By deductive reasoning, if I am better and more important than
you, then my problems and distresses are more important than yours. But that is
not the world God wanted. In fact, the Talmud teaches that before we petition
God for our own needs and wants, we must first pray for another. As we see in
this week’s parashah Vayeira, G-d granted Sarah a son after Abraham
prayed for Avimelech to be blessed with children.
There is no person more empty than an egoist, for God cannot
reside inside a full-of-himself arrogant person, and so He vacates the premises. To
improve ourselves and all humanity, we must get ourselves out of our own way.
You want to throw something on the sacrificial altar to get results (other than
scapegoats, i.e., your mother, your partner, your cousin, your sister, etc.),
start with the words, “me,” “myself” and I.
By further deduction we must recognize how very far away we are
from God and truth by looking to Moses as the paradigm of behavior. It was because he was the most humble person to walk the earth that he was worthy to be God’s unique
messenger: “ And there was no
other prophet who arose in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face….” Thus, if God was so
close to Moses due to his humility and self-effacing behavior, imagine how bad
we look in God's eyes because of our selfishness. We are polar opposites.
Selfishness is an antithesis to the five senses with which God created and
blessed man, for it has no eyes for the suffering of its sister, has no ears
for the cries of its brother, it smells not its own stench, it has no parched
tongue to know another’s thirst and it has no heart to feel or hand to touch
another in comfort.
It is little wonder then that the world in which we find
ourselves is falling apart due to its fragmented nature wherein each person
thinks the world revolves around them instead of realizing that the whole world
depends upon them. There is an apropos rabbinic allegory about heaven and hell.
“In each location, the inhabitants are sitting at a long table but the utensils
are too unwieldy to serve oneself. In hell, the people keep trying to stuff
their own faces but can’t get the food into their mouths and so they starve. In
heaven, the people help each other and feed one another across the table and
are sated.”
In this week’s Torah reading, Vayeira, we read about the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, societies where people cared only for
themselves and were heartless and callous towards others. Being charitable was
a crime. Their profound egotism and lust for easy gratification led, as it
always will, to self-destruction. As the Talmud says, “He who is affected by a
voracious hunger finally eats his own flesh.” Yes, man is made of earth which
is the most selfish of creations as it is surrounded by a gravitational field
that pulls everything toward itself. Yet even the earth is not so selfish that
it begrudges the flower and the tree to grow upward and the seedlings to
sprout. In the final analysis, the earth gives much more than it takes. Do we?
In the center of the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah
stands the Patriarch Abraham, who asks God to spare the city if even fifty
righteous people could be found. God said he would. Abraham slowly tweaks the
number down to ten in case fifty could not be found. God consents. Not even ten
could be found. But we learn here not only about the failings of Sodom and
Gomorrah, but also about Abraham’s, and Noah’s too. When God told Noah he was
going to destroy humanity, Noah didn’t say a peep, he just built an Ark. When
God told Abraham he would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s best was to
suggest that God should spare the righteous. But, when God told Moses that he
was going to wipe out Israel because of the sin of the Golden Calf, Moses said,
“Please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have
written.”
It is said that in the Messianic
Age everyone will be beset by intractable problems. As today’s crises escalate
personally and globally, we too cannot merely ask, “Will it be okay for me?” We
ARE our brother’s keepers. Like those in the allegory, we too each have a long
spoon in our hand with which we can “serve” another and the other can serve us.
On our own initiative let’s grow “longer arms” to give each other a helping
hand and not by contradistinction pickpocket each other of our dignity and humanity
by our mere self-absorption. If only ten righteous people could have been
found, Sodom and Gomorrah would not have been destroyed. The question to
ourselves is, “Would we count among them?”
(By the way, giraffes are kosher animals but we have lost the knowledge on how to slaughter them properly. So be a giraffe. Stick your neck out for someone else and be a head above the rest!) Shabbat Shalom
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