Rabbi Reuben's Weekly Torah Commentary

Vayera
(Genesis 18:1-22:24)

Everybody bargains with God.  When I was a kid I used to bargain for test grades (“Dear God, let me get a good grade on my math test and I’ll do all my chores at home without having to be asked for the next month”).  It never worked.  People have told me over the years about bargaining with God because a loved one is sick (“Please God let my wife get well and I promise to go to synagogue every month for a year,”) or when they face their own mortality (“Let me live long enough to see my daughter’s wedding and I promise to include the synagogue in my will when I die.”)

Bargaining with God is indeed an ancient and venerable tradition which in Jewish civilization traces its root to very this week’s Torah portion.  In it God reveals to Abraham that God intends to destroy the city of Sodom because it is filled with violence and lawlessness.  In one of the most powerful ethical challenges in all of ancient spiritual literature, Abraham without a second thought immediately demonstrates why Jewish civilization can only be understood as fundamentally “communitarian” in nature.

Abraham’s response to God in this week’s portion is contrasted by the rabbis of Jewish tradition to the lack of response or apparent concern for anyone in the world beyond his own family that characterized Noah in his story of just a couple of weeks ago. When Noah was told by God that the world was about to be destroyed and was given instructions on how to build an ark to save his own family and all the animal life on earth he never once raised a question to God about the justness of wiping out all human life on the planet.  He simply went to work to save his own family.  Period.

Abraham, upon hearing God’s death decree for an entire city (let alone the entire planet), immediately challenges the justness of God’s decree.  “Shall not the judge of all the earth do justly?” Abraham asks.  “Would you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham challenges.  After all, the world is a complex, messy place, prone to shades of grey and ambiguity, rarely presenting a clean and simple picture in black and white.  Abraham recognizes that what it means to be a conscious human being is to be responsible for the welfare of others and not merely oneself.  In challenging God and bargaining as he does (“If there are 50 righteous in the city will you save the city for their sake?” “How about 40?” “30?” “20?” “10”), Abraham sets the tone and moral compass for all of Jewish history, theology and ethics ever since.

Abraham’s willingness to stand up on behalf of total strangers who were not his family and argue that God should treat them with fairness, justice and compassion, set the stage for the bold commandment found later in the Torah that challenges all of us regardless of who we are or where we live, and is particularly poignant this week: “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16)

Over 3,000 years after the Torah was written, Abraham’s cry to God on behalf of the strangers of Sodom seems all the more remarkable today.  How many times must our own human indifference and unwillingness to stand up to evil allow genocide after genocide to wreak its brutality on the innocent of our world?  Whether a single individual like those individuals who are victimized that we can read about almost every day in the news or entire populations like the Israeli victims of the October 7th massacre or so many caught in the crossfires of the Israel/Hamas, Israel Hezbollah wars, Jewish ethics teach us that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander.  We are part of a larger community, connected one to the other, created in God’s image and as such responsible to protect the sanctity of human life, all human life above all other Mitzvot.  That is why Judaism teaches us that we cannot be an “innocent bystander,” because if we stand by while an injustice takes place and do nothing, we are not innocent at all.  We are collaborators with the injustice.  We are enablers of brutality.  We are accessories to the crimes we witness and from which we turn away.

That is why it is Abraham and not Noah in the Torah who becomes the father of the Jewish people.  That is why Abraham is told by God that his task and therefore our challenge as well is to be a blessing to all the families of the earth.  What God doesn’t say is that we are to be a blessing only to our own family, only to our own people, only to our own community, only to our own religion or those who speak our own language.  No, it is Abraham who is our ultimate moral model – the one who champions the stranger, who stands up to God and challenges the fundamental justice of the world, and who opens his heart and spirit and is willing to bargain for the good of all.  

I was profoundly saddened this week as I contemplated the needless pain and suffering, humiliation and brutality suffered by that young woman in Richmond.  After all this time, after 3,000 years, you’d think we would all know better.