Abraham’s Question: Parashat Vayera

Parashat Vayera

Torah Sparks
Genesis: 18:1-22:24
We have reached this Torah portion again, a reading that includes crucial episodes in our formative history. The encounter between Abraham and God, in which Abraham challenges God to spare the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah contiues to amaze. But are we ready to learn from it?

Abraham has the audacity to stand up to God and tell God that that it would all wrong for God to destroy the evil people of Sodom if there could be found among all those wicked people just 50, 45, 30, 20 – a mere 10 good people. And God agrees that such a small minority of good people would be enough to redeem the entire city and save it from destruction. (This bears repeating: The small minority of good people are not the only ones saved. They save all the wicked people from destruction, as well.)

Let us contrast this with the all too common rhetoric we hear these days that excuses stereotyping of entire societies because of a small minority of evil people within them! How often do we hear, for example, that Islamophobia is justified because, even if the evil Islamic extremists are only a small percentage of the whole, that is still too great a number to tolerate overall?

Recently I had a discussion with some people about how we should react to parts of the Torah that we feel are immoral. The Torah’s value system can seem outdated. We pride ourselves in having progressed toward values that are more loving and inclusive than those of that ancient document, produced so long ago. But what about those parts of the Torah that are still light years beyond our conventional habits of morality? Is the radical forgiveness and acceptance that Abraham advocates also a primitive ethics that we have outgrown? Or should we try to take in the awesome dimensions of his moral achievement with gratitude for having received a record of it and in humility for having been called upon to be his heirs? How would we act differently were we to strive mightily to learn from this example of Abraham our Patriarch?

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein

image:  “The Lonely Walk” © Vinoth Chandar altered and used with permission via Creative Commons License

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