41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.