Placing Blame

October 26, 2007
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Our weekly Torah portion includes the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the description sounds too much like the photos and video we have been seeing of the wildfires in Southern California. What actually happened to the two cities of the Plain in biblical times is anyone's guess. What grew up around it was a morality tale.

When we cannot easily explain bad things happening around us, we often resort to explanations that place the blame on the very people who are most adversely affected. Mrs. O'Leary's cow gets a bad rep for starting the great Chicago fire.

Whether the O'Leary story is true or not, according to one historian, it has had such appeal because it offers a clear and specific cause for this otherwise overwhelming event, an imaginative handle by which people can take hold of it. Regardless of the inconclusiveness of the official investigation, at the time it also enabled people to blame someone in particular for what was a matter of collective responsibility and misfortune.

At the time, there were other theories. One stated that an unnamed terrorist from Paris started the fire. Another claimed that people partying near the O'Leary household accidentally set the blaze. And yet another claimed that the fire started as a result of a comet plunging to earth, which also would account for the fact that on the very night of the fire, there were also fires in other nearby communities. This pretty much assembles the usual suspects.

Was the fire the result of a dastardly villain, a clumsy cow, an overly rowdy party, or an intervention from heaven? Was Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by its sinful people, its sinful animals (that's right, the rabbis went to great lengths to let us know that even the animals were sinful in Sodom and Gomorrah--and they had to be, since they were also destroyed in the conflagration), or was it a result of intervention from heaven?

We could seek some interesting scientific reasons for the disaster. If there had been an immediate investigation, as there was in Chicago after its great fire, and as there will be in San Diego very shortly, we would know more. But there is some reason to believe that, by the time of Abraham, the cities of the Plain were ripe for disaster. One thing we know from the Bible is that cities were sometimes abandoned when the garbage around them piled up so high and so wide that the citizens could no longer stomach living nearby. It would have been especially dangerous to leave garbage out in the area around the Dead Sea because the area in question was a place where naphtha pooled naturally at the earth's surface. The combination of naphtha, a high-octane colorless petroleum ether, and garbage could account for a sudden conflagration that would resemble fire and brimstone. If this was the cause, there would have been no place for the people to run, for they would have been surrounded by the explosion and the subsequent flames.

     The Torah tells us that,

 As the sun rose upon the earth and Lot entered Zoar, Adonai rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from Adonai out of heaven. God annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground (Gen. 19:23-25).

When Abraham looked down, "he saw the smoke of the land rising like the smoke of a kiln" (Gen. 19:28). Whatever happened, the disaster was limited to the valley in which Lot and his family had chosen to make their home. Mrs. Lot did not survive and, to this day, guides will point out one of the many pillars of salt near the bottom of the Dead Sea, saying this is "Mrs. Lot." But the way legends arise out of disasters, the presence of the salt pillars gave an excellent handle to the notion that Mrs. Lot was turned into one of them.

From our point of view, the disaster is not the most important part of the story. More important are the moral decrepitude of the citizens of Sodom and the bargain that Abraham strikes with God to spare the cities if ten good persons can be found.

But the disaster is where I wish to focus the emphasis tonight. In this world, there is a law of probabilities. We humans always get in trouble when we flaunt this law of probabilities. If we build our homes too close to a place where wildfires are bound to happen, or mudslides are bound to happen, or tsunamis are bound to happen, or volcanoes are bound to erupt, or earthquakes are bound to rock the land, or hurricanes are bound to strike, or floods are bound to devastate us, then we must accept the inevitable when the probabilities turn into possibilities and then into actualities.

Einstein was convinced that God does not play dice with the universe, but there is no problem seeing that Einstein is correct and also the laws of probability are correct. The inevitable natural disasters are built into the fabric of the world, into the weather and the tides and the land beneath our feet. There will be fires and tsunamis and smoke may mark the spot where cities once stood.

Nature can devastate us. Or we can devastate one another, as when the United States thought it was okay to end the Second World War by fire-bombing cities in Germany and Japan, destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, or when the North thought it appropriate to devastate the lives of Southerners by cutting a swathe of destruction across the State of Georgia that would deprive several generations of the use of that land and those fields.

Perhaps it is in times when devastation and destruction are in our hands and not in the hands of heaven and the forces of nature that we are most in need of the lesson taught in this week's portion. If there are even ten good people, should we really destroy an entire human population of a city or a place or even of a country? Maybe it is not too late for us to gather our resources together to help one another instead of destroying one another. Maybe it is not too late for us to stop blaming the victims of natural disasters for what happens to them and for lending them assistance however we can.

The Jewish Federation of San Diego has already established an emergency fund to help those who are presently affected by the wildfires, those who have lost homes and possessions, and those who need help rebuilding and reestablishing their communities. You can donate on the web to help them. Just go to Jewish in San Diego dot org (http://www.Jewishinsandiego.org) to make a donation. No matter how the fire started, it is our response to disaster that marks us not only as human, but as humane. And let us say: Amen.