Rabbi Freedman’s Shabbat Message

In one of the most famous passages in the Bible, God informs Abraham that the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are about to be destroyed. Abraham, who is imbued with the attribute of חֶסֶד chesed – lovingkindness, remonstrates with God and pleads for the lives of the innocent and righteous who reside there. Yet, God said to Abraham – וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא אַשְׁחִית בַּעֲבוּר הָעֲשָׂרָה there are not even ten people out of the entire population who deserve to survive the devastation. Sodom and Gomorrah’s fate was sealed and in the end the only individuals allowed to survive the conflagration, were members of Abraham’s family who, like Abraham, extended hospitality to strangers – a virtue sadly absent among the general population. Even then, sad to say, Lot’s wife disobediently looked back at God’s destructive power and was turned into a pillar of salt, and Lot’s two daughters, fearing that they and their father were the last humans left alive, calculatingly committed incest in order to save the human race.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah however, begs the question – what sin could have been so heinous as to warrant the expiration of an entire population? The text in Bereishit answers this question, only in the most general way:

וְאַנְשֵי סְדֹם רָעִים וְחַטָאִים לַה’ מְאֹד
Now the men of Sodom were evil and they sinned against the Lord.
(Genesis 13:13)

זַעֲקַת סְדֹם וַעֲמֹרָה כִּי-רָבָּה וְחַטָּאתָם-כִּי כָבְדָה מְאֹד
How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin.
(Genesis 18:20)

The prophet Ezekiel provides a little more detail:

הִנֵּה־זֶ֣ה הָיָ֔ה עֲוֹ֖ן סְדֹ֣ם אֲחוֹתֵ֑ךְ גָּא֨וֹן שִׂבְעַת־לֶ֜חֶם וְשַׁלְוַ֣ת הַשְׁקֵ֗ט הָ֤יָה לָהּ֙ וְלִבְנוֹתֶ֔יהָ וְיַד־עָנִ֥י וְאֶבְי֖וֹן לֹ֥א הֶחֱזִֽיקָה: וַתִּגְבְּהֶ֔ינָה וַתַּֽעֲשֶׂ֥ינָה תֽוֹעֵבָ֖ה לְפָנָ֑י וָֽאָסִ֥יר אֶתְהֶ֖ן כַּֽאֲשֶׁ֥ר רָאִֽיתִי:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, over-fed and unconcerned; they did not support the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I removed them as you saw.
(Ezekiel 16: 49-50)

If one delves deeper, particularly into rabbinic literature, one will discover that the people of these cities were accused of a wide range of sins, including arrogance, inhospitality, greed, violence, sexual immorality, xenophobia and injustice. One could almost say that in Jewish theology this story became the paradigm of moral failure and as such, the people of these cities were the prime example of evil – a trait that was not allowed to coexist with moral man.

The Talmud in TB Sanhedrin 109a portrays the men of Sodom as having “no portion in the world to come”. Rabbi Yehuda explains why this is so based on the verse quoted above from Genesis 13. He claims they were ‘evil’ in relation to sexual morality and they ‘sinned’ in their financial affairs. The first allegation regarding sexual impropriety is based on a verse in this week’s sidra where Sodomite men seek to commit some form of indecent assault upon Lot’s visitors (Genesis 19:5). The second assertion is based on a legend that describes how when a poor person came into Sodom, all the locals would give him a coin (labelled with their own name) with which the stranger could then purchase food — but no one in either of the cities would sell him anything and so he died of starvation. When the body was discovered, each coin was returned to the original owner. This and many other horrific stories about life in Sodom and Gomorrah are found in TB Sanhedrin 109b.

In an article on the subject, Rabbi Mendy Kaminker makes the following case against the people of Sodom and Gomorrah:

The sins of the Sodomites stemmed from their intense selfishness, their unwillingness to part with anything they possessed. The sages of the Mishna teach: One who says, שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלִּי וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלָּךְ, זוֹ מִדָּה בֵינוֹנִית. וְיֵשׁ אוֹמְרִים, זוֹ מִדַּת סְדוֹם “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours”—this is a median characteristic; but others say that this is the character of Sodom.” (Pirke Avot 5:10) The every-man-for-himself attitude may seem harmless, but as these stories reveal, it will ultimately lead to true evil. While the cities of Sodom have long receded into the past, the mentality they epitomized is alive and well. Our job is to uproot and destroy this mindset wherever we can, replacing it with love and goodwill.

The narrative of Sodom and Gomorrah helps to understand Jewish notions of evil as rooted in social ethics, responsibility to the other, hospitality, and justice. The cities’ destruction serves as a moral mirror: what we do to the least of our neighbors, or fail to do, matters both in our world and in the divine accounting. It is of some interest, as one reads this story, wickedness is not necessarily defined as barbaric, animalistic violence against others as we saw on October 7, nor is it portrayed as monstrous torture or cold-bloodied murder as perpetrated by the Third Reich – the bar is set much lower than that in Jewish theology – an evil person is one who acts out of self-interest without any regard for the needs or feelings of others. Egocentricity is the primary characteristic that leads to all other forms of wrongdoing.

That, I believe, is what the chairman of the United Synagogue Visitation Committee was trying to tell me in 1975 as I was about to take up my new position as the Jewish chaplain to two UK prisons. He sat across the table from me and said, “Let me give you a warning – you will meet a variety of Jewish prisoners – white collar, blue collar, fraudsters and murderers – but they all have one thing in common – they are all in prison because they acted selfishly and so be warned, because, given the opportunity, they will try to take advantage of you, so always be on your guard even as you wish to show them compassion.”

His advice was helpful and sadly apposite. But what I did discover in the ten years that I visited these prisons was that nearly all of the men I visited were very ordinary people who had lived lives like each of us – but somewhere along the line had taken a decision that they thought would benefit them, even as it harmed another person. I recall speaking to one young man called Gary, who had murdered a woman in the course of a burglary. Chatting with him about his upbringing, he told me that as a teenager he would go with friends to the cinema – I said to him, so did I – but he then told me, that he and his friends rarely saw the end of the movie, because they were often thrown out for vandalizing the seats or other parts of the cinema. I sat there recalling my teenage years and how much enjoyment I had received by going to the movies with my friends – and I questioned why we turned out so different – parental influence, a sound education, reasonably intelligent and decent friends, or maybe something else in one’s upbringing – and then it flashed through my mind that there but for the grace of God, go you or I. A different childhood on both sides and there might well have been role reversal. Judaism is not far off the mark when it teaches that humans are not born righteous or wicked, rather they have the potential to become righteous or wicked, depending entirely on how we choose to use our Yetser Tov and Yetser Hara – our good and bad inclination.

So you see, such people come across, generally speaking, as quite ordinary – this young man (he was 18 when I first met him) was personable and polite, he had no mark of Cain that signaled to the unsuspecting that he was a convicted murderer. So why did this young man end up in prison with a life sentence?

The answer to this perplexing question may be found in Sefer Bereishit following the murder of Abel by his brother Cain: וְאִם לֹא תֵיטִיב לַפֶּתַח חַטָּאת רֹבֵץ – Said God to Cain, “If you do not do what is appropriate, sin is crouching near your doorway.” (Genesis 4:7). This verse implies that in all likelihood, once one makes the wrong decision, there are almost always consequences. It is as the rabbis taught in Pirke Avot: מצווה גוררת מצווה עברה גוררת עברה one good deed leads to more good deeds, while unfortunately one bad deed will often project a person onto a pathway of self-destruction as one becomes entrapped in one’s own ignominy.

Cain seems the perfect example: for it appears from the text that he had absolutely no intention of killing his brother, he simply wanted his sacrifice to be accepted – he wanted to top the league in making offerings – he was desperate to win the gold medal ahead of his brother. But in seeking this outcome he became so obsessed with coming ‘first’ that he allowed his ego to control all of his emotions at a terrible cost. Nowhere is Cain described as evil – he was simply an ordinary person, an average person, who allowed evil thoughts to infect his consciousness with catastrophic effects. Many understand ‘evil’ in this way. Few questions are as haunting and enduring as the nature of evil. Is evil an intrinsic human quality, a distortion of moral freedom, or a product of circumstance and choice? The Hebrew Bible and subsequent Jewish tradition wrestle deeply with this question, offering a complex vision that resists simple dichotomies of good and bad. Jewish sources portray evil not as a metaphysical force equal to good, but as a tragic possibility embedded in human freedom.

These were some of the ideas put forward in the BBC 2024 Reith Lectures, delivered by forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead. I was particularly interested in her views as she had worked earlier in her career in the very prison where I was the Jewish Chaplain – HMP Grendon. At the time I visited this prison, Grendon was the only institution of its kind in Europe where prison officers were often replaced with forensic and clinical psychiatrists and psychotherapists. In her series of four lectures, one of them was aptly titled, “Is there such a thing as evil?” In the lecture, she argued, unknowingly I suspect in line with Jewish theology, that all people have the capacity for “evil” as much as they have the ability to cultivate “goodness”.

She begins her lecture with a question, “I have done evil things, but does that make me evil?” This, she says, is a question asked of her by many of the patients (perhaps others would say criminals) with whom she has worked. Typically, she says, that she begins her answer by telling them that evil is a complex idea and that Saints, sociologists, theologians and neuroscientists all have had something to say about it. But then she says to them that the capacity for evil is present in everyone. As William Blake said, cruelty has a human heart. Perhaps that is why in the Perek (quoted above) שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלִּי וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלָּךְ, זוֹ מִדָּה בֵינוֹנִית. וְיֵשׁ אוֹמְרִים, זוֹ מִדַּת סְדוֹם “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours”—the first suggestion by the rabbis is that this could easily refer to the average man or woman in the street; it is only as an afterthought that the rabbis add – but this type of behavior may also be typical of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah!

In a rather frightening statement, Adshead, makes the proposition that because of this possibility, each and every person should attend to that capacity and study it’s components closely because it is possible (though hopefully not probable) for each and every one of us to get into a state of mind that could be called evil. Astonishingly, she also appears to refer to the rabbinic concept mentioned earlier that one good act may well propagate further acts of goodness, when she said, “I will also suggest that we need to manage our own capacity for evil by cultivating and practicing our capacity for goodness, which is both protective against evil and healthy in its own right.”

Unquestionably, Adshead is not alone in holding these views. The poet WH Auden described evil as ‘unspectacular and always human’ and the historian Christopher Browning called his study of the German soldiers who killed thousands of innocent civilians ‘ordinary men’. Initially these men were called upon to exterminate the Jews by their own hand, the most infamous massacre taking place at Babi Yar (29–30 September 1941), in which some 33,771 Jews were murdered. But it has been suggested that the emotional impact of this type of killing on ‘ordinary men’ was reported to the Nazi High Command and was one factor that led to the development of the technology of mass murder and the death camps. Military morale, it is said, would not have been affected in this way had the soldiers been evil incarnate. To be sure, they personified evil through their actions, but that is different from being born evil.

That was certainly the view of philosopher and political thinker, Hannah Arendt, who wrote the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt was a Jew who had fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Her use of the phrase – the banality of evil – surprised and shocked many people for it implied ordinariness, triviality, predictability, even dullness. But apparently she used the word in part to describe Eichmann’s deportment at the trial, at which he showed little emotion – certainly neither remorse nor animosity towards his captors. He simply claimed that he bore no individual responsibility because he was simply “doing his job.” By doing his duty, he suggested he was complying with the law, not breaking it – so how was this a crime? In his eyes, it was the most normal thing to do – to obey the orders of the Führer.

During his imprisonment, the Israeli government sent no fewer than six psychologists to examine him. These psychologists found no trace of mental illness. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially family and friends was highly desirable, while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more normal in his habits and speech than the average person. As difficult as it is for survivors of the Holocaust to accept Arendt’s hypothesis, her argument was that Eichmann’s offence was a classic example of how an evil state of mind need not be enduring or be a persistent quality of a person and may even coexist with a capacity for goodness towards others.

Such concepts may well be in sync with Jewish theology. The Torah introduces evil not as an independent cosmic principle but as a distortion of God’s creation. In Genesis 1, God repeatedly declares creation as good. Yet by Genesis 6:5, we read that “every inclination (Yetser) of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” The tension between these two passages frames the Jewish understanding of human moral struggle: humans are created in the divine image (Genesis 1:27) yet possess impulses that can lead to violence and corruption.

The concept of the Yetser Hara—the “evil inclination”—appears implicitly in Genesis and explicitly in later rabbinic literature. It does not denote an external demonic force but an internal drive that can manifest as selfishness, desire, or aggression. According to Deuteronomy 30:19, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.” Evil, in this view, arises from misused freedom rather than innate depravity.

Rabbinic literature develops the psychology of the Yetser Hara in sophisticated ways. The Talmud (TB Berakhot 61b) teaches that God created both the Yetser Tov and the Yetser Hara, implying that the latter has a necessary role. Without the Yetser Hara, says the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 9:7), “no one would build a house, marry, have children, or engage in commerce.” The challenge is not to destroy the evil inclination but to sublimate it, to harness passion and ambition for constructive ends.

Thus, in biblical thought, no one is born evil. All are endowed with moral choice and even the wickedest retain the capacity for repentance. The prophet Ezekiel insists: “When the wicked person turns away from all his sins … he shall surely live; he shall not die” (Ezekiel 18:21). This radical belief in moral rehabilitation undergirds Jewish ethics.

As a former prison chaplain, I find these words both challenging and inspiring. On the one hand, how can the worst of offenders be restored and returned to a civilized world. Who wants the mass-murderer, the rapist or pedophile living next door – and yet I recall a question posed by the head of the Israeli prison service to the governor of HMP Grendon. He asked, what is your rehabilitation rate. The governor responded, “Wrong question! In the British penal system, rehabilitation is virtually non-existent. Better to ask, what is the re-conviction rate?”

I found his answer sad and depressing. By comparison Judaism’s answer is hopeful and uplifting – that given the circumstances there always remains hope, however slim that hope may be. It certainly helps the ‘average’ person as they struggle inevitably with their own shortcomings and pray that yesterday’s mistakes should pass quickly, be rectified today, so that tomorrow will always lead to a better, kinder and more humane future.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Freedman