What do you do when God tells you he’s about to destroy the most wicked people in the world?
If you’re Abraham, you beg him to spare their lives.
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, God tells Abraham he’s going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. And these people were evil. They hated outsiders. They despised the poor. According to our Sages, they even made it a crime to help a stranger. And it was Abraham, the very opposite. He devoted his life to welcoming strangers, feeding the hungry, and performing acts of loving kindness, chesed.
So you’d think Abraham would say, “thank God, good riddance.” But no, he argues with God. What if there are 50 righteous people? Will you spare the city? 45, 40, 30, 20, 10. And why stop at 10? Rashi explains that in the generation of the Flood, there were eight righteous people, Noach and his family. And they were not enough to save the world.
But 10 righteous people could have saved Sodom. Rav Moshe Feinstein teaches something beautiful about this extraordinary conversation. Abraham’s kindness wasn’t just a personality trait. It was a moral principle. He didn’t reserve his compassion for people he liked or people who agreed with him. He even wanted to save people who stood for everything he opposed. And he focused on the righteous because, even a small group of good people might influence an entire wicked society to change.
Think about that. Abraham wasn’t excusing their evil. He was hoping they would overcome it. We can fight wickedness with everything we’ve got and still pray that those who practice it will change their ways.
Abraham didn’t ask God to accept their wickedness. He asked God to give them another chance to overcome it. And when they failed, he accepted God’s decree. It’s not about sunshine and rainbows and certainly not about moral relativism. It’s about justice and mercy each in its time. That’s what it means to be a child of Abraham.
May we live up to that challenge and let us say, Amen.
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