Parshas Vayera 5786 - The Chessed of Avraham

In this week’s parsha, Avraham poses a remarkable and challenging question to G-d:

“Will you also stamp out the righteous along with the wicked? What if there should be fifty righteous people in the midst of the city? Would you still stamp it out rather than spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people within it?” (Beraishis 18:23-24)

Avraham was pleading with G-d to spare the people of Sodom. But this raises a difficult question: Why would Avraham do so? The people of Sodom represented everything he opposed.

At the beginning of the parsha, Avraham ran to greet three strangers, offering them water, bread, and freshly slaughtered meat. According to Rashi (Beraishis 18:7), he slaughtered three calves so each guest could have a tongue to eat. Avraham embodied chessed—loving kindness and generosity.

In contrast, the people of Sodom despised chessed. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 109b) tells us they tortured and executed a young woman simply for giving food to a poor man. When they discovered that Lot was hosting guests, they surrounded his house and sought to attack them. Even after Avraham saved Sodom from the four kings, the king of Sodom never expressed gratitude (ibid. 14:21). Their worldview was summed up by the Mishnah: “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours—this is the characteristic of Sodom.” (Avos 5:13)

So why did Avraham still ask G-d to spare them?

Avraham’s values were rooted in G-d’s Torah, which seeks not the destruction of sinners but the eradication of sin. As the Gemara teaches (Berachos 10a), “Let sins disappear from the earth—and the wicked will be no more” (Tehillim 104:35). The goal is not to destroy people but to motivate their transformation.

Therefore, even though the criminalization of chessed that was practiced by the Sodomites was totally anathema to Avraham, Avraham still did not desire the Sodomites to perish. On the contrary, he  beseeched G-d to save the city. As Rav Moshe Feinstein ZT”L explains, Avraham asked G-d to save the city if there were fifty righteous men in the city (and eventually even if there were only ten righteous men in the city) because that small group of righteous men could influence others and transform their evil values to good. Even if the Sodomites would not initially listen to these people, eventually over time the good values would penetrate Sodomite society and take root. A few righteous people could redeem an entire city.

The growing secularization of society has often led to intolerance and even violence toward those who think differently. Yet the Torah, as exemplified by Avraham, teaches a different path. The Torah advocates the power of ideas and people to influence others to change and become good. As Rav Moshe aptly writes, a small amount of light can dispel a great amount of darkness.

Like Avraham, we should proudly exemplify the values of the Torah in the way we live and believe and recognize that these values will eventually change the world. By living lives of chessed and moral clarity, we can influence others and help bring spiritual light into the world.

May we merit to see the fulfillment of the prophet’s vision:

“And G-d shall be King over all the earth; on that day, G-d will be One and His Name One.” (Zechariah 14:9; end of Aleinu)