Changing The World Ten Righteous People At A Time

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on November 7th, 2025, when Rabbi Steven reflected on an interfaith service and protest outside the ICE Detention Facility in Broadview. 

Our tradition insists that the world can be transformed by the goodness of even a few people acting together as a mitzvot minyan; if there had been just ten righteous souls in Sodom and Gomorrah, their tale of two cities would have gone down a little differently. 

And if ten righteous souls wrote us a review on Apple Podcasts or their podcast player of choice, told their friends about this podcast, and donated at the link below to help us create more inspired down-to-earth Jewish content like this, well, who knows what bright future we could create together!

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

Transcript

Transcript

This sermon was delivered at our service on November 7th, 2025. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai podcast or watch it on our YouTube channel.
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I have this memory. My family and I are waiting at the airport for a flight overseas. I think we were traveling to Europe for spring break. The invasion of Iraq had just started — so I must have been about fifteen. Every television at the airport is playing news about the war on loop. And as we’re watching clips of troops marching across the desert and smoke rising from bombed-out buildings, my stepfather leans over to me and says: “Just tell anyone who asks that we’re Canadian.”

I was thinking about this moment recently, in response to a question posed by the journalist M. Gessen. They ask: “When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns toward the world is the face of a monster — what does that say about you?” They go on to argue that, in their experience, it has been far too easy for Americans to abrogate responsibility for the things being done in our name. We pay taxes, but it’s not like we get to decide where that money goes. We enjoy the privileges of citizenship, but those privileges fall short of dictating policy. We vote, but we didn’t vote for that or for them.

Yet regardless of how you feel about the actions of this country, if you are a citizen you have benefited from a “Pax Americana” — a period of relative peace maintained by our military and economic dominance since the end of WWII. For those of us living inside its borders, American hegemony has meant a lot of good things (of course, for some more than others; the benefits have never been equally distributed). And for some living outside our borders, it has meant being the beneficiary of USAID and other programs meant to reshape the world for the better. But for many people living overseas, the consequence of American hegemony is to have only known a United States that is imperious, violent, and cruel. Think about Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or any of the other places where we have interfered or intervened in the name of our own interests, where the face that America turns toward the world is war.

https://youtu.be/nVJXbkNyLTg

This is a face that we, as Americans and people who live here, have started to see more clearly. Our government is increasingly visiting the same animus reserved for our “enemies” on its own people. And now that the military is quite literally on our doorstep, as the National Guard is deployed on our streets and federal agents detain our most vulnerable, as our poor and our hungry are put under siege by this administration — we can no longer ignore the monster that America has become, and perhaps has always been. We certainly can’t claim to be from somewhere else given that these acts of state-sanctioned violence and cruelty are happening here, in the United States, the place we call home. This problem is our problem. And so, to borrow from M. Gessen, we have to ask ourselves: “How can I be a good citizen of a bad state?”

It feels odd to assert my patriotic bona fides (it’s something we don’t do very often on the left), but I want to be clear: I am not anti-American. In fact, I’m quite proud to be from this country. I find purpose in the promise and project of this nation; that we can create e pluribus unum, out of many one — even if we speak and eat and pray and work and love in different ways. How lucky we are to live in a place where the world’s diversity is just down the block or a short bus ride away. I believe in a society that celebrates difference and offers equal opportunity. But this version of the United States is not guaranteed. It is something we must constantly maintain and protect. And this requires that we stay honest about the ways that we have fallen short of this vision.

I imagine that how some of us feel about America right now is not far from what God must have felt, gazing down at Sodom and Gomorrah. For the Torah, these cities are paradigmatic of a bad state — places that have become so bent by violence and cruelty, it seems like there is no possible recourse for them. “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great,” God exclaims. “Their sin weighs heavily upon them.” But what, exactly, is so terrible about these cities that God would decide that justice would only be found in their destruction? The prophet Ezekiel gives us a hint: gaon, he declares, arrogance is the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. Despite being blessed with abundance, its citizens did not help those in need. Instead, fear replaced their capacity for generosity with greed and paranoia— worried that the traveler, or the person seeking a better place to live, or someone from the other side of town, or perhaps even their neighbor would try to take what was theirs. And so they turned to violence and cruelty, not only toward the people who lived outside their walls but toward each other (Rabbi Lizzi shared a few stories of their most egregious behavior in her sermon last Shabbat; I recommend listening to it).

But in steps Abraham. He challenges God, not once but six times. “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?” Abraham asks. “Will you wipe out these cities and not forgive them?” He negotiates with God, asking for Sodom and Gomorrah to be spared on behalf of 50, 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 righteous people. If only ten righteous people are found, then God should avert the cities’ destruction. This plea, Rabbi Avital Hochstein writes, defies the ordinary logic that the bad should be punished and the good should be rewarded. She teaches: “It is a call for God to tolerate, to bear, to accept, or even to absorb evil; to refuse to let the wickedness of others dictate God’s response. In essence, Abraham asks that human society be judged by the merits of those who choose good and justice, rather than condemned because of those who choose corruption and wrongdoing.”

Here, I believe Abraham makes two bold claims. First, he argues that the presence of righteous acts — however small, no matter how insignificant they may seem — maintains the possibility for societal change. A minyan of people who do good things is not a lot of people who do good things (it’s just ten people). This is especially true in cities as populous as Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet that’s sufficient, he says. That is enough.

The second claim is that even those who have been bent by a culture of violence and cruelty can still change. Will you simply wipe out these cities, Abraham asks, and not provide a path toward forgiveness? Here he points out that people who do good things are not just people who do good things; they are also people who help other people do good things. And this capacity for righteousness exists in all of us, no matter how much this moment may call us toward hatred, apathy, or despair.

Rabbi Zohar Atkins notes that Abraham operates in what moral philosophers call an epistemic modality: he doesn’t know how many righteous people there are in Sodom and Gomorrah, if any at all, nor whether those who choose to to bad will change their hearts and choose to do good — yet ulay, perhaps, Abraham argues, there are innocent among the wicked. “The perhaps acknowledge[s] the boundary of his knowledge,” Rabbi Atkins teaches, “While refusing to let that boundary silence his voice.” For Abraham, the “perhaps” is sufficient. The possibility, not the inevitability, of things changing for the better is reason enough to fight.

So what does it mean to be a good citizen of a bad state? It means, like Abraham, taking a risk (it is no small thing to negotiate with God). Abraham sees the injustice of the world and refuses to ignore it; he insists on justice, but the kind of justice that opens the door for the future he wants to live in. And so I ask us: what is the future we want to live in? We must be insistent about its possibility, even if we don’t know if it will come true. We must be bold in our pursuit of it, even if we don’t know the impact of our actions. We must not forget the power of one righteous act, because one becomes ten, and ten becomes twenty; twenty, thirty; thirty, forty; forty, forty five; forty five, fifty.

Earlier today, I attended Faithful Friday — a multifaith gathering at the Broadview ICE Detention Center. It was organized by Faith Over Fear, a coalition of leaders from spiritual and cultural communities across the city of Chicago. We shared songs and rituals from our traditions — Indigenous American, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim. Together, we presented a letter requesting entry into the detention center to provide pastoral support for the people being held there (which is their legal right). And while we knew the chance of being allowed in was negligible (ICE said no), we still showed up for the possibility of what might happen if we come together as a community.

At the same time, Rabbi Lizzi was downtown at a press conference with United for Chicago. This gathering brought together clergy, business owners, civic leaders, and philanthropists from all over the city to denounce the tactics being used by ICE in our neighborhoods.

These were different ways of doing something good, but they reminded me of a simple truth: sometimes being a good citizen just means showing up. It means accepting the invitation to be present; that might mean taking to the streets, that might mean attending a meeting, that might mean sitting down at the table to have a hard conversation. That might mean carrying a whistle in your pocket. That might mean being present for school drop-off and pickup. That might mean patronizing migrant-owned businesses that are in desperate need of customers. Because showing up is one way to ensure that there is a minyan of people doing good things, at least ten people who care and who will bear witness and who will work together to maintain our vision of a just future. Our tradition teaches us that this small number is enough, not only to avert destruction — but to find a path forward. And if we all show up, in whatever way we can, that number will grow and grow until the possibility of the future we want to live in becomes an inevitability.

Shabbat shalom.