Don't Be Evil
Passing from Compassion to Judgment and Back
“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” - Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
“I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether according to the outcry that has reached Me; if not, I will take note.” (Genesis 18:21)
“This teaches the judges that they should not give decisions in cases involving capital punishment, except after having carefully looked into the matter.” - Rashi
“I will plumb the depths of their wickedness to see what will come of it in the end.” - Seforno
“I shall descend my from compassionate side to the side of my judgment.” - Nachmanides
Why does God announce that God is going to descend to Sodom and Gomorrah? This basic question has spurred countless commentaries, beginning with the Midrash which notes that God descends 10 times in the Torah, from the Garden of Eden to the War Between Gog and Magog. Common to many of the commentaries is the sense that God is doing a “double-take.” It’s not enough just to know theoretically that evil or transgression exists. You have to see it and really absorb it to fully appreciate its magnitude. God doesn’t simply descend to Sodom to find out what’s happening there or even to confirm as an eye-witness what God already knows is happening there (Rashi) but to experience it. God forces Godself to watch the snuff videos, the beheadings, the butchery. God goes to Nuremberg to stare into the souls of Nazi officers. God descends from the quiet calm of heaven to the din of an anomic society. God wants to feel the question: “What could drive someone to celebrate the murder of children, of the elderly, on social media?”
In God’s descent to Sodom comes a teaching about proximity. There is a lot of evil (and good) in the world—but we can’t sufficiently know it from a distance. Pascal teaches that we can only know things by loving them. And God teaches that we can only know evil by being appalled by it. In contrast to the Kantian view of morality which sees it as categorical and universal, divine morality requires a viewpoint, an affinity, a stance, a commitment, a covenant to get off the ground. God descends to Sodom, because Sodom isn’t a trolley problem. Sodom isn’t an abstraction. Sodom is a place full of people. It is pungent. It’s noisy. It has a flag and a history.
Ibn Ezra teaches that God has knowledge of the whole, but that God’s descent involves a knowledge of the parts. Maimonides offers a variation. God transcends human affairs, but “descends” to our level to grant significance to our lives. While Rashi positions God as an investigative journalist who needs evidence to corroborate the rumors of Sodom’s evil deeds, others teach that God’s descent is one from dispassionate, macro-analysis to passionate and opinionated engagement. God was always a generalist, but in descending God becomes a specialist. Seforno teaches that God is not content to behold an evil society. God must contend with the depths of its wickedness. God puts in God’s 10,000 hours of training, so to say, before changing God’s Facebook profile picture to support “The Current Thing.”
In Nachmanides’s telling, God can see the very same situation in a very different way depending on God’s mood. The Kabbalistic insight that reality is a function of our sefirotic level accords with scientific studies of perception. God can look on the Sodomites with compassion or with judgment and the same place will yield different analyses. Relatedly, there are studies which show that judges give more severe rulings when they are hungry and about to go to lunch. In our case, God is not captured by bias, but actively electing to have more of it. God has to forcibly adjust God’s own position to behold Sodom in accordance with its proper ontology. God’s subsequent debate that ensues with Abraham can be understood less as an empirical one (how many righteous people live in the city) than as a phenomenological one: should the city be regarded from the side of compassion or the side of judgment? Ultimately, the answer is both. God assigns Abraham the role of compassionate defender so that God may be free to look at Sodom with judgment, rather than having to hold both perspectives simultaneously.
The humanistic debate between God and Abraham contrasts with the anti-humanistic culture of Sodom in which there is no debate, no protest. Abraham defends the Sodomites. But the Sodomites don’t defend his nephew, Lot. They attack him. Abraham seeks to minimize the damage done to Sodom, asking for the enemy to be saved by the merit of the righteous. The Sodomites seek to erase the distinction, however. The visiting angels should be bystanders, civilians, but to the people of Sodom they are potential hostages.
God wants Abraham to ask for mercy, and mean it. But not because Abraham is right. Rather, because divine judgment—in contrast to mere tribal instinct—needs to pass through the sieve of divine compassion. Abraham’s counter-arguments are all refuted, but God can be sure that God is taking a principled approach to the destruction of an evil regime. And Abraham can experience the difference between a culture based on “disagree and commit” and a culture based on brutality. The core lesson of God’s debate with Abraham is that we need to be compassionate for the people of Sodom, but compassion cannot be a sufficient reason to save them. Too often we see that the would-be Sodom-destroyers argue against compassion while the would-be Sodom-apologists argue for it. But compassion cannot be morally instructive unless it is accompanied by an appreciation of responsibility and guilt. The innocent people of Sodom (the children) deserve compassion for their tragic end, but that doesn’t mean their analysis is credible.
God’s descent isn’t just a descent into the tangible and the judgmental but is a descent from the repose of the Creator to the obligation of just war. If God were not God, God might break from this descent. God’s descent, and our own, is part of the toll of evil. But descend we must. Abraham’s moral development would be incomplete — and the covenant fundamentally flawed — if the only options were compassion or judgment. When we descend to Sodom, we find that our compassion and our judgment surge. The fullness of these feelings, even when they are paradoxical and conflicting, is a requirement of moral existence. Unfortunately, and this too requires us to descend in understanding, the Sodomites feel no moral compunction, no moral dilemma, no moral tension. We combat them not just by eradicating them and their influence but by ensuring that we never become like them. Abraham’s defense of Sodom—practically foolish and politically ill-advised though it turns out to be—is the vaccine we need against becoming evil ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
Yasher koach