Saving Ourselves From Being Like Sodom

At our services on November 15th and 16th, Rabbi Lizzi sermonized on the sin of Sodom, which, the rabbis tell us, was primarily their failure to share their abundance with others. In contrast to Abraham, whose hospitality toward the three messengers opens the story, Sodom is portrayed as operating from a scarcity mindset which drove them to selfishly hoard resources and turn away the needy from their city. And when the odd stranger does make it into Sodom, things don’t go too well for them, to put it mildly. How does our society today echo the evils of this cautionary tale of the dangers of inhospitality?

****

For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates.

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

We see one of the most iconic conversations in all of history, certainly in Biblical history, happen in this week’s Torah portion. Here’s the scene… Abraham is sitting outside in his tent recovering from surgery on a very sensitive place on his body, especially for a man in his 90s, and three men approach his tent. He’s never seen them before, he doesn't know them– they could be dangerous, they could be thieves– but he doesn’t approach them with suspicion or fear. He yells to Sarah, make some lunch! We’ve got guests! And he begs them to come inside and take shelter from the heat, clean off their feet, and break bread together. As it turns out these guests tell him that next year they’ll come back and when they do, he and Sarah will in fact be parents of their own biological son, something they had given up on, had thought impossible given their age. The guests eat, rest and then leave and head in the direction of a place called Sodom– the cities of Sodom and Gemorrah. 

And after the three mysterious guests have just left Abraham and Sarah’s tent headed toward Sodom, God muses to God’s self… Shall I hide from Abraham what I’m about to do? I have singled him out, that the nations of the world will one day bless themselves by him and his descendants by doing what is just and right, tzedakah u’mishpat…”  And so God says to Abraham, “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave! I will go down to see whether they have acted according to the outcry that has reached Me.”

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֔ה זַעֲקַ֛ת סְדֹ֥ם וַעֲמֹרָ֖ה כִּי־רָ֑בָּה וְחַ֨טָּאתָ֔ם כִּ֥י כָבְדָ֖ה מְאֹֽד׃ אֵֽרְדָה־נָּ֣א וְאֶרְאֶ֔ה הַכְּצַעֲקָתָ֛הּ הַבָּ֥אָה אֵלַ֖י עָשׂ֣וּ ׀ כָּלָ֑ה וְאִם־לֹ֖א אֵדָֽעָה׃ 

You know what happens next because Jews love what happens next: Abraham negotiates with God. We LOVE this story because it exemplifies a value we hold dear, which is that no one is above the law – NOT EVEN GOD. And so Abraham, talking to the creator of the known universe, negotiates, advocates. Abraham responds to God, not with bravado but with great humility (even if the humility does feel a tad bit contrived). He says, “I’m just dust and ashes, no one really, but I have to ask… Would the judge of all the earth of all not act justly? הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כׇּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט׃ 

What if there are 40 innocent people in Sodom and Gemorrah, will you spare them then? Yes, God, says, for 40 I’ll spare the towns. What if the 40 should lack five, how about 35? Yes, God for 35. What about if there are only 20 good people in the towns? Yes, God says, for 20 I’ll spare the cities. And finally they stop negotiating at 10 and they part ways. This is one of the places we get the model of Abraham as provider of radical hospitality, and Abraham the upstander, the advocate for justice. It’s inspiring.

The only thing is, the towns of Sodom and Gemorrah are destroyed. Which raises the question– what was this sin, or culture of sin, that was so pervasive, so corrosive, so kaved, heavy, so unavoidable, for everyone in the town, that the consequence had to be destruction? Could you even imagine how terrible these Sodomites were, how craven, evil, bloodthirsty, monstrous, terrible people they must have been to deserve the fate they got? Or is it possible that the people of Sodom weren’t actually so different from us, and this story is here as a cautionary tale to help us avoid becoming them, or to see how we already have? And in any case, to change course if we recognize ourselves in this story.

So what does our tradition, the rabbis of history, say the people of Sodom did that led to their downfall? The Torah gives us some hints, but the rabbis of the Talmud and the Midrash (1500-2000 years ago) give us a lot more juicy, gory detail about these sins that led to this great outcry that led to the city’s destruction. For example…

The soil of Sodom and Gemorrah was so rich and fertile that when a farmer rinsed off greens grown in the fields gold dust would shake out. And the towns’ people said, “We live in a town with an abundance of food and water, precious stones, gold and pearls can be found in our land. Any visitor, and guest, any immigrant coming through here is coming only to strip us of our wealth. Let’s keep them out, and drive out those who manage to come in, especially the poor and the sick.” It is said that in Sodom people built fences around their gardens to keep even the birds from eating from their trees.

So the sin of Sodom and Gemorrah is selfishness– a specific kind of selfishness: not sharing one’s abundance with strangers and the vulnerable. Having so much, and not seeing that the abundance you have is made holy, made meaningful, through sharing it, and not just with it with your family, but specifically, sharing it with people who can’t access that wealth themselves, or can’t speak the language, or don’t have a home or are otherwise considered strangers or outsiders. What a contrast to where we began our story today, with Abraham opening his tent and table to strangers.

The rabbis in the Mishnah discuss 4 different character traits in human beings. The one that says: “mine is mine, and yours is mine” is a wicked person. The one that says: “mine is yours and yours is yours” is a pious, righteous person. The one that says: “What’s mine is yours and yours is mine,” is an idiot, (am haaretz), an unlearned person. The one that says: “What’s mine is mine, and yours is yours,” this is a morally mediocre person, and some say this is a Sodom-like person, Middat Sdom.  

Worth noting Middat Sodom is not the wicked person… Middat Sdom is just the one that is indifferent to someone’s circumstances, needs, and vulnerability. I’ll do me, you do you. Your business is not my problem, my business is not your problem. 

How can this lead to the downfall of society? [solicit answers?] Scarcity mindset, hoarding, looking the other way when evil is done….

Let’s take for example, a guy dumping toxic waste into the water on his beachfront property. It’s his waste and it’s his beach. But everyone drinks the water. If everyone drinks poisoned water, they all get sick and maybe even die. Think Flint, Michigan. Here’s another… many people don’t have health care plans (for a variety of reasons, they can’t afford them, they don’t have jobs, they aren’t citizens and can’t get public insurance) but there’s an outbreak of an epidemic. If only some people in the population get vaccinated, the epidemic will rage on. So it’s great if individuals take care of themselves, but if they don’t think about how to make sure everyone, including people without healthcare, get care, the virus will rage on and everyone will be at risk. This is why the rabbis tell the story of a guy in a boat drilling a hole under his seat and the guy behind him says what are you doing? First guy says– it’s just under my seat! But the guy behind him says yeah, but when this ship sinks we all go down.” 

And it’s even more subtle than that… think of the number of unhoused people in a city like Chicago who will die on the streets this winter from cold, and how many homes across the city have not just extra beds, but extra rooms, how many office buildings remain empty and open– but not for strangers. 

Here’s another Sodom story from the midrash: When a poor traveler came through, the people of Sodom would give him a dollar with their own name written on it. When the traveler would use the money to try to buy bread, no one would sell it to him. Eventually when the person died of hunger each Sodomite would reclaim his dollar. Funny, right? Only if you think cruelty and harm is funny. 

Sodom is cruelty, for sport. Barbarism, because they could, because it was funny. A social agreement wherein bullying and meanness to people not like your people, is not just normal, but the law. The sin that you might think of coming from Sodom (which has to do with sex) is only an issue because the townspeople force the guests coming to their city into it violently, coercively and in a gang mob situation (we didn’t read it today but that’s in Genesis 19– it’s very overt and disturbing!). In Sodom, cruelty, violence, bullying, coercion, violence, and shaming became normalized and anyone who went against it was punished. 

Abraham’s great niece, Lot’s daughter Pelotit saw a poor man languishing in the town square for lack of food– she felt sorry for him and the next time she went to the well to draw water, hid some food in her pitcher, and would secretly give it to him. The people of Sodom kept wondering– why does he not die? How does he stay alive? When they finally figured out the reason they took Pelotit out and burned her alive. As she was being taken out to be burned, she prayed, “God of the universe, exact justice and judgment on my behalf from the Sodomites.”

The Talmud writes, her cry– Tza’akatah– rose up to the Holy One, and God said, as we heard in the beginning, “Let me go down there and see what is causing the outcry that has come to me.” God said, “if the people of Sodom have done what this woman cries, I will turn the city’s foundations over from bottom and top and top to bottom.”

Meanness, crassness, humiliation, used to be at the fringe of our shared public discourse– no serious person would imagine speaking on national television let alone imagine winning a campaign for public office using such expressions of low character and simple school yard bully behavior. Since Trump’s first campaign in 2016 paired with the rise of social media over the past 2 decades, public shaming, bullying, and cruelty have become mainstream, an acceptable way of flexing dominance and power in the public sphere, whether in this country, in Israel or in many countries around the world. You’re all 12 and 13 years old– sadly, this is all you’ve ever known. That way of speaking and wielding authority just won another election in this country and it is careening toward the realm of policy, codifying Middat Sdom, radical individualism to the point of cruelty, removing the public safeguards that protect the most vulnerable from the most powerful, or powerfully indifferent. This has gone from the fringe to the norm, and our tradition, emphatically, pleadingly, desperately asks us to see it, and to know how dangerous it is, and to not be sucked in, to not be coerced because everyone else is doing it. Not only not to get sucked in because it hurts individuals– though it does. But rather, because it will lead to our destruction. And I know that sounds dramatic, but this time it won’t be by God’s hand but rather by our own, by a kind of day by day dissolving of the social bonds that hold us in life, in love, in community, in allyship with other groups, in trust in a justice system that holds people accountable and where no one is above the law, and trust in a government that functions to serve people, all people. When the trust and bonds that hold a society together corrode and break under the weight of a mindset of scarcity, suspicion of the other, individualism, cruelty, callousness… my friends, if we go down that road there will be nothing left to save. Perhaps that is what happened in Sodom and Gemorrah– perhaps it was less about God sending down fire, and more about the cities’ slow self-destruction from the inside, sparing no one.

So what do we do? Let us not normalize any of this. Let us not say to ourselves, “I’ll keep my head down and in 4 years I’ll vote for new leaders.” It is easy to put the responsibility of changing course into the hands of those who have the most and who wield more power. But the places we can make change now is here, here in our day-to-day lives, in our places of work, shopping, school, shul, local issues, local government. We will need to work harder to fight the current of meanness and dehumanization that has pervaded our public discourse– I’ve seen it infect relationships at work, in our homes, in our friendships, it’s contageous. We’ll need to work harder to be kind to our friends and family. We’ll need to work harder to not rage-scroll the news, soaking up the horrors, and then  pass on their energy to our loved ones. When we walk down the street, remember to catch eyes with the person outside the grocery store, to affirm their simple humanity, and to help them in some concrete way. We will need to work harder as we continue to engage on the subject of Israel and Palestine and care about the welfare of Gazans and West Bank Palestinians and Israelis– Jews and Arabs and everyone else– and not see anyone in this equation as strangers or outsiders who threaten our family but as all part of one family in a one place that needs our love and support, because all need to thrive in that land for any to survive let alone thrive. We will need to figure out how to be like Abraham and like Pelotit– which let’s be honest, Abraham did not get what he fought for, and Pelotit did, but she paid the ultimate price for her principles. So let us also figure out how to resist systems that hurt people, yet do it in a way that affirms and preserves our own humanity and safety and sanity too. 

The affluence of Sodom lasted only 52 years, says the Midrash, 25 of which God made the mountains around them shake as a warning that they should repent and change their ways, but they didn’t. When cruelty, bullying, oppression and violence become the norm in a society, when we countenance and resign ourselves to it and justify it or ignore it… we don’t need God to send down fire and brimstone. That society is already decaying from within. But we can decide to swim against the current– to be better, do better, to do the opposite of the callousness being modeled from on high, and set better examples for one another and for our kids, starting right here, wherever that is, lest we forget that we are children of Abraham. I believe we can do this and we must– the sake of humanity– our’s and every one else’s. Shabbat shalom.