A friend, I don’t remember whom, told me something years ago during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). This was the time of horrendous atrocities against Israeli civilians by Palestinians, such as the bombing of buses, pizzerias and other heavily trafficked areas. This friend related that his son had been on a bombed Israeli bus. Others were killed and mutilated but he was miraculously unhurt. Unscathed. A true salvation. But then my friend added something: “The way the bomb exploded, combined with my sonlocation on the bus, meant that he was also spared from seeing any of the victims.” Perhaps I was thick. I wondered: What could possibly top the miracle of one’s life being saved, uninjured to boot?
“What was so important about not seeing the victims?” I asked.
“Zeva’ah,” my friend said. “My son didn’t need to witness any of the zeva’ah, the atrocities.” Twisted bodies, detached limbs, disfigured faces. Ghastly sights. “Those sights can scar you forever. He was rescued from that, too. Complete miracle.”
Lot’s wife looked back. She was scathed. She turned into a pillar of salt.
What is the meaning of this?
Is this image so distant in time and place and culture from our own that it has no meaning for us?
The corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were about to be destroyed. At the last minute, even as Lot resisted two angels’ importunings to escape before it was too late, the angels stopped pleading with him and grabbed his hand, grabbed his wife’s hand and the hands of their two daughters and forcibly rushed them out of Sodom, depositing them outside the cities, beyond the border of destruction.
They were rescued. Safe. Unharmed.
As the angels were whisking away Lot, his wife and daughters, one of the angels warned: “Flee for your life! Do not look behind you nor stop anywhere in all the plain lest you be swept away.”
Lot’s wife looked back.
Was she merely curious? Or was she malicious — did Lot’s wife need to see the punishment of the sinners of the cities? Or, perhaps the opposite, did she distrust and disbelieve her rescuers and resent being denied her hearth and home, whose destruction she could not fathom and whose corruption she found congenial?
The Torah does not address her motivation. It did not matter. She looked back and saw what no human should have to see — “sulphur and fire that rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah” — as the Biblical text put it. Smoke billowing out of crematoria, the stench of burning human flesh, as the Nazis had it. Zeva’ah, as the parent of a survivor of the Second Intifada put it. Bodies burnedand other unspeakable atrocities, as IDF rabbis and others saw while identifying Hamas’ post-Oct. 7 victims.
She looked back.
Pillar of salt.
No life. No breath. Not even a tombstone.
Someone else looked.
“Abraham arose early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the L-rd. And he gazed down upon Sodom and Gomorrah and the entire surface of the land of the plain; and saw — and behold! The smoke of the earth rose like the smoke of a kiln.” Where Abraham had stood the day before is where he remonstrated with the L-rd to spare the two cities, lest a few righteous people live there, “And will the Judge of the entire earth not do justice?”
Abraham needed to know G-d’s answer — the fate of the cities. Abraham would know by looking. Would the two cities be destroyed? What would the Judge of the entire earth do? Abraham had to know, and he was answered. “The smoke of the earth rose like the smoke of a kiln.” The L-rd did not accept Abraham’s pleas. Abraham must have been devastated, even as his faith must have been untouched since, as he stated at the outset of his audacious argumentation with G-d, “I am but dust and ash.”
Like Lot’s wife, Abraham saw what no human should have to see. He did not disobey a Divine command forbidding him to look back — only Lot’s family was thus commanded — still, Abraham saw. He did not see the immediate destruction, human bodies burnt or bludgeoned by tumbling bricks and structures. He arrived a day later. He saw the post-destruction scene, the leftover smoke, rising as if from a kiln. Leftover? Was this any different from smoke billowing out of crematoria, the stench of burning human flesh? I think not. There is no escaping it: Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt. Abraham looked and did not turn into a pillar of salt. She should not have looked. He did look. And he survived.
The difference between Lot’s wife and Abraham, I think, is this. Whatever Lot’s wife’s motivation, none of the possibilities included self-sacrifice for the sake of a humanitarian goal larger than herself. She had no reason to gaze upon the evil. It could only contaminate her own humanity. She had no right to do that. Her body, like everybody’s body, was not her own. It should not be contaminated by images of evil.
Abraham, however, sought a humanitarian goal far larger than himself. His goal was the salvation of two whole cities, Sodom and Gomorrah.
A humanitarian who sets out to save those lives that are at severe risk must place himself at risk. Tuvia Bielski, who smuggled Jews out of the Nazi ghettoes of Novorodock and Lida, and Irena Sendler, who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, risked not only their lives but their souls, seeing things again and again that no person should see.”* The Judge of the entire earth rejected Abraham’s efforts, but this did not detract from Abraham’s selflessness. Any person who is selfless on that level needs to see what no human should have to see in order to sustain his mission, to refine it accordingly.
Abraham chose to see the zeva’ah. It was the price he paid to develop the monotheistic faith that shaped humanity into believers in the one G-d. Lot’s wife chose to look back and shaped herself into . . . nothing . . . but a pillar of salt. But surely somewhere, in some way, Abraham also became a pillar of salt. After all, he saw what he saw, the smoke of the earth rising. Like those who viewed the unviewable terror victims before or after Oct. 7, Abraham was scarred. Centuries later the Prophet Jeremiah identified the locus of Abrahamprice: “My soul will cry in its hidden chambers” (13:17). Or, as my late friend and teacher, Fred Englard, a survivor of Auschwitz, put it: “I have no tombstones. I took my cemetery with me, inside me.”
© IJN 2024
