This Tuesday, November 11th, Jewish communities all around the world will participate in The Rabbi Sacks Global Day of Learning, marking the fifth yahrzeit of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. For more information, and to find a community near you, click here.
When did human beings become moral?
If you’ve been reading the Torah with us these last few weeks, you know we were certainly not born with the innate ability to do the right thing. Adam and Eve, tasked with just one simple restriction, fail miserably. Their son, Cain, does even worse, and the folks who follow are so wicked that God eventually has to drown them all, save for Noah, his family, and the animals.
And then comes Abraham.
In this week’s parsha, our patriarch shows us all what morality looks like. God informs Abraham that He’s about to destroy Sodom, a city thick with evildoers, but the man we call Avinu, our father, puts up a fight. “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” he asks God, and immediately jumps into negotiations with the Almighty, urging him to spare the city if even ten good people could be found among its men.
Abraham, several of our rabbis explained, realizes that if God smites the guilty and the innocent alike, we humans may no longer believe that the choices we make with our own free will matter; if the good and the bad both end up punished, we may then argue, there’s really no reason not to indulge in sin.
It’s not a coincidence at all that we read these words of profound clarity and courage the same week we mark the anniversary of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s passing. More than perhaps any of our religious leaders, Rabbi Sacks reminded us constantly that Abraham’s unenviable task was ours as well: to stand firmly on the side of the common good, and argue—always, even with God if need be—on behalf of the quality of mercy.
We moderns, Rabbi Sacks warned us, are suffering from what he called “cultural climate change.” If you’re wondering why everything and everyone these days seems so nasty, brutish, and short-tempered, it’s because we’ve come to rely exclusively on the market and on the state to address all of our problems. We’ve forgotten, Rabbi Sacks lamented, that third and greatest of all joint human productions, the one that animated Abraham, our shared sense of joint moral commitment. The first two institutions, he explained, were about competition and self-interest; the third was about the common good.
Abraham, as this week’s parsha shows, was unparalleled at cultivating the common good. So was Rabbi Sacks: in writing about the dignity of difference, he reminded us that though we all come from different backgrounds and different traditions, culture isn’t and cannot be a zero sum game between warring factions seeking to assert their dominance and exclude all other approaches and interpretations. It’s an insight we need today more than ever.
And there’s no better way of putting it into practice than signing up for the annual Global Day of Learning in Rabbi Sacks’s memory. This year’s theme is “Torah as Conversation,” reminding us of Rabbi Sacks’s observation that Judaism is, first and foremost, a religion of listening—which is why, perhaps, our central daily prayer begins with the words “Hear, O Israel.” So sign up, find a participating community near you, download the ample resources on offer, and begin a fruitful, respectful conversation. God knows we can’t have enough of those these days.
To read more wisdom from Parshat Vayera, including from Rabbi Sacks as well as the Sacks Scholars, click here.