This is the D’var Torah shared by Liz Macedo, co-leader of the ReNewYear service on Rosh Hashanah. The reading it’s about was also the Torah reading for last week.
“Should I hide from Abraham what I am doing?” is the rhetorical question God asks in this parsha. The implication is that God has both already decided what is going to happen to Sodom and Gomorrah and that God also knows that Abraham, who God has chosen to be a source of blessing, who will be the ancestor of a great nation of people and who will bless that people by teaching his children to ‘keep the way of the eternal, doing what is right and just”, God knows that that Abraham is going to have a problem with what God has decided. And God was right. Abraham implores God, almost berates God, asking whether God will allow the innocent to die along with the guilty, and getting God to agree, in successive appeals, to save the cities for the sake of 50, then 45 , then 40 then 30 all the way on down to 10 righteous people, and he more or less tells God that if they are a Judge Of All The Earth, then they better act like it, and deal justly with the people (emphasis, mine).
Abraham begins this exercise of arguing, or ‘bargaining’ some say, with God, to get God to agree to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if there are only 10 righteous people to be found, incidentally, the number of a minyan, the smallest measurement maybe of what can be called a community, a community that gathers to pray. Abraham refuses to accept that there is not some spark of goodness, however small, in this place that God has condemned. Many commenters talk about this interaction as the blueprint for what prayer should be, the example of how we should model our communication of our kavanah to the divine. If we’re going to petition the divine, if we’re going to ask God to do what in our understanding is righteous, as Abraham is doing here, shouldn’t we do as he did and ask on behalf of the whole city, the whole community? Abraham didn’t ask God to save just the good people, he asked God to save the whole population for the sake of the good who are within it.
Our community is stronger when we show up and argue on behalf of all of us, for all of us. We are stronger, when like Abraham, we recognize the inherent dignity of everyone, when we acknowledge that each person contains the divine, whether we understand how or not. Whether we see it or not.
While the God who created the world takes the position that it is necessary to destroy the life that God made, the human whom God created, who contained a spark of the divine within him as we all do says, no. We can’t make a unilateral decision like that. That’s wrong and they should all be saved for the sake of the goodness that exists among their number. The goodness that can grow, even here, if we feed it.
God doesn’t come out of this one looking great. God destroys the cities after Lot and his family (only numbering 8, missing that threshold of 10) escape. God just saves the good people, the people who align with God’s expectations. But Abraham’s argument on behalf of saving them all is the shofar for anyone who listens for it. What Abraham was asking for wasn’t radical. It went against norms, maybe but it was hardly obscene. Our liturgy is full of prayers that seek to subvert oppressive systems. Prayers that the naked should be clothed and the hungry be fed dare to speak the truth that human dignity must be more important than profit. Prayer and the kavanah we hold when we pray can be the way we see others who are different from us, as belonging with us. When Abraham asks God, “Will you sweep away the innocent as well as the guilty?”, I hear, “Who among us hasn’t been both?”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.” When prayer lights that kavanah within us, when it gives us the strength and the courage to challenge the heavens and confront the devastating problems with an argument and a vision that includes everyone, when it gives us a place to name the promise that lifts us all, that’s when we are praying like Abraham.