Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? So often, our human brains insist on trying to divide up the world into these two, simple, neat categories. Who is right and who is wrong? Who is like me and who is Other? It is amazing to me how insistent we are in thinking this way... and how utterly damaging and destructive it is. Even when we don’t intend to do so, we still picture the “bad guys” as terrible, morally bankrupt, soulless, evil people, and we lump them together into a monolith. It just makes things easier, doesn’t it? We don’t have to grapple with the nuance and “messiness” of knowing that they too - whoever “they” are - have families, hopes and dreams, fears, livelihoods, and redeeming qualities. This week, the Torah reminds us of the massive flaws in our dichotomous thinking... and just in time for us to try and figure out how to pick up, and reassemble, the broken pieces of our fractured country.
Our
parashah first shows us the horrific tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Pure evil, right? Irredeemable and utterly corrupt. Abraham tries to speak up for these doomed cities, urging God to search high and low for even a handful of “good apples” to save the batch. But God cannot, and so the two cities are demolished in fire and brimstone. Ok, so maybe I was wrong then? Maybe the text actually DOES want us to identify what sinister looks like, and is indeed urging us to sweep out evil from our midst? Maybe sometimes we SHOULD think in binary terms, because some things are completely awful, and therefore some other phenomena could be totally good. Well, not so fast.
Right after this story ends, Abraham travels to a place called Gerar, where he assumes - like with the Sodomites and Gomorrah-ganders (?) (Why don’t we have a word for them?) - that “surely there is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife” (Gen. 20:11). But he is mistaken. The king, Avimelech, is insulted that Abraham would assume such horrid and immoral behavior. Even Abraham, who so recently tried to advocate on behalf of the Gomorrah-ites, falls back into this pattern of assuming the worst of The Other. The Torah challenges us: Don’t make these assumptions! You don’t know them, and you don’t know how they’ll behave. Maybe you saw one example of bad behavior, or even a pattern of poor decisions; do you think that encapsulates them? You wouldn’t want them to do that to you, would you??
This cautionary tale is so poignantly significant for this moment in our country. You may feel you have good reason to label someone else a godless heathen, an extremist, or a total Gomorrah-er. You can point to evidence, opinions, statements, and chants. Ok, but now what? Should we punish our enemies by raining down sulfurous fire on them, and blotting their name out from upon the earth? Maybe some would say “yes.” But that doesn’t really make us much better than our expectation of them, now does it? So let’s instead take a moment - or maybe we need a few weeks... - and then try to begin bridging the divide. It doesn’t require amnesia, naïveté, or an oversimplification of what’s at stake. It does, however, demand humility, compassion, and an open mind. The picture is essentially ALWAYS more complex and nuanced than we first thought. We just need to look a little closer - within and without - for the bridge-building to begin.
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