Vayera 5775 - English

By Rabbi Daniel Kripper
Beth Israel Aruba

Affirming the Past, Strengthening the Present

Do you remember Lot’s wife, described in this Shabbat Portion?  Yes, she is the famous character that turned into a pillar of salt for failing to heed the orders of the angels of deliverance while fleeing from the city of Sodom.  And we do not even know her name…

A current tourist brochure will tell you that the pillar can be reached by driving southbound on Road 90, a few kilometers before the Dead Sea industrial area so-called Dead Sea Factories.  There’s a brown road sign “Lot’s Wife” showing the direction on the way to that unusual petrified figure of salt, resembling a human form.  According to the biblical account, she was punished for disregarding God’s stern warning not to look back at Sodom, the city she was about to leave.  She could not resist the temptation “and she became a pillar of salt.”

A moral lesson can be drawn from Lot’s wife behavior.  The pillar of salt came to symbolize a certain common attitude toward the past.  The one who wants to embalm the past and not let it go, bitter as it may have been.

Looking back can enlarge the scope of our horizons.  As a people we have large memories, and what we are, we owe, to a large extend, to what has gone before.

As history’s perennial survivors, looking back and remembering has become a mitzvah, a moral imperative, in our time.

But there is also a danger – on a personal as well as a communal level – in lingering too long on the tragedies of the past; in dwelling in the ruins of history rather than building on the foundations of the present.  For focusing exclusively on the past can become a kind of obsession, thus blocking our potential for growth and development.

Unfortunately, this is one of the maladies of contemporary Jewish life.  For too many, Jewish identity is awakened and reinforced only by memories of the tragic past.  They remember Amalek, but they forget the sanctity of Shabbat and the joy of the Festivals.

As Mordecai M. Kaplan once cautioned: “When the whole content of Judaism is reduced merely to an awareness of anti-Semitism, Judaism ceases to be a civilization and becomes a complex.”

We should move beyond this distorted view of Judaism, and recapture the many dimensions of a richer Jewish life.

Rabbi Daniel Kripper

Beth Israel Aruba