Sodom: A Story for our Time?

We’d come to the city years before - even though it had a terrible reputation (Genesis 13:12-13). Everyone in the Valley knew about Sodom – it was violent, corrupt, lawless, everyone was out for themselves. There were no-go areas at night, and even during the day it wasn’t safe, certainly not for a woman – it was bad, like New York in the 70s, or parts of Jo’burg or Mexico City today...but there always have been places that bring Sodom to mind: godless, fear-filled cities where people struggle to survive with their humanity intact. God knows, what an impossible project it feels sometimes: to live with integrity when you are surrounded by greed and trickery, corruption and selfishness, with anger simmering on the streets, in cities that lack compassion, where hope is all burnt out.  

Our city felt it was living on the edge, life was harsh, chaos was always just around the corner - things, we felt, could break down at any moment – but did it deserve what happened? The fire and brimstone, the choking dust, the charred bodies.  Do cities perish through lack of goodness? Did Hiroshima? Or Dresden? Did Aleppo or Mariupol? Surely the innocent and the guilty die together?

Was Sodom different? I knew good people there, who perished with the wicked. No justice, even for the righteous: it is ever thus.  Would it have made a difference if there’d been even ten good folk in Sodom, people of principle, those who stood outside the crowds, who resisted the descent into self-centredness, manipulation, mass delusion? Were there not even ten, tender of heart, on the side of life, committed to their neighbours, caring for their environment, nurturing the society in which we lived? If just that handful had acted sooner, could they have saved us all? We’ll never know. 

My husband was a good man – and there were a few others like him, prepared to offer hospitality to strangers, to take in the immigrant, to protect those seeking shelter and asylum. Yes, there were some, but as it turned out there were not enough – not enough to stop the guiltless suffering the same fate as the guilty. Is this the iron law of life, that suffering comes to all, that a tipping point is reached in every society when the Messiah can no longer come, when the forces of greed, or indifference, overwhelm the good there is, sweep away the hope for better things?

How much brave, careless rhetoric does it take for a society to implode under the weight of its own contradictions?  The powerful flaunt their might with cold calculation, companies cynically eye the bottom line of the balance sheet, the politicians come and go as helpless and self-regarding as the rest, fearful of disturbing the status quo, the blameless are trampled underfoot, the poor live quiet lives of desperation: is Sodom always our future, as well as the past? God knows, I certainly don’t. 

I told him it was no place to bring up a family, but Lot wouldn’t listen. My husband was a good man, but he was a stubborn man. He’d chosen this place, his uncle Abraham had been very generous, had let him choose west or east, Canaan or the fertile Jordan valley (Genesis 13:10-11). And Lot – yes, a good man, I say it again, but a man of simple tastes who saw only what was in front of his eyes, who never saw the wider picture (I know, that’s always hard to do) - my husband Lot saw the well-watered plains and economic opportunities of the Jordan valley and he thought ‘Head east young man’, not having seen all those old movies that taught that west is always the way to go: you follow the sun, on, away from here, and over the horizon.

So he landed up there, in benighted Sodom, ‘Twin-Town: Gemorrah’.  God help us.  Though He rarely seems to. But yes, easy to blame God – though usually He’s blamed by those who fail to see that He’s given us the responsibility to make things work. ‘We, the people’, responsible for our fate, for better or worse.  

So Sodom it was, and we settled there and lived as people live, doing business, raising a family, struggling to make ends meet, helping each other out. We were close-knit as a family – we had children, and they grew, and they married young, and then my two youngest daughters came along:  I loved them more than words can tell, they came so late, you see. And it was a moment of madness I’m sure - but he could be impulsive like that, any of us can, but what with his stubbornness, his impetuous belief that he knew what’s right while others are always blind, and what with the strain of those hours when we were under siege in our own home and the mob was at the  door, baying for blood - those two strangers whom we’d taken in, given shelter to, they were under our roof, our protection, and that is a sacred responsibility, to protect the stranger and Lot believed in that, he really did, even though he wasn’t pious, but he believed in certain values - so that when the mob came to drag out the two visitors, our guests, my husband in that moment of madness told the crowd: take my girls, but don’t take my guests. As if that wasn’t also a sacred bond – his loyalty to our family.

 And I can’t forgive him for that moment, that gesture, that offering, I really can’t – though I can see how he felt he had to do something to keep the mob at bay, to keep them from entering our home: they would have raped us, killed us, it had happened before, it’ll happen again – so we were at their mercy and none of us would be here to tell this tale, I think my husband figured, if he didn’t do something, offer them something. But the girls, how could he do that? You see - you do see, don’t you? - in times of war and insurrection, in times of terror, in times when chaos is the only law, people sometimes have to make terrible choices, terrifying choices: pray you will never have to make such choices.

You who will face floods and fires, storms and drought, you who will face upheavals beyond imaging unless you can turn things round before it is too late – pray that your choices and the choices of your children and your children’s children will not be choices too heavy for the human heart to bear. 

There was a moment when all went very still – like the moment of calm before the storm breaks – when Lot realised the end was near and that we had to flee because no good would come of this, it had all gone too far: this city had reached its point of no return. Zero hour. Lot just knew, or maybe the two strangers told him – I’ll never know for sure – but  the next thing I know we were packed and running, Lot and me and the two girls and we left the rest of the family there, they wanted to stay they said, and it all happened so quickly, there was no time to think and we had to leave them, it tore me apart, I had to leave my life behind, but I had the girls and we went, that night we went, in a rush, a panic, we just left, and the tears were burning my eyes and I couldn’t bear to go on, and I knew I had to go on – as women in war have always gone on, beyond the pain, beyond the calculations, into the fear, into the animal instinct to survive, to live while others die, you see others die and you have to go on, because there is breath in you still, and you can’t go on, but you must go on, and you want to die, but you want to live – and I had to turn and look, I had to see what I was leaving behind, my grown-up children, my family, my friends, and I loved them all so much: how could anyone bear to leave without looking back, looking to see what was happening even though I knew what was happening, how the city was aflame, how the sulphurous hearts of the inhabitants of Sodom had exploded into a raging inferno of destruction, that they were being destroyed, all of them, they had destroyed themselves really and now the city was aflame, and the fire and the smoke consumed them all, a conflagration like no other: it was a holocaust of suffering like no other. Though I’m told there have been others.

Wouldn’t you also have looked? A last glance, a last chance to see what had been, and how it all went wrong? 

It’s legendary, this epic place of self-centredness and terror. ‘The destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah’ – how easily it rolls off the tongue, but it should make our mouths bitter in the telling, we should taste the dust and the ashes, our tongues should shrivel in the heat of our rage that it ends like this. I stood rooted to the spot, watching, the end of my family, the end of an era, the end of my hopes for the future. Dust and ashes, and there I was – motionless, transfixed by all the suffering that we are heir to, motionless, like a pillar, all hope abandoned, emptied out like a salt-cellar bled of salt, a grieving heap of salt, spilled out, lifeless, no movement, no movement ever again, my eyes fixed on the devastation, long gone now, and still here, and still to come. God knows when it will ever end.

That’s it. That’s my story. (What are you waiting for? There’s no happy ending). You don’t need to know anything else. You don’t even need to know my name. I am Lot’s wife, that’s all. I am no-one. And I am every woman who has ever suffered the loss of what was once treasured but is forever gone. And I am every woman who has ever feared the loss of what we still possess, the beauty of the world, the beauty of family and friendship and community, the playfulness of  autumn leaves in their season, and the sensuous aroma of bread baking in our homes, and the unbearable lightness of being alive, the gift of life, and the blessings we share, and the fragility of it all – who does not fear the loss of what we still possess, all that is still precious under threat, the possibility of change always suspended just out of reach?

Don’t we want to grasp it all while we can, don’t we want to hold on to life while it is still worth living? The texts never gave me a name – but I need no name. For you know me: you are me, men, women, young, old, we are Lot’s wife, looking back at what we had, petrified of loss, holding the planet in our hands.   

 

[Based on a midrashic sermon on Genesis chapter 19: Finchley Reform Synagogue, November 12^th 2022]