Vayera: November 7, 2020/20 Heshvan 5781

Vayera is a special parashah for me, as it would have been, had my family not been beaten to the date reservation by someone else, the parashah on which I celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah. The year I turned 13, my birthday on the Hebrew calendar fell on Shabbat Vayera, as it did the year I was born, and as it does this year. None of this is at all relevant to the parashah, but it's a nice story.

There is a lot that goes on in this week's portion - Abraham is visited by angels, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, Isaac is born and nearly sacrificed (two events that some traditions place 37 years apart), Hagar and Ishmael are sent away. It's a busy parashah. As part of the narrative surrounding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, there are a few famous scenes. There is Abraham's negotiation with God, ultimately getting God to agree that, should ten righteous people be found in the cities, He will not go through with the planned destruction (spoiler alert: there are not ten righteous people, and the cities are destroyed); there is Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt after looking back at Sodom as they are leaving the city; and there is one of the more infamous scenes in the Torah, popular among lists of "WTF actually appears in the Bible?". In this d'var Torah, we are going to look at the context of this episode and try to understand what we are meant to learn from it.

Our story begins with Lot, Abraham's nephew, who had moved to the area of Sodom to prevent feuding between his herders and those of his uncle. He meets a group of strangers, commonly understood to be the same group of angels which had just been at Abraham's tent to give news of the future birth of Isaac, coming into town, and, being the hospitable guy he is, invites them to come to his house, eat, rest, etc. Hearing about the strange men staying at Lot's, the people of Sodom surround the house, demanding 'Where are the strangers who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may know them!' ('know' of course, having its carnal meaning). Sending one's guests out to be gang-raped is not generally considered to be proper hosting etiquette, so Lot comes up with another solution. He tells the mob, "I have two daughters who have never known a man. I will bring them out to you. Do as you please with them. But don't do anything to these men. After all, they have come under my roof!" It goes without saying that most contemporary readers of the text would be horrified by Lot's behavior. Is this really how a righteous (or at least righteous enough to be saved from the annihilation of Sodom) person behaves? Offering his daughters as substitute rape victims doesn't quite sound like righteousness.

The first-level context into which we can put this is one of the sacred value of hospitality. Hakhnasat orhim is one of the things of which the Talmud says "A person eats their fruits in this world, and the cornucopia is ripe for them in the World to Come". One of the qualities for which Abraham is praised most often is his hospitality - his tent is said to have lacked walls, so as to be open to everyone. Maybe to an ancient audience, well steeped in a cultural milieu that called for giving of oneself, the idea of sacrificing the safety of one's family and property (and, in the ancient world, daughters might well be considered both) to protect one's guests would be understood to be an obvious fulfillment of the hospitality imperative. But there is a deeper level here.

Too often, we assume that the personalities in the Tanakh are meant to be perfect. Some religious traditions venerate their prophets and insist they lived lives free from reproach. Judaism is not  one of them (Lot is also not regarded as a prophet by Jews, but that is neither here nor there). Even the most righteous and praiseworthy figures in our people's history are imperfect. Moses lost his temper from time to time, Aaron and Miriam slandered their sister in law Tziporah, King David committed adultery with the wife of one of his military leaders and then orchestrated the death of said soldier to cover up the affair. Maybe what we're meant to be getting here is that Lot was not perfect either. This is the opinion of the Ramban, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (not to be confused with his contemporary Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam). In performing his duty as host, Lot has failed his duty as a father, a fact which, while terrible, does not take away from his worthiness to be rescued from the destruction of his wicked city.

On a related note, whenever this episode gets brought up in interreligious fora as part of an indictment of the sort of wickedness that the Bible endorses, Christian defenders of the passage frequently make the argument that Lot knew that his daughters were safe in the hands of the mob, as Sodom was populated by homosexuals, who would not have interest in raping women. Now, leaving aside the misrepresentation of motivations for rape, this interpretation does not jive with the Jewish understanding of what sort of wickedness was going on in Sodom. While forbidden sex acts between men were something that happened in Sodom, that wasn't the big issue that made God say pull out the brimstone. The great sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed was a pathological cruelty towards others and a hatred of hospitality. According to one midrash, the citizens of Sodom made helping the poor or strangers a capital crime. When a young woman, sometimes identified as a daughter of Lot, was found to have been sneaking bread to a poor beggar, she was smeared with honey and tied up so that bees could sting her to death. When cast in this light, and further contextualized by the mob's response to Lot's offer of his daughters - commenting that a newcomer to their region was now attempting to change their ways - we can also understand the motive of the mob in demanding access to the guests. Not only were they intending to rape them for their own sexual gratification, the people of Sodom wanted to run these guests out of town, lest there be a hospitable place in their city. In this sense, we can start to see the more complex context of the story, rather than "if your guests are in danger of being raped, offer your daughters". Because that's totally missing the point.