When we saw the pogrom in Amsterdam last week, so many of us said – “it isn’t worth it. Leave. Come to Israel. There is nothing worth defending there. That isn’t our place.”
Were we right? Or is it, somehow, worth it to stay?
Just this month, 17 Israeli soldiers have fallen in battle. Doubtless, those in Amsterdam look at us here and ask: is it worth it? Are the constant fear, and the thousands of deaths, worth it?
In the thousands of years of our persecution, millions upon millions have been killed. I am sure that countless Jews have asked: is it worth it? Wouldn’t it be better just to melt into the background?
When we ask this question, it isn’t just about us. Some look at the body bags of Hezbollah or see the destruction of Hamas fighters and celebrate. We see the deaths of women and children as collateral damage brought upon them by our enemies themselves.
But even the fighters had families. Even the fighters were sons and brothers and fathers.
So, is their suffering worth it?
We’re finishing up the paperwork on our shibbutzim – our home renovation. I’ve put my back into building walls and waterproofing foundations. It hurts me to see perfectly good buildings in Beirut knocked down, or beautiful houses in Gaza reduced to rubble.
These are people’s lives, their investments, their passion. And we destroy them because a gunman decided to use a second-story bedroom or Hezbollah decided to set up a rocket warehouse a few stories underground.
Forget who’s right or wrong: is it worth it?
Wouldn’t it be better to disappear than to cause the suffering and destruction that is necessary for our survival?
In the annals of destruction, this week’s Torah portion features one of the most complete stories in human history. Not only are S’dom and Amora destroyed, the very plants of the land that surrounded them are wiped out. Reading that story, the text tells us why they were destroyed. Twice, it says: because their cry is very great. It seems that they are literally crying out for destruction. It is the role of the messengers to validate their cry and erase their civilization.
When Lot brings the messengers to his house, the entire city turns out seeking to rape them. This includes both the young and the old who would see no natural pleasure in such an act.
When Lot tries to dissuade them, through a terrible counteroffer, they ask him what right he has to judge. With that we can see that their society is beyond reform. The entire city has to engage in its collective sickness. None can avoid participating and none can criticize.
The people committed their acts of sickness as a sort of moral despair – a commit to ever greater extremes in the hope of finding some light at the end of the pit they were digging. Like Bernie Madoff once they have begun to dig, they cannot stop.
In financial terms, when you have a small debt, it is a weight, but you can seek to get out from under it. When it becomes larger, you may well give up hope and continue to spend. But then, eventually, to satisfy your need for self-justification, you will make your profligacy a ‘good’ thing. In finance, it is called Modern Monetary Theory – you will try to say that spending more and more is actually good despite your bankruptcy.
The same concept applies in spirituality. You can have Modern Spiritual Theory where you try to twist sin into something good so you can justify yourself to yourself – but deep down, you know the truth and what emerges is a flood of horror and or mental illness in your society.
This is why the people of S’dom didn’t want children. They hated the world they had created but they couldn’t escape it. And this is why they so badly abused visitors. They were embarrassed and to protect themselves from the reminder of their moral depravity, they had to double down o it. This is why cults insist that their members disengage from their families – or perhaps integrate and abuse them. Outsiders may unravel the tight social straightjacket that maintains the evil of their society.
A more subtle sign of their sickness is the meal that Lot serves. He serves the messengers a feast. However, instead of bread, he serves Matzah. Why Matzah? We eat Matzah, in part, as a rejection of the source of all ancient bread. We reject Egypt, like throwing a Boston Tea Party, for one week each year. But these people? They conducted their cultural embargo year round. Even Egypt was too good for them.
With all of this, S’dom’s sin wasn’t a particular sin. It was a general one. S’dom was overwhelmed by their sin. The angels were sent to test S’dom; to see whether their course could be just slightly improved. And S’dom failed that test.
Of course, the test wasn’t only about S’dom. It was also a test of Lot. When we criticize Noach we point out that he didn’t change society. He didn’t rescue any people. But Lot didn’t even rescue the animals.
When the angels ask if there’s anybody else he would want to save, Lot can think only of his married daughters. He’s given a blank check to bring people out and he will offer it to almost no one – and absolutely no one will accept it.
When the angels tell Lot to flee to the mountain, he says:
אַל-נָא, אֲדֹנָי… וְאָנֹכִי, לֹא אוּכַל לְהִמָּלֵט הָהָרָה–פֶּן-תִּדְבָּקַנִי הָרָעָה, וָמַתִּי.
Please no my Lord… I am not able to flee to the mountain, lest the evil stick to me and I die.
Lot recognizes that his failure has facilitated a vast destruction. This is why Lot picks a place, a young city, a small city, and tries to save it. Of course, when the destruction starts, Lot’s courage vanishes and he flees to the mountains. And, like Noach before him – submits to drink and degradation.
It might seem like Lot’s fate in inevitable. A complete social sickness cannot be resisted. In my shiur last week, somebody asked whether it would have been different if Avraham had gone to S’dom. There are certainly hopeful signs. When the escapees flee from KedarLaOmer’s attack on S’dom, the Torah writes:
וַיָּבֹא, הַפָּלִיט, וַיַּגֵּד, לְאַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי; וְהוּא שֹׁכֵן בְּאֵלֹנֵי מַמְרֵא הָאֱמֹרִי, אֲחִי אֶשְׁכֹּל וַאֲחִי עָנֵר, וְהֵם, בַּעֲלֵי בְרִית-אַבְרָם.
And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew–now he dwelt by the terebinths of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother of Aner; and these were confederate with Abram.
Avram had allies. He had friends. He has people who would fight an impossible war with him. He had people he would save. Avraham’s ability to lift the local people up is why exile is necessary before his descendants can occupy the land. So long as Avraham is there, the people of the land never have a chance to fall into moral depravity. As the Torah says:
וְדוֹר רְבִיעִי, יָשׁוּבוּ הֵנָּה: כִּי לֹא-שָׁלֵם עֲוֺן הָאֱמֹרִי, עַד-הֵנָּה.
And in the fourth generation they shall come back here; for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.’
But Avraham’s alliance-building wouldn’t have been enough. We know it wouldn’t have been enough because Avraham himself was unable to rescue S’dom despite interacting with its people and with its king.
So, is there any hope for the likes of S’dom? Is there any solution other than the complete collapse of such a society and the death and destruction that must accompany it?
This reading has two expressions of emotion. S’dom cries, but others do quite the opposite: they laugh.
Of course, there is laughter in the story of S’dom itself. When Lot comes to his sons-in-law, they think his warning is a joke. They cannot imagine their place being threatened. They can’t imagine the curse that is coming. Their perception of the joke is founded on their own sense of certainty.
But there is laughter around the story of S’dom. When they are told of the coming of Yitzchak, they laugh. They can’t imagine the blessing that is promised.
And then, after Yitzchak is born, and after S’dom is destroyed, we read:
וַתֹּאמֶר שָׂרָה–צְחֹק, עָשָׂה לִי אֱלֹהִים: כָּל-הַשֹּׁמֵעַ, יִצְחַק-לִי.
And Sarah said: ‘God hath made laughter for me; every one that heareth will laugh on account of me.
I heard a story once, delivered by a woman named Cynthia Riggs – who was in her 80s at the time. She was telling how her mother had died, and she had lost her direction in life. She had been a ship’s captain and geologist and a manager of a bed and breakfast. Friends suggested she write books – and she did. She published 10 of her books and became a nationally recognized mystery author (the Martha’s Vineyard Murder Mysteries).
When she revealed that the first book had been published – and became a best seller – when she was 70, the audience laughed. And she responded, with a smile in her voice, “There’s still hope for all of you.”
That is the laugh that Yitzchak inspired. There is still hope.
The laugh of Yitzchak is the laugh that forces you to see new possibilities. It is the laughter of disbelieving joy.
Our people are founded on this laugh. It is this laugh, the laugh that says anything is possible – no matter what the reality – that sustains us. It is this laugh, the laugh that acknowledges the room for the Divine “I will be what I will be” that gives us strength.
And it is this laugh, even in the face of G-d, that can challenge every evil ideology that humanity can devise.
After all, there is nothing the evil like less than the humor of the powerless.
In my shiur last week, I mentioned well over a hundred massacres, expulsions and forced conversions conducted against the Jews in the Islamic world prior to the State of Israel. This week, I charted those actions against time and place. What I saw was that we were not drastically persecuted in all times and places. Instead, there were four periods of persecution.
- First, Jews were attacked at the birth of Islam, in the early fundamentalist days of the faith.
- Second, Jews were attached by the Almohad’s, the great fundamentalist unitarians of North Africa. Their dedication to a single totalitarian vision of G-d was so strong that they believed that G-d could not have attributes.
- Third, Jews were attacked in Yemen, particularly during the reign of Al-Mutawakkil Isma’il who led the country in a period of great prosperity. They actually had a world-wide monopoly on the export of coffee. But like Fidel Castro living in a farm house, he sustained himself by sewing and selling caps.
- Fourth, Jews were attacked, and are still being attacked, in the religious echo of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab – the great fundamentalist of the end of the 18th century.
As with so many of our persecutors, it is the totalitarians who focus on us. Totalitarians pick one value, one good, and they elevated it. It could have been social cohesion like Bavel or Plato’s Republic. It could have been material wealth. It could have been physical pleasure. It could even have been military might.
As my mother, Chana Cox, argued in her magnum opus Reflections on the Logic of the Good, as soon as you elevate one good – any good – you must crush all others. Dedication to one value – the definition of totalitarianism – requires the erasure of all others.
Dedication to one value (good or evil) robs a society of their humanity – of their need to balance the good and be, every one, a judge. Ultimately, the sins they commit erase their very desire to survive.
It is the totalitarians who can’t suffer the survival of outside ideas. It is the totalitarians who can’t survive our laughter.
They attack us because we represent their ultimate weakness.
So what happens when we leave? What happens when our laughter is silenced?
We can see the results all around us. We can see the morally bankrupt, and Jew-free, societies of Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Afghanistan. We can see the implosion of Amsterdam and Paris and Berlin in the long aftermath of the Shoah. They were once great centers of living culture, now they are shells celebrated for what once had been. They are powerless in the face of Islamism.
The Almohad’s who persecuted us in North Africa went on a brief period of great conquest – as totalitarians are wont to do – and then they imploded. Spain’s empire only seemed to grow after the Expulsion. However, they killed up to 8 million people just to mine Peruvian silver. It was silver they needed to feed their constantly decaying – and constantly bankrupt – society.
Without us. Without our laughter, without our weakness, without our challenge to the totalitarians – there is often no one who can protect the world’s societies from their own extremes.
Just this week, 35 people were killed in an SUV attack in China. The government tries to sweep these things under the rug, but they are becoming more and more common as the government cracks down on dissent and the society locks itself into an openly totalitarian reality.
In the developed world, the words ‘love’ and ‘self-love’ may not seem like a bad thing, but like totalitarian in general, they are erasing all other human values, and they are driving people and societies to self-destruction. There are now more dogs than children in the US.
The future is being abandoned.
And, of course, in the Muslim world the totalitarian advance of Wahhabism and political Shiism are bringing darkness from Mali to Mazer-i-Sharif – and from Manchester to Malaysia. In Iraq, girls as young as 9 can now be married off. In Afghanistan, women can’t speak outside the the house. They can’t even be loud within it, lest they be heard on the street. In Iran women are arrested and sent to insane asylums should they violate the dress codes of the totalitarians. In England humorous tweets are met with visits from the police.
The price of sin – or Modern Spiritual Theory – must eventually be paid. Except that our G-d is “I will be what I will be” and His world will be what he wills it to be. It is our laughter that can stand in the breach and save the nations of the world from the reckoning that faces them.
So is it worth it? Are the thousands of our dead and the tens of thousands of theirs worth it?
Are the wasted buildings and the missiles and even the cars worth it?
For me, the answer is clear:
So long as we extend the hand of friendship, welcome guests, and see the divine in every man – as Avraham did – it is worth it.
So long as we argue amongst ourselves and so long as we resist a closed totalitarianism within our communities – it is worth it.
And so long as we laugh – laugh with the realization of the possible and with the freedom of the irrepressible, it is worth it.
It is worth it not only for our people, but for those who would consider themselves our enemies.
Shabbat Shalom.
