Excerpted from Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm’s Derashot Ledorot: A Commentary for the Ages – Genesis, co-published by OU Press, Maggid Books, and YU Press; edited by Stuart W. Halpern
The Lot of Lot
In this sidra, which records some of the greatest events in the history of mankind such as the Akeida, and through whose holy passages there move such spiritual giants as Abraham, Isaac, and Sara, we find one character more distinguished by the shadow in which he is hidden than by the light which is cast upon him. He flits through the previous two Torah portions in an incidental sort of way, a bit mysterious, never fully capturing our attention, seemingly a character accidentally and fortuitously rescued from total oblivion of history only because he had a great uncle. He is a man who intrudes upon sacred history, but never really becomes a part of it.
This man is Lot, the nephew of Abraham. And perhaps his very importance lies in the fact that he is not a major character, a chief actor in the historical drama, but rather a secondary, stagehand type. Why is that important? Because we can identify with him more easily than with Abraham. Most of us are not great, not giants, not Abrahams, but ordinary mortals with ordinary foibles and weaknesses, ordinary virtues and ordinary goals. Lot is the average man, and from him and his life, the average Jew can learn more in a negative way than perhaps even from Abraham in a positive way. In the life of this man we can see the pitfalls before all of us, the dangers in the life of every man, so that he can teach us how not to live and what not to do.
Lot cuts a tragic figure indeed. He was given a number of real advantages early in life. For one thing, he had a rich uncle – Abraham – who set him up in business. This same uncle provided him with a Jewish home, a decent life, and education. Lot proved loyal to Abraham even after he left him to settle in Sodom, the city of wealth and corruption. Even there he still keeps many of the things he learned from Abraham, such as hospitality. He leads an “underground” Jewish life. He is the nephew of Abraham inside, a judge of Sodom outside. He becomes a respected member of their society. He is one of their elders. He has seemingly made the best of both worlds – a Jew at home and adjusted to his society nonetheless. This is the balance struck by the average, wellmeaning, good-natured, but not overly idealistic man.
But listen to what happens at this point. The angels come to destroy Sodom because of its cruelty. And here three things happen which spell tragedy after tragedy for poor Lot. A merciful God spares him from death in the destruction of Sodom, but his life has been seriously impaired.
- He finds, after a long stay in Sodom, that he has inverted values; he has lost his spiritual perspective. He still retains something of the teachings of Abraham, but not in the proper proportion. Thus, when the mob asks for the three strangers who are his guests to be victims of their degenerate passions, Lot offers to protect the strangers – a virtue of no mean order. But how? By committing a far more degenerate offense: he offers his daughters in their stead. He has values, but they are lopsided.
- He finds himself alone in his own home. When the angels plead with him to leave, he turns to his sons in-law. The Torah calls them “ĥatanav, lok’ĥei venotav” – in other words, they are not really sons-in-law, they have no relation with him, they merely married his daughters. And what is their reaction? “Vayehi khimtzaĥek be’einei ĥatanav” – it was all a joke to them (Genesis 19:14). And his wife? She cannot resist a last look at the hotbed of corruption. It still lures her, and as she parts from her husband, she looks back and becomes calcified. Thus, Lot’s terrible loneliness: his own family no longer understands him or sympathizes with him. He is a stranger in his own home.
- And his greatest tragedy: when he and his two daughters are left alone as survivors, they think that the whole world has been destroyed and they are the only survivors. They become enmeshed in a deadly gloom and think that the human race will die with them. And so, out of the depths of their despair, in order to realize their destiny as humans and practice their good intentions of settling God’s world, they commit the most serious of all immoralities – incest – while Lot is in a drunken stupor.
Quite a miserable end for a man who never had serious pretentions to great evil. Why is this? Why such terrible punishment? There is only one reason: because he left Abraham. All along, he was quite willing to follow his great uncle, willing to learn from him and lead his kind of life, but when it hit his pocketbook, when it came to money – “And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock” (Genesis 13:7) – then he leaves Abraham, and is willing to settle in Sodom, the byword of all that is evil. Now don’t think that Lot completely relished this idea; after all, he was a pupil of Abraham. But business required it, he told himself, financial necessity had forced him to leave both Abraham and his ways. And besides, corrupt though Sodom was, it was a beautiful city, as the Torah describes: “It was like the garden of God, like the land of Egypt, as you come to Zoar” (ibid., verse 10). Hence we read, “And Lot traveled from kedem, east” – upon which our rabbis, quoted by Rashi, comment in a play on words – “He caused himself to travel away from Kidmono shel olam, the Eternal One of the world.” Maybe Lot will carry over some small habits that he had learned in the house of Abraham. Maybe there will be some souvenirs or mementoes. But essentially he had torn himself away from Abraham, and along with that, from the God of Abraham.
And this is indeed the crucial event in the life of Lot, in the life of every average man: “And Lot traveled from kedem” – “from Kidmono shel olam.” His departure from Abraham and all that he stood for: this was the cause of his grief and the seedling of his tragedy. And if you analyze the whole episode of Lot carefully, you will see that he was rewarded measure for measure. The resulting tragedies follow the pattern of Lot’s sin.
- Lot sinks to the most degenerate immorality because of inverted values. But did he not bring it upon himself? Was it not he himself who made the decision to leave Abraham because of “economic pressures”? Was it not he who first consciously inverted his own values?
- He was lonely in his own home, and an alien to wife, children, and children-in-law. But he brought it on himself. By leaving Abraham, he isolated himself from Abraham’s God – and now found himself isolated by others.
- He was led to his ultimate degradation, the depths of immorality and disruption of his family – the act of incest – because of the doom and pessimism which made him think that he and his daughters were the only survivors, that the world was destroyed. But did he not bring upon himself this feeling of no choice, of absolute necessity? Did he not begin this life of pessimism when he decided to settle in Sodom, to leave Abraham – because business required it, because otherwise he could never survive in the competitive market? He began by considering that there was only one way out – Sodom; and ended by having his daughters consider only one way out – his deepest and most lasting humiliation.
So then, in the one act of leaving Abraham, or as our rabbis said it, causing himself to travel away from God, Lot suffered a corresponding series of tragic consequences of inversion of values, loneliness, and a deadly and sickening pessimism. His is the story of a man who seems well established, successful, and at the peak of his career, but whose early, serious errors bring his life crashing into a conclusion of shame and disgrace.
It does not take too much to see why and how this story of Lot is a parable for Jews of all eras, especially for the “average Jew” of today. Just look at what has happened to so many of our fellow Jews:
- We have suffered an inversion of values, just as Lot did. Thus, we place Ĥanukka, with all its colorfulness and festivity, on a much higher rung than the Sabbath. Many a person who would never dream of forgetting to celebrate Ĥanukka in the grand manner will not think twice of violating the sanctity of the Sabbath. Similarly, there are many other inversions of values. In many a home where kashrut has long been abandoned, the unveiling of a tombstone is regarded as one of the fundamentals of our faith. How horrified some people are when they hear their rabbi minimizing the importance of the unveiling. And how irritated they are when they hear that same rabbi emphasizing the significance of kashrut.
- All modern man, and especially Jews, suffers from intense feelings of alienation, from both philosophical and emotional loneliness. We feel that we do not really belong in this world. We know that we are not completely accepted by our beloved country – not with the pact with Saudi Arabia, not with the constant emphasis of this being a Christian country, not with the plague of the Sunday Blue Laws which discriminate against Saturday Sabbath observance. Our relations with Israel are only philanthropic and sentimental, not sufficiently strong to diminish our sense of estrangement and loneliness. So much of what goes by the name of “American Judaism” has absolutely nothing to do with God, so that we are estranged from Him too. And in our loneliness, in our estrangement and solitude, we nervously look about for more and more entertainment, we obsessively seek our luxuries; even our laughter becomes anxious instead of relaxed. No wonder so many moderns find that they must, out of their solitude, turn to the couch of the psychiatrist to seek solace and a sense of being wanted.
- Jews of certain kinds come to conclusions which are bleakly pessimistic. They become prophets of complete assimilation, prognosticators of doom. You recall the two prophets, one a professor and one a historian, who recently wrote in the B’nai Brith Monthly, that we Jews have no religious future in this country.
So that like Lot of old, the value-inversion, the loneliness, and the pessimism are our heritage.
And were we to trace these consequences to their original source, we would find this too identical with the source of Lot’s woes. The “original sin” of American Jewry is: “And Lot traveled from kedem.” We have used all kinds of excuses, especially that of financial necessity, as the reason and justification for leaving Kidmono shel olam, Almighty God. Like Lot, we do keep up certain practices that come from the house of Abraham in order to assuage our consciences: we hang Jewish paintings on the walls, we display a big Ĥanukka menora, our living rooms are amply stocked with Israeli ashtrays…but Judaism and Jewishness are otherwise not noticeable in our lives. Like Lot, we have begun to live an underground existence insofar as our Jewishness is concerned; for, like the nephew of Abraham, we have learned to adjust to every conceivable kind of Sodomite practice in the world around us. “He caused himself to travel away from Kidmono shel olam.”
By running out on the God of Abraham, we have brought on ourselves all these undesirable and unfortunate consequences.
But of course things need not necessarily be thus. We are not – yet – too far gone. There can still be a realignment in Jewish life in this country. But in order to accomplish that, the process has to be reversed: instead of going away from Abraham and all he stands for, we must go back. We must not leave kedem, but go back to kedem. “Return” is, indeed, the original meaning of teshuva. We must return to Kidmono shel olam. The only way to achieve the proper spiritual orientation and perspective, to keep our sense of values; the only way to achieve a sense of being wanted, warm, closest to God, a sense of rootedness; the only way to arrive at an optimistic, healthful, sanguine attitude to Jewish life, and life in general – is to return to Kidmono shel olam, to reverse the process of “And Lot traveled from kedem.”
And to facilitate that great return is one of the chief functions of our synagogue, and of any other genuine Orthodox synagogue. One of the three meanings of “kadima” is “back to kedem,” back to Kidmono shel olam, back to God.
If we are to escape the lot of Lot, we must heed the call of “kadima,” the return to God, to Torah, to tradition, to the origins of our life and the spiritual resources through which it can thrive and through which it will survive.
