Imu Shalev: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

Hi, I’m Imu Shalev. Parshat Vayera begins with two pretty well known stories. The first is the three messengers who come to tell Abraham and Sarah that they’re going to have a baby. And the second is the story of Abraham bargaining with God to try to save the people of Sodom. These two stories don’t seem to have all that much to do with each other, but in this week’s episode, Beth Lesch uncovers a surprising link between these stories. At first, it seems like a small, simple connection, but as she and Rabbi Fohrman pull on that thread, it leads them to profound insights about God’s values and what makes life worth living.

This episode is also special for another reason. We’re trying something a bit new on Into the Verse. Beth is going to take us behind the scenes and actually share parts of her research journey… the question that kicked it all off, the confusing parts that stumped her, and her discussions with Rabbi Fohrman along the way. I’ve got to tell you, it made me feel like I was on the journey with her, getting the thrill of discovery right alongside her as new questions and ideas unfolded. I hope you’ll feel some of that excitement too. Here she is.

Beth Lesch: True or false? In this week’s parsha, God tells Abraham about the plan to destroy the city of Sodom, and upon hearing this, Abraham pleads with God to spare the righteous people who might be living there. 

That’s what I always thought. But as I recently discovered, there’s actually more to the story. Listen to what Abraham says to God:

אוּלַי יֵשׁ חֲמִשִּׁים צַדִּיקִם בְּתוֹךְ הָעִיר הַאַף תִּסְפֶּה וְלֹא-תִשָּׂא לַמָּקוֹם לְמַעַן חֲמִשִּׁים הַצַּדִּיקִם אֲשֶׁר בְּקִרְבָּהּ

God, maybe there are 50 tzaddikim, 50 righteous people, in the city. Are You really going to sweep away and not forgive the place for the sake of the 50 tzaddikim inside of it?

(Genesis 18:24)

I’ll repeat the key phrase: וְלֹא-תִשָּׂא לַמָּקוֹם – God, are You not going to forgive the place? 

Abraham seems to think that if there are 50 tzaddikim in Sodom, God should forgive the whole city. Abraham isn’t just asking God to spare the righteous people; he’s asking God to let the wicked people off the hook. Once I noticed that this was Abraham’s actual request, I couldn’t stop wondering about it. Why would he ask for that?  

Why Spare the Wicked?

I came up with a few possible explanations, but none of them seemed to work completely. At first, I assumed that it was an all-or-nothing kind of situation, that God either had to destroy everyone or destroy no one. So if there are tzaddikim, you can’t destroy the city, right? But I don’t think that assumption holds up. I mean, think about how the story actually ends. God destroyed the city, but Lot was miraculously saved. God could have done that with all of the righteous people and still doled out punishment to the wicked. So you can’t really say it was all or nothing. 

Another idea I considered was: Maybe that’s just the kind of person Abraham is – he’s compassionate, he thinks that wicked people should be forgiven for their sins and given a second chance. Except… that’s not how Abraham presents his case. He doesn’t say: God, I know they deserve to be punished, but have mercy on them. Abraham doesn’t make his case on the basis of mercy; he makes his case on the basis of justice. Listen to what he says to God: הֲשֹׁפֵט כָּל-הָאָרֶץ לֹא יַעֲשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט – Is the shofet, the Judge of all the earth, not going to do justice? (Genesis 18:25). Somehow, in Abraham’s mind, forgiving the wicked people is the just thing to do. And what’s crazier is that God apparently goes along with this. God says: אִם-אֶמְצָא בִסְדֹם חֲמִשִּׁים צַדִּיקִם בְּתוֹךְ הָעִיר – If I find 50 tzaddikim in Sodom, וְנָשָׂאתִי לְכָל-הַמָּקוֹם בַּעֲבוּרָם – I’ll forgive the whole city for their sake (Genesis 18:26).

I’m sure that Abraham and God know what they’re doing here, but personally, I find this story really puzzling, even troubling. Shouldn’t wicked people be punished for their crimes? Isn’t that the just thing to do? So what is going on here? What do Abraham and God know about justice that we don’t?

In this episode, I want to explore that with you, and I want to do it by inviting you into the Aleph Beta beit midrash. I’ll share with you the verses that I studied and the questions that stumped me along the way. I’ll play you excerpts from my study sessions with Rabbi Fohrman. And if your experience is anything like mine, you will emerge with a wholly transformed understanding of this powerful story. I hope you find it as thrilling as I did. 

So let’s start at the beginning. I had this question about Abraham’s strange plea to give a pass to the wicked people of Sodom, and his even stranger claim that doing so would be mishpat, would be the just thing to do. So you might think I’d start scouring the verses, hunting for answers. But that’s not what I did. I didn’t start my search with the question. I started with the text. If that sounds a bit cryptic, let me explain.

Instead of looking for answers, I began by opening up to Genesis chapter 18 and simply re-reading the text. Just relaxing, keeping an open mind. Letting my brain marinate in the story. Because if you just read the text to find answers, you’re only going to notice the things that seem relevant. But when you read it as is, without looking for anything specific, all sorts of nuances and surprises can jump out at you, and sometimes they end up leading you to just the kind of insight you’re looking for. And sure enough, when I sat with the text, I noticed something.

The First Clue: ha’af

It’s a single word, a word that appears in Abraham’s conversation with God about Sodom. The word is ha’af. It roughly translates to “Really?” or “Could it possibly be?” It expresses incredulity, disbelief. It’s in Genesis chapter 18, verse 24: הַאַף תִּסְפֶּה וְלֹא-תִשָּׂא לַמָּקוֹם – Really? You’re going to sweep away and not forgive the place for the sake of the 50 tzadikim inside of it?

Now, what did I find so interesting about this simple little word ha’af? Well, something about it was ringing bells for me, because I had just come across the word ha’af earlier in this very same chapter, just a dozen or so verses prior. Here’s Genesis chapter 18, verse 13: הַאַף אֻמְנָם אֵלֵד – Really? I’m going to bear a child?

If you’re thinking that that doesn’t sound like the Sodom story, you’re right. Chapter 18 contains two separate stories. Abraham’s conversation with God about Sodom is the second story. The first story is the story of Sarah and Abraham and the three men who visit their tent and announce that Sarah is going to have a baby. There, the Torah tells us that Sarah had already reached menopause, and so she reacts to this news by laughing. She says to herself, הַאַף אֻמְנָם אֵלֵד –  Really? I’m going to bear a child? (Genesis 18:13).  And then God actually calls her out on that and asks why she laughed – after all, God can do anything! – and she gets scared and tries to deny laughing. And after all that, that’s when we get God’s conversation with Abraham about Sodom.

It’s not clear how these two stories relate to each other, if they relate to each other. But both stories contain the word ha’af. And the word ha’af is extremely uncommon. Do you know how many other times this word appears in the Five Books of Moses? None, zero. Ha’af in the Sarah story, ha’af in the Sodom story, and that’s it. So is it just a coincidence? Maybe. But it was enough to make me wonder: Could it be that the Torah wants us to see these two stories as somehow connected? Or was I making a big deal out of nothing?

I wanted to investigate further, and decided to find a partner to read through these stories with. And lucky for me, I checked my calendar, and ooh – Rabbi Fohrman had an “open hours” slot later that same day, a time set aside for other scholars on the Aleph Beta team to come to him and discuss our research. I sat down with him, and we discussed the ha’af connection, and I asked him: Do you think there’s something here? Do you think the Torah is planting this parallel in the text so that we, the readers, will connect the two stories? Rabbi Fohrman didn’t say yes but he also didn’t say no. Here’s what he said. (Oh, and sorry for the sound quality – such is the Aleph Beta beit midrash.)

Rabbi David Fohrman: What you really need to do in a situation like this is, you really want to get meditative. You want to go on a long walk, and not just focus on the narrow ha’af, but the context of ha’af. If I was going on a long walk on the context of ha’af, I would be bothered by all this laughter business, like, what the heck is going on with all this laughter? Why is Sarah laughing? Why is it such a big deal that she’s laughing? Who cares? 

I don't know what the answer to that is, but there’s got to be some answer to it, and if you’re going to offer me some deep under-the-surface insight on ha’af, I bet it’s probably connected to the larger theme of laughter here. 

Beth: What Rabbi Fohrman is doing here is a bit subtle. He’s saying: “Beth, we haven’t seen enough evidence yet to say whether this connection is for real or is just a coincidence. But let’s say that the Torah is signaling to us that these two stories are connected… connected in some deep and fundamental way. If that’s true, then I would expect that there would be more parallels between the stories. Indeed, I would expect that all of the major elements from story A would be somehow paralleled in story B, somehow in conversation with story B. Hey, you know what major element I see in story A? Laughter. It comes up one, two, three, four times. It’s kind of conspicuous. What’s going on with Sarah’s laughter?”

So if these two stories really are linked, then laughter should also come up in the Sodom story. It might be subtle, a kind of echo of laughter, something in conversation with the idea of laughter. But it should be there. That, at the very least, is Rabbi Fohrman’s contention.

A Parallel with Laughter

At this point, Rabbi Fohrman was silent for a moment, thinking. And then he offered up one more thought. I’ll play the tape for you, and just a heads-up on the translation: tzachak is the Hebrew word for laughter.

Rabbi Fohrman: Let me just throw in one other thing that just as I was talking I noticed. Is there a word in the Sodom story that’s central and absolutely crucial to what God wants to seemingly talk to Abraham about, and what Abraham’s talking to God about, that reminds you of the root tzachak? 

Beth: Tzedakah?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, tzadak. Right? It’s just one little pen-stroke away. If you take that daled and just extend that line, then tzadak becomes tzachak. Which to me is a really interesting thing, suggesting, if we’re not completely off the deep end, that there’s some interesting relationship between tzedek and laughter. 

Beth: Interesting. I'm taking notes for my walk. 

Rabbi Fohrman is noticing that there’s a word that appears in the Sodom story that sounds an awful lot like tzachak, the “laughter” word from the Sarah story. Tzachak is very similar to the root tzadak, “righteous,” which is where we get the word tzedek, “righteousness,” and tzadikkim, “righteous people.”  And tzadikkim show up over and over throughout the Sodom conversation.

Now, I don’t know if you can hear it in my voice, but between you and me, I’m not so enthused by Rabbi Fohrman’s suggestion. Tzadak, tzachak, righteousness, laughter… it feels like a stretch. I mean, you’ve got to change the letter from a daled to a chet… I’m kind of skeptical about this sort of wordplay counting as evidence.

It was getting late in the day, so we agreed to end our session there. A week later, I signed on to Zoom to continue the conversation.

Beth: Hey, Rabbi Fohrman. How are you doing? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Hi Beth, how are you?

Beth: Turns out that Rabbi Fohrman had been very busy since our last conversation. He had been really excited about that ha’af parallel, and so he was talking about it to Imu Shalev, our CEO, and Imu noticed something else in the text and pointed it out to Rabbi Fohrman, and that got Rabbi Fohrman thinking, and he was excited to catch me up.

Rabbi Fohrman:  So what happened was – last week when we were going through this, I couldn't stop thinking about your ha'af thing. It seemed really intriguing to me, and as I told you then, if your ha'af thing is real, you probably haven't seen the last of those intertextual parallels. There's probably more, and you need to find more. Between this week and last week, just so you should know, I wrote 20 pages of notes on this. 

The Second Clue: b’kirbah

Beth: And so he began to share his discoveries with me. It turns out that ha’af isn’t the only highly unusual word that appears in both the Sarah story and the Sodom story. There’s also בְּקִרְבָּהּ (b’kirbah). בְּקִרְבָּהּ means “inside of her'' or “inside of it.” Like ha’af, בְּקִרְבָּהּ almost never shows up in the Torah. And we just so happen to find it twice in chapter 18, once in the Sarah story and once in the Sodom story. 

Here it is in the Sarah story: וַתִּצְחַק שָׂרָה בְּקִרְבָּהּ לֵאמֹר – And Sarah laughed within herself, saying: אַחֲרֵי בְלֹתִי הָיְתָה-לִּי עֶדְנָה – After I have withered, I will experience the pleasure of rejuvenation? (Genesis 18:12).

And here’s the word in the Sodom story: הַאַף תִּסְפֶּה וְלֹא-תִשָּׂא לַמָּקוֹם לְמַעַן חֲמִשִּׁים הַצַּדִּיקִם אֲשֶׁר בְּקִרְבָּהּ – Are You really going to sweep away and not forgive the place for the sake of the 50 tzaddikim inside of it? (Genesis 18:24).

At first glance, these two b’kirbahs seem to have nothing to do with each other. One is talking about Sarah’s disbelief that she’ll have a baby. The other is talking about righteous people dwelling inside of an allegedly wicked city. But when you look more closely, you find that they have quite a lot in common. 

Let’s walk through it, step by step. In each story, there is a kind of vessel or “place,” with something בְּקִרְבָּהּ – something inside of it. In the first story, Sarah is the vessel or “place,” and the thing inside Sarah is laughter. I know it sounds a bit cold to refer to Sarah as a vessel – she’s a person, she’s the foremother of our people, and of course that’s true. I’m just speaking in terms of the “algebra” of the text – the way the pieces of the text line up with each other. וַתִּצְחַק שָׂרָה בְּקִרְבָּהּ – Sarah laughed inside of herself.

In the second story, the city of Sodom is the vessel. What’s inside of Sodom? Tzaddikim, righteous people. Granted, that’s not the only thing inside Sodom – it seems to be dominated by wicked people. But it’s the tzaddikim who are referred to as בְּקִרְבָּהּ. Abraham asked God, הַאַף תִּסְפֶּה וְלֹא-תִשָּׂא לַמָּקוֹם – are You really going to destroy the whole makom, the whole place, and not forgive it for the sake of הַצַּדִּיקִם אֲשֶׁר בְּקִרְבָּהּ – the righteous people who are inside the city? 

So we have vessels and the things inside of them. If we look at the way the parallels line up, or what we call the “algebra,” Sarah, who is a vessel for laughter, tzchok, seems to be paralleling Sodom, which is the vessel for tzaddikim. 

Remember when Rabbi Fohrman suggested the tzachak-tzadak connection in our last session, and I was secretly kind of skeptical? Turns out he was on to something after all. It’s not just that there happens to be a word in one story that sure sounds a lot like a word in the other story, tzachak and tzadak, laughter and righteousness. It’s that if we follow this b’kirbah parallel, then laughter and righteousness actually line up. They’re playing the same role in both stories. We don’t know why yet, or what these parallels mean. But before Rabbi Fohrman and I got to puzzling that out, he noticed something else that was kind of fascinating. Laughter isn’t the only thing inside of Sarah.

Think about the name of that child who is going to be born, Yitzchak (Isaac). It comes from the word tzachak. His name means “laughter.” So Rabbi Fohrman asked me: Isn’t it interesting that Sarah is going to give birth to a baby boy whose name just happens to mean laughter? Here, I’ll play the tape for you.

Rabbi Fohrman: In other words, don't you think it's ironic that as Sarah laughs, וַתִּצְחַק doesn't mean she laughs. It means, she made laughter. What just happened with Sarah?

Beth:  She just conceived. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  And who did she conceive?

Beth:  She conceived laughter, like Yitzchak (Isaac).

Rabbi Fohrman:  She conceived laughter. She conceived Yitzchak (Isaac). There's a double entendre in וַתִּצְחַק שָׂרָה בְּקִרְבָּהּ (Genesis 18:12). It doesn't just mean she made laughter inside of her. It means she made laughter inside of her. Which is God's joke on Sarah. “Here you are laughing. You know what the joke is? Even as you're speaking and laughing at the impossibility of having a child, it's happening. You've conceived. I'm just telling you what's happened already. I'm going to come back, and you'll see that in nine months you’ll have a child. You'll see, this moment when you laughed, you weren't just making laughter inside of you. You're making a child named laughter inside of you.” 

Beth: וַתִּצְחַק שָׂרָה בְּקִרְבָּהּ – A play on words! There’s laughter inside of Sarah, but there’s also Yitzchak, a child named laughter, an embodiment of laughter, this little tiny zygote inside of her womb. So to return to our algebra, what’s inside in each story? There’s laughter-slash-Yitzchak inside of Sarah, and tzaddikim inside of Sodom. Laughter, or Yitzchak, and tzaddikim.

Now, what is exceedingly cool here is that there actually seems to be a drama unfolding with Yitzchak inside of Sarah which is the very same as the drama unfolding with the tzaddikim inside of Sodom. And it’s a drama that gets to the heart of our burning question about Abraham’s plea. If you continue to trace the Yitzchak/tzaddikim parallels, you can see it.

Sarah is physically incapable of conceiving a child. It’s not just that she’s elderly. חָדַל לִהְיוֹת לְשָׂרָה אֹרַח כַּנָּשִׁים – the text goes out of its way to tell us – Sarah is no longer getting her period, she has gone through menopause (Genesis 18:11). But God intervenes and actually bends the physical law. Why does God do that? Most of the time, God upholds the physical law. Why bend it in this case? It would seem to have something to do with the thing which is בְּקִרְבָּהּ – the thing inside. Yitzchak needs to be born, and a baby needs a place to grow. So God grants life to Yitzchak, but that’s not all. We might say that God brings Sarah’s whole womb back to life, all for the sake of allowing Yitzchak to thrive in the world.

A Place to Thrive

Let’s look at Sodom and we’ll see that there’s something very similar going on. What law is being bent in the case of Sodom? It’s not the physical law; it’s the moral law. It’s the law of justice, of mishpat. The wicked people of Sodom are supposed to be punished. That should be the mishpat of the city. People deserve to be punished for their crimes. But what is Abraham pleading with God to do? To forgive the wicked people, to let them off the hook. To bend justice.

Now, why would God do that? Well, maybe it has something to do with the thing which is בְּקִרְבָּהּ – the thing inside. What if there are tzaddikim inside, Abraham presses? Those tzaddikim deserve to continue to live, to thrive, and they need a place where they can do that. So Abraham insists that God not merely preserve the lives of the tzaddikim, but that God grant to the entire city a new lease on life, all for the sake of allowing the tzaddikim to thrive in the world. Just like the rejuvenation of Sarah’s womb, for the sake of Isaac. 

And at this point, we’re in a position to come back to one of those big questions that started off this research journey. Why does Abraham ask for God to forgive the whole city? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to save the righteous and punish the wicked? God could just assess each individual inhabitant of Sodom, open up a Google spreadsheet and record everyone’s verdict, and then transport the righteous people out of the city on a flying carpet, relocate them to someplace else in the ancient Near East, and destroy all of the guilty people who remain. Why not do that? Here, I’ll play you the tape where Rabbi Fohrman and I are talking this out. 

Beth: How does the Sarah and Yitzchak case offer an answer to the question of why the tzaddikim of Sodom should warrant the saving of the resha'im (wicked people)? Could you simply save Isaac and not save the makom (place) – and not save the womb? You can't, that doesn't make any sense. You can't disentangle them. A fetus needs its womb in order to develop and to exist and to reach its potential.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Which suggests to me that Abraham's argument with Sodom is similar.

Beth:  Right. That Sodom is the womb. The tzaddikim somehow need it – 

Rabbi Fohrman:  It's their place. They're flourishing. 

Beth: Rabbi Fohrman offered a vivid analogy that I really appreciated. He said: Let’s say you’re visiting the Grand Canyon and you see a lone tree, a beautiful tree, growing out of the stone, against all odds, its trunk winding around desert rocks. You don’t go saying: Oh, let’s save that tree! We’ll dig it up and bring it home with us to Long Island. We’ll replant it in our yard, in our rich, moist soil, with our fertilizers and our Miracle-Gro and our suburban sprinklers. If you uproot that beautiful tree, it might not survive. It might never take root in your yard, however fertile it may be. True, we might not have expected the tree to flourish in such a barren place, but flourish it did. The tree works where it works. You don’t mess with that.

Rabbi Fohrman: So that's Abraham's argument. If you have a community of tzaddikim, it means that there are tzaddikim who are flourishing. I don't know I can transplant them. I think that if you could transplant them safely, and you were sure that you could transplant them safely, then Abraham's argument loses a lot of its gusto. So there's something growing here that’s flourishing, that's very precious. We don't mess with that.

Beth:  I think you might not be giving Sodom enough credit, and I'll tell you what I mean by that. Your read of the 50 tzaddikim in Sodom is that now it's past the threshold of flourishing, and you don't want to mess with that. What I see in the Isaac case is that there is nothing flourishing there yet, but still God decides that God wants her womb to be the makom for this tzedek.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's actually intriguing. I hadn't thought of that. What you're suggesting, if I'm not mistaken, is – let me just take your logic and see where it goes. I think what you're saying is that, the same way that Isaac could only be Isaac if nurtured by Sarah's womb – that must have been what, so to speak, was the Divine intuition – so too, it could be that these tzaddikim could only be seen as existing because there's Sodom to nourish them. Therefore, whatever argument you would make towards getting rid of Sodom because it's really bad, the one good thing that they do is, they just happen to be the place, like it or not, where these tzaddikim can grow. 

Beth:  That's right. Obviously, that turned out – because we think of Sodom as being such a heinous place, and the portrait that you just painted was not in fact true. Those tzaddikim didn't exist. Sodom didn't have the quality of being able to be a makom for that kind of flourishing. But if it had, isn't that interesting.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Had it been able to, it would have changed the mishpat (justice) of the city, because the mishpat of the city has to take into account that, okay, in an absolute sense you're doing these terrible things and you deserve to get that. But something we haven't taken into account yet is that you have become the place for something very powerful and good. 

Beth: At this point, I felt so close to an answer to that burning question that jump-started this whole research journey. On the face of it, the mishpat, the justice that Sodom deserves, is to be destroyed. And what we were seeing now in the text is that the tzadikkim, the righteousness and the good that could come out of the city – that might be a reason to change that mishpat, to let the city exist even if by rights it shouldn’t. But I pushed Rabbi Fohrman about this, and I asked him: Okay, so then I’d expect Abraham to argue that saving the city would be the right thing to do, even though it requires bending mishpat. But that’s not what he says! Why does he claim that saving the city actually would be mishpat?

Rabbi Fohrman: You’re right. For Abraham it really is all about mishpat. But he’s asking Him to uphold mishpat in light of tzaddikim. So what is his argument? 

Beth:  Maybe mishpat should respond to tzedek. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes! That’s the answer. Mishpat has to respond to tzedek. You can’t have mishpat in a vacuum without taking the value of tzedek into account. 

What Abraham is saying is: You can’t look at the resha’im (wicked people) in the world and say, “In mishpat, do the resha’im deserve to die or do they deserve to live?” But what if there’s tzaddikim among them? What if there’s tzedek among them? Tzedek changes mishpat. It’s not just another value, Abraham is saying, that opposes mishpat, that has to be dealt with along with mishpat. It actually impacts mishpat! Abraham’s view of the synthesis between tzedek and mishpat is that at the end of the day God has to be the upholder of mishpat. But you can’t be the upholder of mishpat without including the presence of tzedek within your mishpat. 

Abraham saw the exact same thing happening with his wife as he's arguing about with Sodom. He's saying: There was this little tiny zygote inside something which was non-viable, but You said that that was so important that it changes the judgment on that whole place, on that whole womb. Haven't You shown me that the imperative of nurturing this little tzedek thing bends the mishpat of the larger place which it's in? I'm just holding You to account for Your very own values!

Abraham is saying that you don't look at a place by just saying, “Do they deserve to live in and of themselves?” You look at the precious thing inside the place. That’s what he’s learned.

Tzedek Bends Mishpat

Beth: Amazing. This insight Rabbi Fohrman and I arrived at, that mishpat doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it has to respond to tzedek-slash-tzedakah… this felt like a real answer to my original question about Abraham’s challenge to God. Abraham called sparing the city justice, because in this case, justice actually would mean sparing the city… for the sake of the righteous potential within it. Justice bends and expands to accommodate tzedek. But even though that’s what the text was pointing us to, there was still one thing we were missing, which is: Why? Why should the potential for tzedek, for righteousness and good, actually change the mishpat, the justice for Sodom? Wouldn’t it make more sense for justice to be, I don’t know, about what you actually deserve? Rabbi Fohrman and I thought about this together.

Rabbi Fohrman:  So I don't know.  But let me ask you this. Let's play a little thought experiment. You’re God and you say, “I’m thinking of creating a universe.” And I’m an angel and I’m saying, “Oh, God, what an interesting idea, why are You thinking of creating a universe?” So God says, “Well, I’ve got this great value called mishpat. And I really want mishpat to exist, not just as a theoretical value. I want it to exist in the world. So, would mishpat be a good enough reason to create a world, if it didn’t already exist?”

So you say, “Well, God, I’m really intrigued. Can You describe to me mishpat?” So you say, “Sure. Mishpat is fair is fair. Fair things should be done in the world. No abrogations of justice. The trains run on time, nobody goes on red, everybody goes on green, and…”

Beth: Mishpat doesn’t seem like a value in and of itself. It sounds like…

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. 

Beth: …the cost of doing business. It’s a maintenance in order to do other things. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly, it’s a maintenance issue. It’s not a reason to create a world. Once there’s already a world, I don’t want it to be a corrupt world, certainly. That would be terrible. But it’s not a reason to create a world, so the trains run on time, so things are fair. It’s not a reason for being. So you’d say to God, “Okay, so what really is the reason for being?” 

The answer would be tzaddikim. Giving people a second chance, helping someone up when they’re down, helping people even when they don’t deserve to be helped, because my heart goes out to them, right? That’s what tzedek is. Tzedek is doing the right thing even when it’s not just. So if you had a world of tzedek, you know, you can hear an angel saying, “You know what? Maybe that is a reason to create a universe. If you would actually have beings who would evince that quality of love in their relationships with others, love actualized into human relationships really would be a reason to have a world.”

If that’s true, now, not only is tzedek a reason to have a world, but since comparatively it’s so much more important than justice, in the sense that justice has to be there as a predicate, but it’s not a reason for creating a world – 

Beth: So how could you sacrifice tzaddikim to mishpat? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. Since tzedek is so precious, if there’s a significant minority of tzedek to be found in the city, I don’t care about the resha’im anymore! It’s a city with tzedek in it! That city deserves to live! That’s Abraham’s argument. In other words, his argument is that, as you put it, tzedek impacts mishpat. 

A Reason for Existing

Beth: In the final minutes of my last learning session with Rabbi Fohrman, we asked ourselves: Why does this material matter to us? How have we changed, having gone on this journey? 

Rabbi Fohrman:  To me it gets to this really interesting question around the meaning of life in a very grand sense. Which is, why should I even bother? Life isn't easy, right? It’s hard and it comes with pain. There's no question that life comes with that. What's our answer to “why bother”? 

To me, this is what this material gets to. The answer is tzedek. There's a certain value that's really precious. And it's really precious in small amounts. That's, to me, what was so striking about this, is that what Abraham intuited and understood is that you can't just weigh things in terms of their aggregate mass. I would venture to say there's not enough goodness in our lives, on an absolute level, to outweigh the pain and the turmoil and sadness that comes with life, and the monotony, frankly, that comes with life. I'm going to go through monotonous day-in-and-day-out living, I'm going to have to go and slog through my job to bring home the bacon… none of which is the reason why I'm living life. 

Even in my own life, Aleph Beta has a vacation coming up which I'm going to actually take, in a week or so. I'm going to get a chance to go away with my wife for the first time in I don't even know how long. We're going to maybe go away to Hawaii or something, which I've always been dreaming of doing but haven't gotten a chance to do with her in like forever. So to me that's really precious.

But if I weigh that on an absolute scale and say, “Okay, Fohrman, how long have you been married? It's been like 30 years now and you've gone to Hawaii never? In an absolute scale, how much of your life is monotony, and how much of your life is these wonderful precious moments that you spend together?”

What this says is, a little bit of tzedek goes a long way. It changes the just way to see things. It means, even in my hard-nosed calculation of my life, I can say: You know what? If my life included these moments where I was really willing to give to others in a profound way, moments where I could express goodness in little things… darn it, that's a life worth living.

God says: Mishpat might not be a reason to create a universe, but tzedek is. The notion that the universe would be worth having because there could be those moments of tzedek in it, to me is a profoundly optimistic way of looking back at my own life and assessing its value and meaning.

Beth:  I'm especially appreciative of what you said at the end because I have the instinct that you just articulated, which is that even if the ratio of the transcendent to the mundane in my life is laughable, the transcendent is so precious that it makes it all worth it.

Rabbi Fohrman:  I think you're absolutely right. One of the beautiful things about this material is, at the end of the day, don't you say you knew this to be true all along? You just couldn't prove it. And to me this feels like: Okay, now you can prove it. This is Abraham saying this is true, God saying this is true. You actually see it. Of course this is true. It's just that I never quite had the language to express it. It gives your intuition legs to stand on and proudly say, I will not be cowed. I will cling to the meaning of my life even if it seems small by some measures of observation.

It's not like some mercy, fluffy way of viewing life. No, tzedek bends mishpat! Mishpat, in the hardnosed way of looking at your life, the way a judge looks at your life. The judge is supposed to say: “Yeah, but when you passed that homeless person on the street, remember that time when your heart went out to them and you sat down next to them and you talked with them and you made that human connection with them?” And that changes the significance of your life. I think that's huge.

Beth:  Rabbi Fohrman, I really, really appreciate the back-and-forth. This has been meaningful for me as a scholar and as someone who's relating to these ideas. Thank you so much.

Credits

This episode was written and recorded by Beth Lesch.

Editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our senior editor is Daniel Loewenstein.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman. 

Our editorial director is me, Imu Shalev.