Against the Backdrop of Selfishness and Greed, Be a Blessing

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on November 1st. Rabbi Lizzi delivered a sermon on the sin of Sodom. Or, rather, the sins of Sodom! According to the rabbis, these included selfishness, arrogance, apathy — a failure to share their abundance of resources with the needy. In our own time of greed, how can we choose to bless our neighbors instead of, say, covering them in honey and put them on a wall for the hornets?

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

Transcript

Transcript

Recognizing we had not one, but two really awesome, thoughtful, smart, deep reflections on this week's Torah portion. I want to keep this short, and actually there'll be a little bit of crowd participation, but it's always, I always want to, like, wrestle with what with the Torah describes. And I want to talk about a section that they did not touch, and I understand why. All right, so you've already heard about Avram chosen from among all of the people on planet earth at that time to enter into a covenant with the Creator of the universe, a covenant where his job is. If you were listening very closely, you would have heard this. It was in the very first Aliyah that Eva read, hey, yeah, bracha, say that after me, hey, bracha. It means be a blessing. Be a blessing. That is the first, and I would say most important thing that the creator of the universe says to the first Jew go out there and be a blessing, heI bracha, and from the minute he is given these instructions, he is challenged with what it means to be a blessing. What does it mean to be a blessing when there is a famine in the land that you were just told to go to and you have to leave? What does it mean to be a blessing when you think you and your lie your wife's lives are at risk, and so you have to lie about who your wife is and give her to Pharaoh. What does it mean to be a blessing when Pharaoh gets mad at you and sends you packing? What does it mean to be a blessing when you have a property dispute with your nephew? Right? All of these, like very, sort of relatable kinds of experiences that I think all of us you know, like, what would I do in that moment? What would it mean to be a blessing? In any case, everything that happens in the Torah after this moment, I would argue, is the torah asking us, what does it mean to be a blessing? Whether the stories are about Abraham. And of course, most of them are not. Most of them are not about Abraham. We meet Abraham. We read about him for a couple partios, a couple sections, and then we read about his kids and his grandkids and all of the many descendants of Abraham and the whole Torah. You could say the stories that are about him, but mostly the stories that are not are a question. What does it mean to be a blessing? How do I show up as a blessing? And so sometimes it's not just the Torah being kids in the B mitzvah class have maybe heard me say this before, and if you haven't, you'll hear me say it again. The Torah isn't always here to be prescriptive, to tell you what to do. Sometimes it's here to be descriptive, to describe what humanity and the world actually look and feel like sometimes, and sometimes it's not good, right? Sometimes it's prescriptive, and oftentimes it's descriptive. And so when it's descriptive, that can still be an opportunity to learn, what does it mean to be a blessing? What should I not do if I want to be a blessing? And so, as I mentioned, there's a moment in this week's tour reading when Avram and his nephew, Lot get into a little disagreement about the land they're sharing, and they part ways. Avram stays in the land of Canaan, and Lot, his nephew, journeys eastward and settles near a place called Sodom, in English, Sodom and it is described in two ways. One of them is very full of wicked sinners. This is the place he chose to put his tent. And there are hundreds, maybe 1000s of places, locations named in the Torah. This is the only one I can think of that is described that way, very full of wicked sinners. And you have to wonder, what was so terrible about that place. It's intriguing, right? We could guess. But you also might recognize the name. Put your hand in the air if that name sounds kind of familiar as a place you might have heard of right in next week's Torah portion. You know this Eliot in next week's Torah portion. This is the name of the city that God wants to wipe off the map because of its wickedness. And this is the city that Avram will argue for, will negotiate for, on the basis of the possibility that there might be 40 okay, even if not 4035, maybe 3025 2010 maybe good people in this city. And spoiler alert, the city is destroyed. So the question remains, My God, what was so awful about what was happening there? What was so pervasive that it literally touched everyone that there were not even 10 people to be found who were not somehow corrupted by whatever this evil was. So the Torah gives its own sort of brief explanation. It refers to Sodom, actually, in this week's Torah portion as a well. Irrigated, well resourced land, a lush land, a garden of God. And so the rabbi's of the Talmud, at least 1000 years later, thought to themselves, my gosh, you know. And they looked at other references in the Torah. What does it mean this kind of language about the lushness? It meant that the ground just, you know how we say, hamotzi, leche, minha, Aretz, like that, God brings forth bread from the ground. And actually, mostly bread doesn't grow out of the ground. Flour grows out of the ground, and then we human beings turn it into bread. But in sadom, the bread just grew out of the ground in beautiful loaves and shapes. And you know, just imagine challah growing in your backyard. I mean, I don't know how to make challah. It's like I have a lot of talents, but that's not one of them. But if it grew in my backyard, I would put it on the table every week. That's how holy I am. But the people of sadom, they had bread growing out of the ground. When they shook the leaves of the plants gold dust would just fall right off into their fingers. That's how lush and how well resourced this land was. And so the text describes these three strangers going to sadom to spend the night there, and the people of sadom threatening to do some very violent, unsavory things to these people passing through and that particular violence is where the word associated, usually with the place sadom, comes from. If you are wondering, that's what the townspeople were threatening to do to these strangers. Parents ask your or kids ask your parents about it later. And it's on the basis of just these three short sentences about what the sodomites threatened to do to their guests that the prophet Ezekiel says much later the great sin of Saddam. Are you ready for it was arrogance. Was arrogance, he writes, was in the voice of God, the city had plenty of bread, ease and tranquility, yet it did not support the poor and the needy in their haughtiness, their arrogance. God says they committed an abomination against me. So just to repeat the great sin of Sodom is not actually whatever you may have heard or associate with the name of the city. Rather, according to the prophet Ezekiel, the city had plenty of bread, plenty of resources, had ease and tranquility, and yet did not support the poor and the needy. Their selfishness was their abomination, and led to the downfall of that entire city. Okay, what's his name? I want to call on him. All right, Grant and everyone in the room, raise your hand if you know someone who can be selfish. Okay, for those of you who aren't raising your hands, I want to live wherever you live. Okay. Now, keep your hand up. Raise your other hand if you every so often, can be selfish. Yeah. Okay, okay, all right. Put him down. Put him down. Raise your hand if you know somebody who's like, unusually generous. You know just a person who you can't really how did they get this way? I don't know, but they're great. They're so generous. Okay, leave your hand up. Raise your hand if, every so often you can exhibit unusual generosity. Every so often it happens, yeah, okay, just appreciate that. Both hands were up all over the room here, right? And so what I'm seeing here is probably, like most people in most places, we have both tendencies. We have tendencies towards selfishness, we also have tendencies towards generosity, right? And whether or not you are an official descendant of Abraham, I think we all want to be blessings. We all want to lean into how to be less selfish and more generous. But doesn't happen on its own right. We need and benefit from models, you know, thinking about those people who remind us what generosity looks like. We benefit from inspiration, from coaching, we benefit from tradition, and we know we'll get it wrong sometimes, but it's important to remember, as we look out at our own society and even in this room full of really good people, we're not saints, but we're also not irredeemably sinners. Nobody would refer to this room of people as very, very wicked and sinners against God because of all the generosity that's here and in most places in the world.

So you have to ask if a society. Be is so completely overrun with toxic selfishness like sadom. How does that happen? How does that happen that a society can become completely shot through, so that no one is exempt from being saturated by selfishness? And that is an actual question. How could that happen? How could that happen? And I am interested in what you think about that. All right mark in the back, stand up really loud so that people can hear you. Stand up for your morals and values. That's the opposite. Not how do we avoid becoming so selfish, but so we would do the opposite. You would have morals and values that you would squash and not follow and allow people to do immoral things in front of you. That's how right. That's, I know, I know this is like it seems. Well, why are we? But let's, let's actually, thank you. Yes, fear

controls people, fear of being from peer pressure, or fear of being reprised on if you did something opposite

of what. So I don't know if people heard fear, fear of what people would do to you if you went against, like, cultural norm, fear of maybe scarcity. Like, oh, if I do something nice for somebody else, maybe I'll lose the nice thing that I have. Okay, what else? Oh, Sasha, yeah, yeah, you got the mic right into it. Like, if

you don't listen saying how other people feel and you only think about yourself or like other people like you, you have to think about everyone and listen to everyone.

Beautiful. Did everybody hear that? Okay? She said, if you're only thinking about yourself and people like you, you know, and not actually thinking about the greater good. All right, maybe, maybe, all right. Two more. Ricky. Othering, everyone Okay, so it's and that's sort of like an amplified what Sasha said, it's not just people like my family and people like me. It's just me. I've got to protect. I look out for number one. I'm number one. Everybody else is number 25,000, I do not care about what happens to anyone else other than me, and everybody in a society thinks that way. God, could you imagine? Okay, maybe one more. Was there? All right, one more in the back. Yes, stand up. I'm Molly.

I'm in grad school, and one of my friends, one of my colleagues, studies this, her recent

takeaway is when people are I mean, people are afraid of not having enough for themselves and their families.

So the kind of the fear that Christine was talking about, the fear of scarcity, the fear of losing, yeah, thank you, amazing. I think we could probably go on but, but we can stop it there. And if you want to keep talking over lunch about that question, all of these are things to just notice when we feel or experience who doesn't feel scared sometimes, right? Who doesn't sometimes feel like you got to look out for number one, right? All of these different things are all they're all tendencies we have. The question is, what do you do when you notice you're actually operating from those feelings? So the rabbi's who wrote later books of Jewish literature were also really troubled by the idea that a society could become so corrupt that it warrants destruction. Now let's even forget the idea that, like God, destroyed the town, because you could imagine, and we know that societies that disappear often are corrupted from the inside before they're destroyed from the outside. There can be a moral rot from within that actually destroys the city long before anything happens on the outside, from the inside out. So the Rabbi of the Talmud give us a little more color to the kind of selfishness that you're all describing, and I want to share just a few of these stories with you. They're short. Can I so the people of sadom, they said to each other, since we live in a land where bread comes out of the earth and the leaves have the dust of gold on them, we have everything we need. What need have we for immigrants? This is in the Talmud. What need have we for immigrants? For travelers come. Let us. Let us cause the proper treatment of travelers to be forgotten from our land, because all those people stand to do is divest us of our riches. And so it was right. It was a strategy set at the top, and they instituted laws and customs not just to punish but torment the unsuspecting Wayfarer who might pass through. And here are some of these customs. They had beds on which they would lay their guests, visiting from out of town. And when a guest was longer than the bed, they would cut him down, either from the head or the feet, I would presume. And when he was too short for the bed, they would stretch him. Here's another when a good person, when a poor person, would come to Sodom each and every person. Would give him $1 and they would write their own name on the dollar. And then everyone in town would make sure that that poor person could not spend the money. They would go from store to store, and people would say, Oh, I'm sorry, I don't take that kind of currency. Oh, I'm sorry, I don't. And when the person would die of hunger, then everyone would come back and reclaim their dollar. And so you can hear in those stories not just selfishness but cruelty, right? Like delight in the pain of others, the story of the dollar. It's not like they even earned interest on giving the poor man the dollar. They just get to laugh at his suffering when they come and reclaim it. It's so mean, it's so mean, it's it's like the It's the essence of bullying, mean, selfish behavior. But that was Sodom. They created a culture of delighting in the suffering of others, and that is why it uniquely earned the infamy of being a place of irredeemable wickedness against God. There's another story about a young woman who would take bread out to starving people in a pitcher so the people of Sodom wouldn't see. And when the matter was revealed, the people of the town gathered together and smeared her in honey and hung her from the wall of the town so that Hornets would sting her to death. And there's another story, same thing happens, where they don't take her out and smear her with honey, and the Hornets get her but they burn her alive. These are all stories in the Talmud. What strikes me about that last story is that the young woman is a kid, and these stories about the people who are exhibiting compassion in the face of a society that is pressuring them not to feel it, are girls. They're young girls trying to help strangers or friends get food or resources they need to survive, and they are turned into an example for all to see to show that nobody should take a chance on being compassionate and kind, right? It showcases the unique challenge, I think, experienced by anyone who is more sensitive to the needs of suffering people, often girls and women and mothers who know what it feels like to see a child suffer, right? And they're told, and I should say we are often told, You're being weak or stupid or naive, right? There's a reason why these people are suffering. Maybe they deserve it, right? And I know it sounds perverse, but I'm actually seeing head nods in the room of when this has been said to you at some point when you were exhibiting kindness or compassion for someone who everyone else said doesn't deserve it. How does a society become so corrupt from the inside, by teaching its children to be afraid, to trust their instincts toward compassion and goodness and generosity and instead, to embrace the worst selfishness of those adult models, modeling it for all to see a society becomes so corrupt from the inside when it criminalizes immigrants for simply existing, for simply existing and pushes its own people and excuse me, and punishes its own people for extending kindness to them, telling its own people that giving to others reduces what you have and caring for others, whomever they are, undermines your safety. Right, a society becomes that corrupt by telling its children that the ideal when you grow up is to be rich above all else, not so that you can share it, but so that you can hoard it and deprive others of it and laugh at their misery. It is sociopathic, and obviously it hits very close to home, right? It hits very close to home, right? Our president is building a $230 million golden ballroom on the ruins of the people's house, to quote my colleague from last week, giving gifts of billions of dollars to countries with authoritarian leaders, while 42 million Americans this week lost access to supplemental nutrition. Right? And those same leaders will not lift a finger to help them recover. It, apparently, the amount of money it costs to get the nutrition that a lot of these, you know, it's 42 million Americans and 23 million families. So a lot of those people are children. It's $186 a week for a lot of those people, it's, you know, 100, for lack of $186 a week people are going to go hungry and, you know, people can't be bothered. One has to marvel at the similarities to sadom, a land that is lush and has plenty of resources. Is to share with all its inhabitants, as well as immigrants, and yet, in which leaders hoard that wealth and punish shame, belittle and bully and threaten people who are trying to balance the scales or trying to behave with kindness and decency and humanity. Immanuel Kant, who's a moral philosopher, created what he called the categorical imperative, which is a general guide for how to be in the world. His version of Hey ye bracha be a blessing. And the Categorical Imperative says that whatever you are doing must be universalizable. Whatever moral behavior that you choose to do. If everyone could do it, then you should do it. But if you're making an exception for yourself on the basis that other people won't get what you have, or have access that you have, or you're treating others as stepping stones while you step over them, it will only be a matter of time before the tables are turned and before you are the one being stepped on. So maybe don't step on people, the tradition says, but we're still early in the Torah. We haven't gotten the 10 Commandments yet. We haven't received Torah at Sinai, and so at this point, we get the opening lines of the Parsha. Keith bracha, be a blessing. Be a blessing. So in a world where selfishness has become the norm, where kindness is labeled as criminal, now what does it mean to be a blessing? What does it mean to be a blessing? And maybe it seems obvious, but I actually this mark is where I want to turn it back to you to reclaim. What does it mean to be a blessing? And I would love to hear like four people, maybe share for you in this moment, what does it mean to be a blessing for you? You don't have to be Abraham. You can just be you from wherever you sit in the world.

Eva, bring it. It means to like, stand up for what you believe is right, if, even if other people don't also share those same values.

Did everybody hear that? What does it mean to be a blessing? Keith, using

economic privilege to support others, so donating equal aid, or going to neighborhoods where people are so vulnerable and

economically supporting them, in places where people are literally afraid to go outside to patronize stores using what economic resources you have to go and support those places and people in whatever way you can in the back there, yes, stand up so people can hear you being respectful and being grateful for what you have beautiful right here. Stand up, always being a friend for people. We could go on and on. But if there is a question that you leave here with today, I hope it is, what am I doing in this moment and in the next moment to be a blessing, and in the moment after that, and in the moment after that, hey, yeah, bracha, say it again with me. Hey, yeah, bracha, Shabbat, shalom. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai