It’s a question I’ve been hearing a lot these days, especially in the wake of recent debates in the public square and varying visions about what kind of country we should be: What are biblical values?
I suspect many of us are familiar with what some have claimed are biblical values: a narrow view of morality that limits personal freedoms, stigmatizes diversity, restricts the rights of women, excludes immigrants, and leaves the most vulnerable without a safety net. According to this perspective, those who wield power can do as they please, often with impunity, while the rest are expected to endure and comply.
But is that what our tradition teaches? Is that what would be revealed, in the final analysis, as the values that undergird and animate the Torah?
Sometimes, to understand a thing, we need to see its opposite. Our Torah portion this week, Parashat Vayera, does just that. In Genesis chapters 18 and 19, we’re told of the infamous twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, places that were evidently so twisted and depraved that God declares them beyond saving, worthy only of total destruction.
Our tradition holds up the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as paradigmatic symbols of evil. When the prophet Isaiah, for example, castigates the Israelites for abandoning justice, exploiting the poor, and creating a society so unjust that it could only end in ruin, he calls them k’tzinei S’dom, “chieftains of Sodom” and am Amorah, “nation of Gomorrah” (Is. 1:10). One of the most disturbing stories in all of the Bible – the story of the concubine of Gibeah in the book of Judges, in which a woman is horrifically assaulted and killed by men from the tribe of Benjamin, leading to a brutal civil war that nearly wipes out the Benjaminites – is deliberately based on this story, in order to demonstrate just how violent and vicious Israelite society had become at that time. And when the book of Deuteronomy portends the destruction of Israel for its failure to abide by the covenantal requirements to build a just society, it describes the doom in terms that are strikingly similar to those used in our parashah regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
So what made Sodom and Gomorrah so sinful, exactly? What were the characteristics of their culture that constitute the antithesis of the values our tradition wants us to embrace as a people and upon which the Torah wants us to establish our society?
While our parashah only hints at it, later rabbinic literature fills in the gaps. In Genesis chapter 18, verse 21, God pledges “ אֵֽרְדָה־נָּ֣א וְאֶרְאֶ֔ה , I will go down and I will see, הַכְּצַעֲקָתָ֛הּ הַבָּ֥אָה אֵלַ֖י עָשׂ֣וּ ׀ כָּלָ֑ה וְאִם־לֹ֖א אֵדָֽעָה , whether they have done altogether like its outcry that has reached Me; if not, I will know for sure” (Gen. 18:21). Eagle-eyed rabbinic interpreters noticed that, when God says, “like its outcry, הַכְּצַעֲקָתָ֛הּ,” it is actually in the feminine – “like her cry.”
Why “her cry”? According to a midrashic tradition, retold by my teacher Rabbi Sharon Brous (The Amen Effect, pp. 55-58):
Sodom and Gomorrah were abundant in natural resources, blooming oases in the middle of the desert. These lands were so rich with vegetation, it is said that bread emerged from the earth in Sodom with the dust of gold. But, as often happens, the cities’ natural abundance fueled a spirit of scarcity among their inhabitants, who sought to safeguard their riches. ‘Outsiders will only try to divest us of what is rightfully ours. Come,’ they plotted, ‘let us eradicate foreigners from our land…’ And so they did. They forcibly deported foreigners and sealed off their borders. They’d share with no one!
But it was not enough to criminalize outsiders, those who sought a better life in their midst. They also ruthlessly targeted their own poor. Already back then, their xenophobia was matched by their misogyny – they not only lied, cheated, and stole from the most vulnerable, they took sadistic pleasure in violating and dehumanizing women. In Sodom and Gomorrah, the people’s worst inclinations were propped up by a legal system, a High Court comprised of habitual liars and perverters of justice. Lawmakers passed zero-tolerance policies that meted out torture to anyone who exhibited the slightest compassion for a struggling neighbor. In Sodom it was decreed, ‘Whoever hands a piece of bread to a pauper or stranger shall be burned at the stake.’...Laws like these, of course, fueled a culture, in ancient times as in modern, of distrust, betrayal, and callousness. Neighbor against neighbor. A cynical, concerted, legal effort to quash human goodness.
Abraham’s nephew, Lot, lived in one of those terrible cities. He was an unremarkable fellow. On one hand, he didn’t share the depravity of his neighbors. But he seemed to have no problem living in their midst, and – like so many living in unjust societies – he kept his head down and his mouth shut in the face of their ruthlessness, corruption, and violence. But Lot had a daughter named Plotit, who wasn’t at all like her father. She saw every person as an image of the Divine, so when she once came across a poor person starving on the street, naturally her soul ached.
She knew well the danger of compassion in her society, but she also understood that she had to do something to help. She quietly conceived of a way to sneak food to the poor man each day when she went out to draw water, taking great care not to be noticed. Over time, the people of Sodom, who took pleasure in watching the poor man suffer, grew suspicious. Surely, he should have died from hunger already! How was he even still alive? They realized someone must be helping him, a traitor who had broken the covenant of cruelty that bound the citizens of Sodom one to the other.
Surveilling the man, they witnessed Plotit bringing him bread. Because feeding the poor was an act of criminality warranting the death penalty, the people of Sodom prepared to burn the girl to death…Plotit was marched into the town square for a public execution, a warning to others who might be tempted to open their hearts to someone in need. Better to close the shutters than get involved in these uncomfortable matters. In her final moments before execution, Plotit wailed. It was a terrible, anguished cry that echoed across the land, a cry so piercing the Holy One could not ignore it.
God sends angels to see the horror for themselves and report back. Arriving in Sodom, they are greeted not by warm hospitality, but by threats and hostility. In fact, the only person willing to offer them shelter is Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who was himself an outsider. And even that act of hospitality nearly costs Lot his life. The townspeople storm his home, demanding that he hand over the strangers “v’neidah otam,” so they can “know” them.
When the townspeople tell Lot to hand over the strangers so that we may “know” them, I think they mean it literally, not euphemistically -- the text is deliberately echoing God’s use of the exact same verb in the exact same form a few verses back, where it clearly means to “know for sure,” following a process of eyewitness verification. The people of Sodom want to verify who these strangers are, and where they came from. Do they belong here, or are they foreigners, here illegally? It’s as though the townspeople were saying, "Show us their papers. Prove their documentation status. We need to know who they are, and determine whether they actually belong here, and if our suspicions are right – that you, Lot, are harboring illegals – we are duty-bound to deport them, and then deal with you."
And it is precisely in this moment – in which the angels see with their own eyes the callousness and cruelty of the Sodomites that had previously been known only through Plotit’s plaintive cry – that God decides the cities are irredeemable, and feels compelled “to take vast, punitive action against the people there.”
Perhaps the Bible is providing a mythical explanation for a natural phenomenon, one that is observable throughout human history: Societies in which property and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, societies that refuse to care for the vulnerable, that turn away from responsibility to others, are doomed to ruin, always collapsing under the weight of their own injustice. Challenged to explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in a few short words, modern historian Michael Parenti responded, "because fewer had more." Seen from this perspective, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – framed as a punishment for their stinginess and meanness – is perhaps better understood as the inevitable consequences of failing to equally share the benefits and blessings of community. Our tradition insists that societies of this sort will inevitably crumble, collapsing from within and, sooner or later, from without.
To stand up against such cruelty is, by its nature, an act of courage — and of faith. In his book, What Are Biblical Values?, the Yale Bible scholar John Collins reminds us that, compared to other ancient Near Eastern formulations, the notion of justice in the Hebrew Bible “stands out in several respects. First is simply the degree of emphasis on the importance of justice in the biblical writings…the Hebrew Bible holds a distinctive place within ancient literature because of the passion it displays on this subject. Second…the Hebrew Bible typically modifies the common ancient Near Eastern concern for the widow and the orphan, by adding another marginal figure, the alien…The concern for aliens is distinctive to Israel in the ancient Near East.” Indeed, according to the Hebrew Bible, our obligation to care and provide for immigrants is part and parcel of our obligation to God” (pp. 179-181). The revolutionary idea at the heart of Torah is that God has a special concern for the vulnerable and the marginalized, for the poor and for the stranger, and how a society treats these people determines how it stands before God.
What are biblical values? Care for the vulnerable. Justice for all.
How do we live into these values in a world that so often seems to be moving in the altogether opposite direction? How do we face down cruelty, selfishness, and hatred without becoming hardened and embittered ourselves? Here, I think, is where we find a lesson in the mysterious figure of Lot’s wife.
When the angels proclaim God’s judgment over Sodom and Gomorrah, they instruct Lot to gather his family and flee the city immediately. By now, you know Lot. He’s not a bad guy. But he’s just not actively particularly good, either. So the angels don’t have to tell him twice to run and save himself. The second they give the word, he’s out the door, and doesn’t look back. As the family flees the city, however, Lot’s wife – who according to later rabbinic tradition was named Idit – looks back at the devastation. And as she beholds the annihilation of the cities, the slaughter of all those people – her extended family, her friends, her neighbors – she becomes a pillar of salt.
It’s common to view this story as a cautionary tale, interpreting it to mean that Idit was punished for looking back. But if we read the text closely, we’ll notice that it doesn't say God turned her into a pillar of salt. It simply states that this is what happened when she turned around.
The 12th century Spanish commentator Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra points out that, when the book of Deuteronomy describes the doom that will befall the people of Israel if they fail to fulfill the covenant, it says that the land will be “devastated by sulfur and salt, beyond sowing and producing, no grass growing in it, just like the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah” (Deut. 29:22), indicating that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was wrought not only by fire and brimstone, but by salt as well. That makes sense if you view this story more naturalistically: catastrophic volcanic eruptions, which resemble the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as the Torah describes it, frequently release not only scorching lava but also rain down massive quantities both sulfur and salt, often leaving behind large deposits of those minerals in the surrounding soil and water, which renders those areas uninhabitable. And, of course, tradition holds that Sodom and Gomorrah stood in the lowlands around the Dead Sea, which earns its name due to the fact that its soil and water are saturated with sulfur and salt. Therefore, ibn Ezra concludes that, when Idit looks back, “her bones were burned by brimstone and she was encrusted in salt” – cause and effect, not crime and punishment. As the medieval Spanish commentator Rabbeinu Bahye ben Asher, explains: by turning around to witness her city being reduced to ashes, Idit exposed herself to the full power of the devouring fire, which burned her – until she was reduced to little more than a mound of salt.
The fate that befalls Idit’s is not one I wish for myself or for any of us. But it’s also a testament to her humanity. According to Nahmanides, the great 13th century Spanish scholar, Idit turned back not because she missed home, or longed for the stuff she left behind, but because she would not simply move on with her own life, safe and secure, while ignoring people plainly suffering. She couldn’t silence the screams. She couldn’t close her heart to the cries all around her. Just like her daughter Plotit, Idit refused to abandon her humanity, and so she put her body on the line and risked her own life, keeping her humanity by facing the horror.
In a world of callousness and cruelty, Idit chose courage and compassion. She looked back because she was unwilling to sever the ties that made her human. And while her big-hearted bravery may have cost her life, her memory is preserved for the ages as a netziv, a monument; an eternal reminder for all of us that sometimes, to remain fully human, we must be willing to confront cruelty, even if it costs us something – perhaps even if it costs us everything; that we must not close our eyes to injustice; that we must not let self-interest or self-preservation make us callous or cold-hearted.
In our own era of upheaval, when some try to convince us that selfishness, suspicion, and savagery are biblical values – the monument Idit left behind, overlooking the desolate wasteland where a so-called “Great” civilization once stood – calls us to question:
Will we, like Sodom, be driven by the impulse to possess, to close ourselves off, to keep people out?
Will we allow ourselves to become a society entrenched in oppression, where the powerful exploit the vulnerable, the poor are trampled, and few are enriched at the expense of many – selfish, corrupted by greed and indifference to human suffering, stingy and mean?
Or will we choose the path of Plotit and Idit, courageous women who sacrificed everything in order to face the horrors of their time with the fullness of their humanity.
May we, like Plotit and Idit, know what we stand for.
May we know how to stand up.
May we know who we are called to stand with.
And may we know – and remember always – before Whom we stand.
So may it be God’s will. Amen.
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