Sodom: The Facts

From Days are Coming by Rabbi Ezriel Tauber Feldheim, 1992

"Preventing another from having a benefit when one loses nothing is the trait of Sodom."

SODOM WAS CIVILIZED AND WEALTHY

Contrary to the popular misconception, Sodom was not a lawless society whose inhabitants committed their acts with unrestrained abandon. They had a very strong town government which promulgated and enforced many laws. Furthermore, they were an extremely wealthy society who put great effort into appearing civilized [ Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer].

This latter point is evident from the Talmudic teaching: One who says "What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours," is an average person (neither righteous or wicked); others contend that this attitude resembles the manner of Sodom [ Avos, chapter 5].

Defining the above attitude as "the manner of Sodom" is surprising. Why is it bad to say, "What is mine is mine"? This may not be overly righteous, but cant it be associated with the society notorious for evil? After all, the attitude expressed above demands nothing of anyone else and even says, "What is yours is yours."

ORIENTATION TOWARD SELFISHNESS

However, the Maharal explains that such an individual does not say, "What is yours is yours" out of generosity. Rather, his entire mind-set is not to share what he has, and in order to do so, he is willing to let the other person retain what he has. On the outside, he appears to be a decent person, yet on the inside his entire orientation is toward selfishness.

The point is driven home by a situation discussed in Torah law [Chosen Mishpat 174]: Our sages discuss a case where two brothers or partners wish to divide a field equally, and one wishes to take the half bordering on the property that he already owns. He wishes to have a single piece of land, rather than two pieces divided by another field. According to Jewish law, he has a right to that portion, and if the other person does not wish to relinquish it, he can be coerced by the courts. Since the one has no loss, and the other has a benefit, he has no right to oppose such a settlement. "Preventing another from having a benefit when one loses nothing is the trait of Sodom."

LAWS

Sodom, therefore, was a society based on absolute selfishness. Their self-centeredness reached such proportions that they could not bear to see others possess anything, even if it did not affect them at all. Yet, they did not want other people (and maybe even themselves) to know how truly selfish they were. Therefore, they had laws.

Upon closer inspection, however, the laws were motivated by two considerations: a) to sanction their selfishness; 2) to do it under the guise of civility. The following examples attest to this.

CHARITY

One law was that although it was legal to give strangers charity, there was a stipulation: each coin distributed had to have the initials of the one who gave the charity. Not so bad. If you were a beggar, a coin with someone else's initials or without such a mark made no difference. However, there was one more rule: Shopkeepers were forbidden to accept coins which had anyone's initials on them! Because of this, beggars regularly died of starvation. After they died, the Sodomites would search the body and retrieve their respective coins [ Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer; Targum Yonason; Sefer HaYashar].

HOSPITALITY

Another law forbade hospitality to strangers. All travelers to Sodom would have to spend the night in the street. Apparently there was an exception to this rule. Some Sodomites prepared beds for strangers. However, if the wayfarer was tall, they would give him a short bed where his legs and feet hung over. If he was short, they would give him a long bed, wake him up during the night and pull vigorously at his hands and feet in order to "stretch" him so that he would "fit." The main purpose of these beds was simply for a good laugh [ Sanhedrin 109b].

COURTS

Courts? Of course they had courts...what civilized people would not? Once, Eliezer (Abraham's servant) had business in Sodom. Seeing a Sodomite beating up a stranger, Eliezer interceded to protect the defenseless victim.

"Mind your own business," said the Sodomite, who then proceeded to take a rock and strike Eliezer in the head, drawing forth blood.

Eliezer took him to the local court of "justice." The judge passed sentenced, winked at his fellow Sodomite, and addressing Eliezer, said, "The man (the Sodomite) who struck you is a professional bloodletter. Pay him his fee. Eliezer, the victim, had to pay! (The Midrash continues that Eliezer then took a stone, bloodied the judge's face, and said, "I am also a professional bloodletter. Take the fee that you owe me and pay it to the one who struck me!" [Ibid])

SELFISHNESS MANDATED

Sodom had courts, and a criminal justice system. And if you asked a Sodomite, he would have told you that even if they were not always the best courts, they served their purpose.

Indeed they did! They sanctioned the inner human yearning and vice known as selfishness. In fact, not only did they sanction it, but they eventually mandated it. By the end, the law was that if anyone showed hospitality to a stranger, the hospitable person was given a slow, painful, cruel death [Ibid; Zohar 107; Sefer HaYashar].

It was not merely acts of injustice that particularly earned G-d's ire against the Sodomites. Injustice always earns His ire and will ultimately be dealt with justly. However, when selfishness becomes so deeply ingrained in a society that it is circumscribed by law, and "violations" of this code are dealt with in the most severe way, then there is no hope. Sodom reached the point where giving in to desires of selfishness was not only sanctioned, but mandated. And that is why only when they reached that point was their fate sealed.

DEPRAVED SOCIETIES CAN DO GOOD THINGS

The story of the destruction of Sodom is recorded in the Torah because its lesson is so relevant. Civilized societies can be breeding grounds for destructive human desires, no matter how many other good things they produce. No one ever said that depraved societies never did anything good. Quite the contrary. Sodom was a very wealthy, beautiful land; Egypt put up the Pyramids and made major breakthroughs in language and math; Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Germany [and America]--you can go right down the line and find the positive products of these civilizations.

In the end, though, each of them harbored within their lifestyle an unchecked human vice which led to the downfall of their respective empires. That glaring deficiency has remained indelibly marked so that even though the citizens of those civilizations did not recognize their faults, we, today, recognize them almost immediately.

VENEER OF CIVILITY

Now we see through the thin veneer of civility which was Sodom. However, do we see it in this society? Are we willing to put our "free world" in its proper place? Do we dare take the risk of exposing it for what it is?

UNCOMFORTABLE CONCLUSIONS

And it is a risk. For if we do expose it, then we may have to own up to certain conclusions which may make us uncomfortable.

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From Days are Coming by Rabbi Ezriel Tauber,  Feldheim, 1992 pp 185-190 [paragraph titles added for emphasis]

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Israel's Masque of the Red Death

Even with the utterly lost,
to whom life and death are equally jests,
there are matters of which no jest can be made.

Edgar Alan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

There were four basic reactions to the plagues that devastated Europe in the middle ages. In the face of certain misery and death, some people turned to extremely pious (often self-abusive) religious practice and others became extremely licentious. Some gave up hope altogether and took their own lives, while those who could afford to do so shut themselves up inside castles, thinking that isolation would save them.

Poe's Masque of the Red Death describes the reaction of Prince Prospero who locked himself and a thousand of his elite subjects inside a castle and engaged in endless debauchery. In spite of all his precautions, the Prince and his subjects were ultimately destroyed by the Red Death.

It occurs to me that the State of Israel is behaving exactly like Prince Prospero and his subjects; building an enormously expensive wall to protect itself from the "red death" of Muslim terrorism, and retreating behind this wall to engage in every imaginable kind of debauchery.

Our Israeli Prince Prospero (the Prime Minister...not a person but a position) and the ruling elite (the oligarchy and their families) really seem to believe that their retreat from reality will save them from the Muslim "red death."

By giving holy sites and precious sacred land to our most virulent, uncompromising enemies, and sinking into pathological denial of reality, the State of Israel awaits the moment when, in spite of its frantic actions and precautions, the Muslim Red Death joins the party inside the "green line."

The State will eventually succumb to the plague that it could so easily have avoided had it only embodied the principles expressed in the words of Hatikva:

Kol od balevav p'nimah
As long as deep in the heart
Nefesh Yehudi homiyah
The soul of a Jew yearns,
Ulfa'atey mizrach kadimah
And forward to the East
Ayin l'tzion tzofiyah
To Zion, an eye looks
Od lo avdah tikvatenu,
Our hope will not be lost,
Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim
The hope of two thousand years
L'hiyot am chofshi b'artzenu
To be a free nation in our land,
Eretz Tzion v'Yerushalayim.
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

Democracy vs Malchut

All efforts to reform Israel into a constitutional democracy will fail unless the reform is first directed to establishing the Malchut.

ISRAEL'S MOCK DEMOCRACY
In 1988, when one might have been able to say that Israel still had a few normative democratic values such as yielding to the will of the people who elect their representatives, Rabbi Meir Kahane's KACH! party was soaring in the polls. Labor and Likud (the putative left and right of Israeli politics) were seeing their political futures (and their bank accounts) diminishing day by day.

The Arabs (really, the Muslims) were shaking in their kafias and burqas, fearing that their imaginary "Palestine" was about to be exposed for the fraud that it is. There was about to dawn upon the Jewish people a realization of the hope expressed in the National Anthem Hatikva that Rabbi Kahane sang loudly and with enthusiastic pride at every public event.

But the hope of nearly 2,000 years was to be delayed a bit. Once again, as had happened so many times in our history, the leaders of the Jewish people found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Reacting with uncharacteristic clarity and decisiveness, the political and spiritual enemies in Labor and Likud put aside their very real differences and formed a cynical coalition to deal with the growing threat posed by Rabbi Kahane's KACH! party.

Kahane was officially banned, and Israel officially became just another Middle East dictatorship devoid of all but symbolic references to a Jewish soul and a Jewish sense of purpose. A slow spiral into cultural relativism and outright nihilism grew more and more powerful. Two years later, Kahane was assassinated in New York, and his assassin was acquitted.

Rabbi Meir Kahane's son Binyamin Kahane showed all the promise of becoming a great leader and motivator and because of this was eventually banned by the same klatch of knuckleheads who banned his father. Binyamin was also murdered by an expert sniper while traveling up the ancient road linking Shekem with Jerusaalem and Be'er Sheba. Binyaman died, along with his wife, while returning to his home in Kfar Tapuach.

Any idea of Israel being a free and open democracy perished with the Kahane bans, for in a free and open (democratic) society, the opposition is allowed equal access to the political system. Witness the international community's recent arm twisting wherein Israel was forced to allow Hamas to be elected as the representative of the Arab (mostly Muslim) majority who seek to put an end not only to the Jewish State but to the Jewish people.

MORBID LICENTIOUSNESS
In the years since Rabbi Kahane was banned there has been a dramatic increase of morbid licentiousness in Israeli society, from pork-eating to drugs and prostitution. A consequence of this trend towards cultural relativism and nihilism is the seemingly unstoppable plan to remove Jews from key areas of our historical homeland. This plan, called by various names intended to disguise its real objective, is being implemented in slow and careful steps...the Fabian approach. Slowly and deliberately, Jews are disappearing from historically significant parts of Judea and the Shomeron.

As licentiousness and irrationality have increased there has been a corresponding decrease in political freedom. I say without reservation that for most of us who oppose the government's plans to continue moving Jews out of their homes and giving our ancestral lands to the Muslims who want to eliminate us, there is no real political freedom here in Israel, save the "Hobson's choice" variety. We'd better take it and like it when they suggest we move to the Negev.

NO REAL FREEDOM
Since the 1988 ban on Kahane it has become increasingly difficult for Torah observant political movements to operate in any effective fashion. Those political factions who do make it are so thoroughly compromised that they function merely as distributors of governmental bribes and as information gatherers for that part of the internal security services who carry on the British Mandate era operations against Jewish Nationalists.

Right now I'd say it's impossible for an uncompromising organization to operate effectively. The proof of this is the Aza pullout, the destruction of Jewish towns and homes in Amona, and the pending Judenrein operations against so-called illegal settlements whose existence threatens the oligarchy's demonic bargain with the international coalition bent on pleasing the Saudi Arabians (Arabian/American oil coalition).

SAUDI ROADMAP
Before you ridicule my reference to the Saudis, recall that the entire Road Map fiasco is the brainchild of the Saudis, only very slightly re-worded and thuggishly enforced by their U.S. oil partners through the aegis of the United Nations and its several anti-Israel operations disguised as humanitarian organizations.

If Jews in Israel want a change in the government, then there must be a base of political operations, command structure, financing, unity of purpose. None of this exists, except in the imagination.

Even if such a political organization did exist, there are very few Torah observant Jews who have the skills necessary to manage a business operation larger than a sole-proprietorship, let alone a military/political organization that must supply basic services to its citizens.

POLITICS IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF BUSINESS
Mind you, there are quite a number of well-intentioned and talented people in the religious right and Jewish Nationalist groups. Were there ever to be widespread training in generally accepted accounting practices and business/government operations management, the natural talents and focused habits developed from Torah and Talmud study would guarantee a generation of sharp operators. Political success would be guaranteed, for politics is the expression of the will of the business sector, not the other way around.

But there is no widespread business and government-operations training of religious Jews. Worse yet, well-intentioned religious Jews are inevitably misled and taken advantage of by opportunistic thieves who've managed to put themselves up as leaders of what remains of the old nationalist movements.

MALCHUT ISRAEL vs DEMOCRATIC ISRAEL
While Professor Paul Eidelberg's analysis of the problems here in Israel is right on target ( http://foundation1.org/ ) he is simply being ignored by most Torah observant Jews. Until he embraces the Malchut as the vehicle for implementing his ideas of governance, these good and important ideas will remain out of reach of exactly those Jews who should be working for change in the direction that Professor Eidelberg suggests.

The only viable solution to our dilemma is to follow the example of Rabbi Yosi Dayan and his son Hananel. Our only real solution is to establish the Kingdom, with the Sanhedrin making political decisions. http://malchut-israel.org/

All efforts to reform Israel into a constitutional democracy will fail unless the reform is first directed to establishing the Malchut.

Bear, Owl, Monkey, Ass

APOLOGUE to Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett

A young painter, indulging a vein of pleasantry, sketched a kind of conversation piece, representing a bear, an owl, a monkey, and an ass; and to render it more striking, humorous, and moral, distinguished every figure by some emblem of human life.

Bruin was exhibited in the garb and attitude of an old, toothless, drunken soldier; the owl perched upon the handle of a coffee-pot, with spectacle on nose, seemed to contemplate a newspaper; and the ass, ornamented with a huge tie-wig (which, however, could not conceal his long ears), sat for his picture to the monkey, who appeared with the implements of painting.

This whimsical group afforded some mirth, and met with general approbation, until some mischievous wag hinted that the whole--was a lampoon upon the friends of the performer; an insinuation which was no sooner circulated than those very people who applauded it before began to be alarmed, and even to fancy themselves signified by the several figures of the piece.

Among others, a worthy personage in years, who had served in the army with reputation, being incensed at the Supposed outrage, repaired to the lodging of the painter, and finding him at home, "Hark ye, Mr. Monkey," said he, "I have a good mind to convince you, that though the bear has lost his teeth, he retains his paws, and that he is not so drunk but he can perceive your impertinence."

"Sblood! sir, that toothless jaw is a d--ned scandalous libel--but don't yon imagine me so chopfallen as not to be able to chew the cud of resentment."

Here he was interrupted by the arrival of a learned physician, who, advancing to the culprit with fury in his aspect, exclaimed, "Suppose the augmentation of the ass's ears should prove the diminution of the baboon's--nay, seek not to prevaricate, for, by the beard of Aesculapius! there is not one hair in this periwig that will not stand up in judgment to convict thee of personal abuse. Do but observe, captain, how this pitiful little fellow has copied the very curls-the colour, indeed, is different, but then the form and foretop are quite similar."

While he thus remonstrated in a strain of vociferation, a venerable senator entered, and waddling up to the delinquent, "Jackanapes!" cried he, "I will now let thee see I can read something else than a newspaper, and that without the help of spectacles: here is your own note of hand, sirrah, for money, which if I had not advanced, you yourself would have resembled an owl, in not daring to show your face by day, you ungrateful slanderous knave!"

In vain the astonished painter declared that he had no intention to give offence, or to characterise particular persons: they affirmed the resemblance was too palpable to be overlooked; they taxed him with insolence, malice, and ingratitude; and their clamours being overheard by the public, the captain was a bear, the doctor an ass, and the senator an owl, to his dying day.

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