The World Hangs By A Sandal Strap

Abraham's Search For Morality in an Immoral Society

But Abram said to the king of Sodom, “I swear to God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth I will not take so much as a thread or a sandal strap of what is yours; you shall not say, ‘It is I who made Abram rich.’” (Genesis 14:23)

Rava taught: As reward for that which our Patriarch Abraham said to the king of Sodom: “That I will not take a thread nor a sandal strap nor anything that is yours” (Genesis 14:23), his children merited two commandments: The thread of sky-blue wool worn on ritual fringes (tzizit) and the strap of phylacteries (tefillin). (Talmud Sotah 17a)

Having just fought on the side of the King of Sodom to redeem his captive nephew, Lot, Abraham makes it clear that his alliance is purely tactical and only temporary—there will be no long term accord between the founder of Israel and the leader of a civilization whose defining traits are violence, brutality, and cruelty, especially to outsiders. While geopolitics sometimes requires expediency and compromise we should not mistake a necessary evil for an ideal. Likewise, there are times when a religious person devoted to a divine quest might need to engage in worldly intrigue, but they should never become captive to it, conflating self-gain with piety. A line must be drawn. That Abraham signifies it with a thread and a shoe strap suggests this line is subtle and flimsy.

The word for sandal strap “sroch naal” appears only one other time in the entire Tanakh, Isaiah 5:27.

In its ranks, none is weary or stumbles,
They never sleep or slumber;
The belts on their waists do not come loose,
Nor do the thongs of their sandals break.

Isaiah describes the enemies of Israel as so strong that not even their sandal straps will break during battle. The sandal strap and the thread are negligible items, literally fringe and marginal, and yet at the same time they hold everything together. One loose thread can unspool an entire garment, one loose shoe strap can decide the fate of an entire battle, and thus direct civilizational history. The obvious point Abraham makes is, I won’t even take less than a pruta from you (the rabbinic measurement required to forge a marital engagement), but the less obvious point is that the future of the world depends on the most negligible measures.

Is there any use to a single thread (chut) or a single strap? In fact, the motif of the chut proves decisive in another moment in Tanakh, the Book of Joshua. The Israelite soldiers plot with Rahab, a prostitute living at the outskirts of the Canaanite camp, to conquer the land where she is a resident. In exchange for her loyalty, Rahab demands a sign that she and her family will be spared. The soldiers tell her to use a crimson thread (chut) to show that she is secretly on their side, a kind of muted version of the lamb’s blood the Israelites themselves once smeared on their doorposts on the cusp of the Exodus. A mere thread saves her life and also renders her a hero, transforming her from a low status person in a doomed society to a fulcrum in Jewish history. Rahab’s name evokes “expanse.” The negligible proves expansive, as signified by her crimson thread. Ecclesiastes 4:12 tells us that a certain kind of chut, the three-fold one, is unbreakable, fortifying our sense that threads can be mighty things.

Both the sandal strap and the thread are symbols of the Israelites as a kind of marginal civilization that other great powers would dismiss or discard, be they the ancient Sodomites, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians—the irony of history is that the sandal strap has proven significant, the mere thread has outlasted those who built ziggurats and pyramids.

In Biblical poetry, the repetition of a phrase or image suggests the first and second thing are synonymous. The thread and the sandal strap make the same point: the apparently negligible is essential, is the key to longevity. Ecclesiastes 4:12 tells us that a three-fold thread cannot be easily broken (ha chut ha m’shulash lo yinatek). Talmudic tradition understands this as a metaphor for three generations of teachers or parents who are Torah scholars. By the same token that led the U.S. Supreme Court to announce in a now-cancellable opinion that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” Jewish tradition posits that three generations of Torah are all you need to secure yourself. The sandal strap secures the sandal. The sandal secures the soldier. The soldier secures the army. World history and spiritual destiny turn on a thread. One act of Torah study, not strong in and of itself, can connect to other acts, to produce an unbreakable thread.

The rabbis grasped the power of Abraham’s refusal to be complicit in the evil of Sodom by telling us that tefillin and tzitzit were given to us as a kind of gift in his merit. Tefillin and tzitzit are literally fringes but they are also commandments that may seem fringe, especially in the eyes of a secular rationalist or unaccustomed to them. But the argument is: the observance of these small things, precisely because they are strange, precisely because they are marginal, can be the basis for Jewish longevity, and the key to staying away from Sodom. Do they empirically work, keeping us away from evil? Not necessarily. But the idea is powerful: to look at the fringe is to be reminded that it is all that separates one from evil. We have to live in the world, we have to compromise, but we also need to know ourselves well enough to know when to refuse. Only a fringe, a sandal strap, keeps us from succumbing to the lures of Sodom. The image connotes hope—it is possible to say “no”—but also fragility: “Is this all that is protecting me from the difficult world out there??”

The key to a great future is made up of lots of small acts and small commitments. The key to a great culture is made up a handful of good relationships. According to Ecclesiastes, as parsed by the sages, three solid generations or even just three solid contemporaries can make a world of difference. And so to concede to the King of Sodom is not just a political error but an ontological one: it’s to underestimate the collective agency that we have to make the world better, starting with deeds that seem, on their own, negligible. To focus on structural issues to the detriment of personal and interpersonal cultivation is to lose the thread. The health of our civilization requires that we continue to value things even when we are told that they are insignificant.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

P.S.

1. Here’s my new interview with Anna Gát, Founder and CEO of Interintellect.

2. Here I am getting interviewed by Susannah Black for Plough.

3. Join my weekly seminar on Threadable where we collectively gloss the book of Genesis.