America, Sodom and Gomorrah
Rabbi Joshua Rose
5/31/20
The Talmudic account of the ancient city of Sodom contains a do-or-die lesson for us in this American moment.
As we look out on our burning cities, awash in chaos and rioting it is hard not to think about Sodom and Gomorrah - two cities which were destroyed by God on account of their wickedness. The townspeople of the City of Sodom were said by the Mishnah to be without a share in this world or the World to Come because they were wicked (רעים) and sinners (חטאים). While Sodom didn’t witness riots per se, attacks on property owners were listed among the crimes the rabbis associate with the city’s wickedness. We learn that the citizens
set their sights on property owners. They would take one and place him alongside a leaning wall and push it upon him, and would come and take his property….They would set their sights on property owners. They would give [one of them odorous] balsam and the property owner would place it in his treasury. In the evening, the people of Sodom would come and sniff it out like a dog...they would come and dig there, and they would take that property. (B. Talmud Sanhedrin 109a)
Many Americans are rightly outraged by the rioting, burning, looting, theft and generalized violence sweeping the nation’s cities. Based on these talmudic narratives we can assume that rabbis would share our anger.
Some argue that rioters should be given a moral pass because their actions are the inevitable result of injustice. I don’t like this line of thinking. First the argument robs people of moral agency and therefore undermines the philosophical underpinnings of progressive politics; it obscures the fact that the vast majority of victims of injustice do not choose violence as an answer; and it is insensitive to the need for justice of those innocents victimized by such violence.
However our Sages descriptions of the famously corrupt city of Sodom points to a different problem with focusing on the riots. What separates the rabbinic account of this social disorder from so many American observers is that our Sages viewed the violence against property as part of a whole. The looting was wicked (ra’ah) and part of a society awash in ra’ah v’cheit, evil and sin. The long litany of moral abuses and crimes against God places these attacks against property owners in a context of moral chaos. (Those excited to read of Divine wrath against ‘sodomites’ will be disappointed; while it remains a curious obsession of the moralists of American religiosity the rabbis’ focus is decidedly elsewhere).
In midrashic and Talmudic texts Sodom was a city where the economically and socially vulnerable were brutally mistreated. The account above is from a long Talmudic passage that bewails, among other things: selfishness, stinginess, violence, cruelty, inhospitality, theft, exploitation of widows and orphans, mistreatment of the poor and even those who seek to assist the poor, financial exploitation, and false judges who pervert justice. In Jewish texts the emphasis is clearly and overwhelmingly on the exploitation of vulnerable people and the apparent total absence of an ethic of justice. Sodom was a place where anyone’s vulnerability would be seized upon for profit and gain.
In other worlds, the destruction of property decried by the rabbis doesn’t stand out in the Talmudic description. Property theft is unsurprising in Sodom because it is part of a poisoned moral ecosystem. In fact the rabbis do not draw any special attention to it as they list horrors of the society.
The rabbinic description of Sodom is a bit of a jumble. There seems to be no order, no causal progression of one kind of transgression to another. A story of the have-nots stealing from the haves is placed without comment alongside a narrative of the wealthy brutalizing the poor, which in turn precedes a picture of an exploited widow. The effect is a portrait of a society in the grasp of moral chaos. Nowhere is there respect for the dignity of the other or a concern with the moral needs of the fellow person.
Yet for Americans the riots are a singular sign of the loss of moral order: “If we can bring these paroxysms of violence to a halt with a curfew, if we can restore property to the victims, then the emergency will have passed. As for the murder of George Floyd, certainly it was a wrong. But the justice system will do its work, and social and moral order will once again be restored.”
But approaching the rioting and even the death of yet another African American man in this way misses the larger picture. The violence of those who are rioting is wrong, cruel, immoral. But it has to been seen as a continuum of violence. A riot cannot be excused but it can shed light on the moral background against which it takes place.
And our own alarm is equally revealing. Why are we shocked by a burning car or the broken shop window but more or less indifferent to the rank racial injustice within our country? How can we decry the damage done to business that employ people but remain unconcerned with the fact that poor people in America are increasingly desperate in their futile fight against poverty? How can believe that a single jury might deliver justice to a murderous cop but continue to accept breathtaking imbalances in wealth and power right under our noses? Every injustice is a form of violence.
The rabbis understood that wickedness does not have a single form, is not identified by specific acts. Rather it is a moral choice made by individuals that comes to characterize the indifferent society. America has adopted policies that continue to make the lives of the vast majority of poor people and people of color increasingly difficult, painful and short.
A famous Midrash tells of God’s decision to go down to the corrupt cities and see if things are truly as bad as indicated by the cry of a particular victim. God had heard a girl cry out.
Rabbi Levi said: [God said]: ‘Even if I wished to keep silent, justice for a certain maiden does not permit Me to keep silent.’
For once happened that two girls went down to draw water from a well.
One said to the other, ‘Why are you so pale?’
‘We have no more food left and are ready to die,’ she replied.
What did she do? She filled her pitcher with flour and they exchanged [their pitchers], each taking the other’s.
When they [the Sodomites] discovered this, they took and burnt her.
Said the Holy One, blessed be He: ‘Even if I desired to be silent, justice for that young girl does not permit Me to keep silent.
How much longer will we make the mistake of being particular about which forms of violence will cause us to raise our voices?
The Sodom and Gomorrah tale has another important lesson for us. A careful reading leaves a sense of narrative imbalance, a frustration of our expectations as readers. Abraham famously prevents God from destroying the cities on account of the fifty righteous people who might live there. Then forty, and so on down to ten. We want the story to end with ten righteous people raising their voices to save those around them, justifying Abraham’s interference with the Divine plan. Instead the patriarch wins the argument but God wins the day. The cities are destroyed.
If the story is unfinished, though, it is because we are still writing it. We are right to insist on individual responsibility and that those employing violence and destruction should be held accountable. But the true test of Sodom is whether we will continue to insist on our own moral responsibility as well. Will God find a community of people to raise their voices against the wickedness they see? Will we raise our voices and save our cities?
