Eden Sadra – Year 11

Parashat VaYera

This week’s parashah is VaYera, the 18^th chapter of the book of Bereishit. I’ll give a quick description.

Avraham is just chilling, basking in the hot desert sun when suddenly three visitors show up at his tent. Being the hospitable man that he is, he invites them in and he and his wife create a lovely meal for them; bread, meat, cakes and more. The three men ask where his wife Sarah is (as she is cooking up a storm in the kitchen) and when he points toward his tent and tells them that she is in there, they confidently tell him that Sarah, Avraham’s very old wife will bear a child very soon.

Sarah hears this and laughs. God gets angry at her for laughing at Him, saying she assumes He isn’t powerful enough to give her a child in her old age, and then the three visitors leave. This is when the drama picks up. When they leave, God has a chat with Avraham telling him that he’s going to check out the fuss that’s happening over with Sedom and Amorah. He tells Avraham that the outcry of Sedom and Amorah is great, which suggests that their wickedness is pretty serious stuff.

God assures Avraham that if the fuss is as bad as it sounds, there’s going to be trouble. Then Avraham gets all philosophical on us and asks God an interesting question: “Will God destroy the righteous with the wicked? Even if there’s just 50  righteous people, isn’t it unfair to destroy everyone? God should distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. He is after all the “Judge of all the Earth”. Doesn’t that mean he should act with justice?

God reckons that Avraham has a good point and Avraham ends up convincing God to spare the city due to these 50 righteous individuals. Avraham uses those killer negotiating skills and gets God down to 10 people!  Even if there are 10 righteous people in a city, God would spare it to save their lives. Although the parashah doesn’t finish with that, this is the part I want to focus on; a bit of a moral dilemma, if you ask me.

If any of you have heard your parents or anyone else call someone the ‘rotten apple’ of a bunch, the saying “It only takes one rotten apple to ruin the bunch” or something along those lines, then you’ve kind of heard God’s view of this story. Because you see that when one apple gets a disease or gets mouldy, it spreads to the rest of the apples in the bunch, just like how when one naughty kid gets the whole class a detention and everyone suffers, and just how the wicked people in the cities will get everyone killed by God.

The idea of collective punishment sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of collective responsibility. It’s questions like, and I know you’ve heard it all before, but if you see someone being bullied and know that you could do something about it without getting hurt yourself, but you don’t do anything, are you a bystander? Do you deserve to be punished?

It’s actually really interesting to see how an ancient story in the Torah still resonates and has had such an influence on things as little as modern day sayings even if we don’t know it. I know that before I volunteered to write this parashah, I certainly didn’t know that that saying had anything to do with a story out of our Torah.

So, going back to that idea of collective punishment and collective responsibility and stuff, I want to pose you guys with a very simple question:

Do you think collective punishment is fair?