Vayera
Genesis 18:1-22:24
II Kings 4:1-37
In our day, we have had much direct experience of traumatic events. Having lived through the attacks of Sept. 11 and more than two years of renewed agonizing violence in the Middle East, as well as our own personal traumas, we have been struck again and again with the unbearable. How are we to respond in the aftermath of trauma?
Buried among the extraordinary narratives of this week’s parashah is the story of Lot’s daughters’ response to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This story gives us a glimpse of a natural human response to traumatic loss, and a vivid picture of how not to act in its wake.
The text tells us that, following the annihilation of the cities of the plain, Lot was afraid to dwell in Zo’ar, and so he and his two daughters went to live in a cave in the hill country.
One daughter said to the other, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him, that we may maintain life through our father.” On two consecutive nights the daughters got their father completely drunk, and one of them lay with him. From these encounters were born Moab and Ben-Ammi, known as the fathers of the Moabite and Ammonite peoples (Genesis 19:30-38).
The text does not tell us why Lot was afraid to live in Zo’ar. Apparently, there was no external reason. Rather, Lot and his daughters were in flight, shattered after the destruction of their home and the death of Lot’s wife. They were terrified, convinced that the world had been destroyed. In a way, for them, it had.
Frantic, convinced that they were the last people alive, Lot’s daughters were driven to acts of incest. One is struck by their use of alcohol to numb their father’s senses, just as Noah had drunk to excess following the destruction of the world in his time.
What can one do in the midst of unbearable loss? Victims may be driven to try to numb their senses and obscure their memories, lest they be overwhelmed by the reality of the destruction they have witnessed. Feeling they cannot bear to absorb what they have seen, people may want to run, or they may be driven to act impulsively.
At such times it is impossible to see clearly, to perceive the big picture of things. At first, all that is visible is the horror of the traumatic event. Externally or inwardly, we may want to run from our feelings, blind for the moment to the reality that we cannot escape our own emotions and memories. In such times, some feel driven to act, desperate to fix what has been shattered, too aghast to understand that actions taken in such impulsive moments are rarely wise.
One can feel only compassion for Lot and his daughters in their terror. Yet the daughters’ compulsion to act, hoping to wipe out their horror at what they had seen, was short-sighted and sinful.
Later in our parashah we find a counter-example, a picture of a person so extraordinary that he could walk calmly through unspeakable events, never losing his vision or his faith. As the Sefat Emet imagines it, Abraham knew all along that the command to sacrifice Isaac could not be from God. According to this reading, Abraham — in a truly superhuman way — maintained his equanimity through the trauma of being commanded to sacrifice his beloved son. He walked calmly to the mountain, with the larger picture of his God firmly in view, certain that, since this was not God’s will, he would not have to slaughter his son.
It is surely too much to imagine that ordinary humans like ourselves could respond with such faithfulness and clarity to our own traumatic experiences. Yet perhaps we are given this picture of Abraham as an ideal to emulate. Precisely when we have suffered unbearable loss — either individually or collectively — we must be particularly cautious of our need to act, to fix what cannot yet be fixed, to drown our feelings in outrage, to act before we have enough information to act wisely.
May all of us be nourished by the ideal of Abraham’s clear-sighted faithfulness. May we, living in the midst of ongoing trauma, be guided to see clearly and act wisely, even in the midst of our pain and our fear. Amen.