Wade was overturned. AR-15s are still widely available. The Muslim ban and a host of other anti-immigrant legislation is almost certainly going to be reinstated. However, it would also be accurate to conclude that we have yet to see the impact of something like the women's march because we never know how the long arc of history will react to protest movements. Changing the morality and the sentiment of an entire nation is slow business, and we live in impatient times.
But additionally, we will never know how much worse it could have been without all the advocacy and protest. After Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, states began the process of sorting out their own positions on abortion. You probably didn’t read about it in the news, because there were some other notable things that occurred on Tuesday November 5th. But Abortion was on the ballot in 10 states. And in 7 of those states, the right to an abortion was enshrined by voters in their state constitutions - states that did not have constitutional abortion protections before. So even though you can’t draw a straight line from the Women’s march to, say, the state of Arizona’s decision to guarantee a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, I would argue that nothing exists in a vacuum.
Mass movements define the morals and trends of a society. The protests against the Vietnam war didn’t end the war immediately, but they certainly demonstrated to the powers that be and to the American people which way much of the country felt about it, and moments like that carry forward in the collective memory for generations. The things we say and do today, the reactions or non-reactions we undertake over the next four years, will have a defining impact on what America values and believes, and specifically what Jewish Americans value and believe. So we can’t simply stay quiet and say ‘ok, fine by me’ when we see something that is unjust, because it’s simply not who we are. There will be a hundred little moments and reminders of that going forward, and we will each individually and collectively have to pick our battles.
But pick them. Walk before God. Do not sink into the mud of a collective morality that is not our own and is not just or Godly or derived from Torah. And do not be dismayed by the uncertainty of the effect. Abraham did not return to his tent, go inside, and close the flap. And neither should we.
And God spoke, saying shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?
And God said, “I will bring fire and brimstone from on high unto the plain of sodom and gomorrah for their sin is so great.”
And Abraham said, “Ok. Fine by me.”
And God said “Wait. Really? this doesn’t bother you?”
And Abraham said “Well, it’s really not my problem. I don’t know those guys and I’m really not involved. Besides, my tent is up here and so it really won’t affect me.”
And God said “Well I mean, I guess? But aren’t you concerned at all?
Concerned with the pain and suffering of others?
Or the moral implications of a God that delivers collective punishment onto an entire society? Or at least worried about the precedent set by a god that gets irritated by the failings and immoralities of humankind, and then just torches everything?”
And Abraham said, “I mean, I don’t see why it’s my problem. I have my own stuff to deal with.”
And God was silent. Fire began to fall from the heavens and the dull sound of screams could be heard in the distance.
And Abraham returned to his tent , and went inside, and closed the flap.
…
You are all familiar with the story of Abraham and God at Sodom and Gomorrah - and all of you are probably aware that my dramatic alternative retelling is not how it ultimately goes down. And it’s pretty clear why it doesn’t go down that way. For Abraham to talk back to God at a moment when God is poised to deliver righteous divine judgment on a pair of towns that have been judged to be wholly wicked is a defining characteristic of who Abraham is, and how we understand a central moral principle of Judaism, and that is: standing up and speaking out is a feature of our tradition, not a bug.
Moreover, the story of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah in my fanciful retelling is both shocking and not shocking. It’s shocking, because we’re so conditioned to Abraham standing up to God, to Moses standing up to God, and to our matriarchs and Patriarchs having exceptional relationships with God, that for Abraham to shrug and say ‘it’s not my problem’ unravels our whole notion of Abraham. And second, if God were to present a character in the bible with a moral choice only for them to respond ‘hey man, this really isn’t my problem’ is really a dog-bites-man story, and by that I mean, it’s not a compelling story. There’s a reason the local news likes to do feel-good stories of the man that won the lottery and paid off the lunch debt of the local elementary school, or the woman that went down a well to save the neighbors cat. Because that person had every reason to say ‘that’s really not my problem’, but they didn’t. Abraham’s act is even a little beyond that: God, the judge of all the earth, the arbiter of good and evil, says hey, heads up, I’m gonna wipe out some towns because they’re evil.’ And Abraham’s response is to question the judge and creator of everything.
But also, it’s not shocking, because sometimes good people do nothing. Sometimes, evil triumphs over good. Sometimes, we get a feel good story of an upstander in awful times, like in the movie Schindler’s List or Hotel Rwanda – a person who, at great personal risk, sticks his neck out for someone else. But those feel good movies exist because there are many, many human instances where people do not look out for one another.
By the way, Jewish tradition does have a guy who says ‘it’s really not my problem.’ His name was Jonah. When God tells him the morally right thing to do, he literally runs, or more accurately he takes a boat, the other way. There is a reason there are many synagogues throughout the world called ‘Benei Avraham’, but no synagogues called ‘Benei Yonah.’
There is never a time when asking questions about what is right and good and moral is out of place. It is always notable to stop and consider when we as individuals call something out that we see as immoral and unjust. But there is especially no time like the present and the immediate future. Because I think there are two forms of resignation that we might otherwise fall victim to. The first is that we might be willing to convince ourselves that something unjust or immoral really isn’t that big a deal - and so we will simply say ‘well, I don’t see the problem.’ This is akin to Abraham saying ‘well, I’m sure that destroying Sodom and Gomorrah is a reasonable thing to do’, even though in his stomach, he feels queasy about it. The second is for a person to conclude that it really isn’t their problem. It’s not my fight, Abraham could conclude regarding Sodom. Maybe one of God’s other prophets can stand up and call out the potential injustice of the situation.
This second issue touches on a complex problem for each of us, and one that pollsters attempted to analyze before and after the election in depth - and that is voters making choices in either their best interests or the best interests of those around them.
Abraham does not live in Sodom and Gomorrah, but his nephew Lot does. So perhaps he feels like he should involve himself in the affairs of the town by blood. But I’ve always understood Abraham to be an international man of justice. He’s not upset because God might kill a family member; he’s upset because God, his God, the God of justice, seems to be doing something unjust to non-Jews, which at this point in history, is simply everyone on earth other than Abraham and Sarah. Abraham does not concern himself with the national origin or otherness of the victims; he simply sees something that is wrong and he stands up to say ‘this is wrong.’
A classic interpretation of this week’s parsha understands that although Noach was called tzaddik be’dorotav – righteous in his generation – Avraham was in contrast simply a tzaddik - righteous in the absolute. Additionally, it is noted by the rabbis that while Noach is said to have walked with God, Abraham is said to have walked before God. The many commentators are interested in the distinction of why Noach is only so-so, but Abraham is elite in his righteousness. But there are some interesting alternative takes.
One fascinating take on this is from a rabbinic midrash in tanchuma, dated to around the 8th century CE. The text teaches us “Noach walked with God” - that the Holy One Blessed Be believed that Noach would not sink down to doing the deeds of the generation of the flood. This can be compared (mashal) to a king who had a child, and he would walk in the role of messenger for his father, and he would go before him on a path with deep mud, and the king relied upon him to not be swallowed up by mud. (Tanchuma 5)
So the standard take, for instance the one that Rashi takes, is that Noach was only sorta good. By comparison to a lousy miserable immoral generation of individuals, Noach was a neutral human, but in comparison to others, that makes him a tzaddik. However, this reading by the Tanchuma flips that idea on its head. In a generation where everyone is an unredeemable horrible wicked jerk, it would have been even harder for Noach to be ok. But God saw Noach and said ‘here is a man that, if he can walk through the mud, I can follow him.’ And so the king let him walk, and he walked.
Abraham is described not as walking with God, but before God. God said ‘here is what I’m going to do.’ And Abraham said ‘Yeah, no, don’t do that, that’s wrong.’ In this moment, we can understand that perhaps God, in the post Cain and Abel, post-Noach and the flood evolution, is still figuring out how to manage humanity. The moral absolutes of the 10 commandments and the 613 mitzvot are still well off in the distance. God has seen small scale evil and widespread evil and God is tinkering with notions of justice. And Abraham responds with protest.
Of this the 19th and 20th century mussar rabbi, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, taught this:
Behold, before us, after all of the wondrous and grand and powerful deeds that we saw in Noach, in his walking the path of the Holy One Blessed Be to do hesed for all the world together, to feed them and to provide for them and care for them, etc. And on account of this, it was said of him with great praise “Noach walked with God.” In any event, there is a higher level than this further that one can claim, because Noach only walked with God, and not before God. Thus his strength was bad, that he needed help. For there are upper reaches of spirituality, which has no end or limit. And a person, it is in their nature to go higher and higher constantly, without any stopping.
In other words, to Rabbi Nosson Tzvi, Noach was a great and holy man, a baal hesed, who tried to get other people to stop sinning, and was a provider and caregiver to both humans and animals. And that he was a good person even when the influences around him were bad. And yet Abraham was an even better human, because while Noach needed God alongside him to make it through, Abraham walked in front of God, with no need for support. But then Nosson Tzvi goes even further to say
. כי למעלות הרוחניות אין קץ וסוף ;והאדם נתבע לעלות ולעלות תמיד בלא הפסק כלל.
‘For there are upper reaches of spirituality, which has no end or limit. And a person, it is in their nature to go higher and higher constantly, without any stopping.’
Which is a totally radical thing for any rabbi to say. It’s not that Noach was so-so, and Abraham was great, so be like Abraham. It’s that Noach was great, and Abraham was even better … And you can be better than Abraham. It might be presumptuous, but I will add my understanding here: Abraham had that one moment to stand up for justice, and he’s a tzaddik. But perhaps there were other moments that he did not seize upon, but that others might have. You can be like Abraham. But you can also, potentially, be better than Abraham. There is no absolute tzaddik. There is only higher and higher.
And in this context, the standing up is important, and the fearlessness is important. Just the other day, you may have come across the same news item that I did - a video of an incident that took place in the New Zealand house of commons. A right wing party in the parliament was attempting to pass a bill that would undo a treaty from 1840 called the Te Tiriti o Waitangi - which was the basis for a certain degree of indigenous Maori rights to both land and leadership. Rising in opposition to the proposal on the parliament floor, Representative Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke begins to speak. But after a few words, she tears up a piece of paper, and (SING) she begins singing, and then breaks into a shout ‘ah Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!’ - at which point several other Maori politicians stand and take the floor and begin to do a haka, which is something of a Maori war dance that many of you rugby and soccer fans will be familiar with. And the gallery begins to sing and chant the words to the haka with them. In the midst of this the speaker of the parliament looks utterly pained and says aloud ‘oh don’t do that’ before being completely drowned out.
That moment - when house speaker Gerry Brownlee, a decidedly pale and not Maori individual, reacts with horror to the official way of proceeding in business by saying ‘oh don’t do that’ - is a fascinating one for me. He knew what was coming - that the normal order and decorum of the chamber was about to go all to hell - and he couldn’t stop it. That the moment went viral on social media and that people around the world now know about the attempt to undo the Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a testament to the power of standing up. Protest is powerful, even when its result is hard to immediately measure. In fact, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is told to us in Genesis 18 even though, ultimately, Abraham did not save the town. The message then is that sometimes an examination of what is just and unjust will conclude unsatisfactorily. That does not mean you do not examine future moments which might be a miscarriage of justice.
A few years ago, there were many such protests. There was the women’s march, and protests against the so-called Muslim ban, and marches regarding police brutality around George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and Antwon Rose, and marches against forced separation of families who crossed the US-Mexico border and were applying for asylum. And there have been vigils for gun violence, and marches and demonstrations in Israel regarding the role of the courts and maintaining democracy, not to mention marches to bring home the hostages. And in many of these cases, one might argue that protest was ineffective. Roe v Wade was overturned. AR-15s are still widely available. The Muslim ban and a host of other anti-immigrant legislation is almost certainly going to be reinstated. However, it would also be accurate to conclude that we have yet to see the impact of something like the women's march because we never know how the long arc of history will react to protest movements. Changing the morality and the sentiment of an entire nation is slow business, and we live in impatient times.
But additionally, we will never know how much worse it could have been without all the advocacy and protest. After Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, states began the process of sorting out their own positions on abortion. You probably didn’t read about it in the news, because there were some other notable things that occurred on Tuesday November 5th. But Abortion was on the ballot in 10 states. And in 7 of those states, the right to an abortion was enshrined by voters in their state constitutions - states that did not have constitutional abortion protections before. So even though you can’t draw a straight line from the Women’s march to, say, the state of Arizona’s decision to guarantee a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, I would argue that nothing exists in a vacuum.
Mass movements define the morals and trends of a society. The protests against the Vietnam war didn’t end the war immediately, but they certainly demonstrated to the powers that be and to the American people which way much of the country felt about it, and moments like that carry forward in the collective memory for generations. The things we say and do today, the reactions or non-reactions we undertake over the next four years, will have a defining impact on what America values and believes, and specifically what Jewish Americans value and believe. So we can’t simply stay quiet and say ‘ok, fine by me’ when we see something that is unjust, because it’s simply not who we are. There will be a hundred little moments and reminders of that going forward, and we will each individually and collectively have to pick our battles.
But pick them. Walk before God. Do not sink into the mud of a collective morality that is not our own and is not just or Godly or derived from Torah. And do not be dismayed by the uncertainty of the effect. Abraham did not return to his tent, go inside, and close the flap. And neither should we.
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