Printable PDF available here. Previous year’s pieces on Parshat Vayeira can be found here and here.
Rav Kook (Ein Ayah, Berachot 6)
“Sulfur and salt have burned up its entire land. It cannot be sown, nor can it grow anything, not even any grass will sprout upon it, like the overturning of Sodom, Gemorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overturned in His fury and in His rage.” (Devarim 29:22)
Mayim achronim (washing one’s hands after a meal) is obligatory because of Sodomite salt, which [gets on a person’s hands while eating] and can harm a person’s eyes. (Gemara Chullin 105b)
The gemara in Chullin gives a seemingly prosaic reason for mayim achronim – nothing more than making sure salt from the meal doesn’t get in your eyes. However, there are always deeper layers of meaning for us to uncover in the Torah. What is the spiritual message of mayim achronim? And why do Chazal say specifically that the concern is salt of Sodom(lit. מלח סדומית)? Salt hurts your eyes no matter where it comes from. And besides, there are many places proximate to Israel where salt is supplied from. Finally, as already noted by the Rishonim, the Sages give an entirely different explanation of mayim achronim in Gemara Berachot (22a), where it is derived from the verse “and you shall be holy” (Vayikra 11:44). That makes mayim achronim sound like it has some intrinsic spiritual value, as opposed to just being a matter of health or hygiene.
To answer these questions, we have to understand that the concern for getting salt in our eyes is about much more than just health or hygience. There is a deep ethical message as well, one that explains why our Sages were specifically concerned about “salt of Sodom.” As is clear from this week’s parshah, Sodom was not a pleasant place and its citizens had a penchant for violence and abuse of strangers. However, the book of Yechezkel (16:49) gives a very different diagnosis of why Sodom was destroyed – “Behold this was the iniquity of Sodom your sister – pride, abundance of bread, and careless ease were hers and her daughters’, and she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Yechezkel castigates Sodom for its heartless abandonment of charity, for the way its residents greedily amassed wealth and turned a blind eye to those in need. Sodom was drunk on its wealth and the thirst for more, and so it lost its moral compass – the most basic indicator of which is the practice of chesed and compassion for fellow human beings.
Whenever one is involved in any physical pleasure, he risks blunting his spiritual sensitivity and losing – to some degree – his attunement to the needs of others. And this is certainly true of eating. For this reason, our Sages established a spiritual framework for mealtime, which is bookended by mayim rishonim at the beginning and mayim achronim at the end. Mayim rishonim is a sort of preventative medicine (lit. תרופה קודמת) to the self-centeredness of the act of eating. It is modeled after the practice of the Kohanim sanctifying their hands before performing service in the Temple. It is an advance reminder to be ‘on guard’ against the dangers of raw, unrefined desire, and of the imperative to bring the sanctity of the Temple into our physical lives.
However, even with the most potent of reminders, it is difficult for anyone to go through a meal without some degree of self-centeredness, without losing some level of focus on the needs of others. Our Sages thus established mayim achronim as well. It reminds us to cleanse ourselves of the “salt of Sodom,” which refers not only to actual salt, but also the poisonous and warped values that Sodom espoused. We come away from the meal with “clean hands,” ready to act in the world in a holy way and be conscious of the needs of others, without our eyes being “blinded” by the noxious ideology of Sodom.
We can now explain why our Sages derive an additional source for mayim achronim from the verse “and you shall be holy.” Holiness is a difficult and complex concept to articulate, but it comes from being rooted in spiritual values and living with consciousness of G-d. Someone immersed in physical pleasures lives with smallness, with a world that centers around him and his needs. He is always asking “What is in it for me?” But a holy person sees a bigger picture. He realizes that he is bound to every other living being, which, like him, is also a creation of G-d. Chesed and rachamim, compassion for all, pour out from the depths of his very being. But this is simply the positive articulation of the warning to cleanse ourselves from the salt of Sodom.
Thus, far from being a mundane hygenic practice, mayim achronim is an opportunity to recharge our ethical sensitivities, and remind ourselves that true holiness is impossible without love and concern for our fellow human beings.
Food for Thought
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (Bereishit 18:23-26): Both in Abraham’s request and in G-d’s reply is the marked stress on בתוך העיר. Abraham does not say בעיר but בתוך העיר , the answer even runs בסדום בתוך העיר…. The idea of a righteous man in the midst of Sodomite depravity which Abraham visualizes, for whose sake the city might be saved, is not one who keeps to his own four walls, in haughty pride of his own superiority gives up the masses and just looks on at their ruinous moral lapses, who thinks he has done quite enough if he saves himself and at most his own household. Yea, such a one Abraham would not class as righteous, he would not consider that he had at all fulfilled the duty which lies on man in bad surroundings. The ruin of the masses whom he had long given up, would leave such a man cold, he might even possibly feel a certain smug satisfaction in it.
Rav Soloveitchik (Festival of Freedom, pg. 21): Man has the choice to eat either in hiding, alone, like the beast in its lair, or in community, before the Lord. When eating rises to a great service, to an experience of G-d found and held not by reason but by feeling the discomfort and embarrassment of those who have not and inviting them to join those who have, a new community is born, a community which consists of master, mistress, servant, and pauper. The birth of this community hallows the meal and endows it with sanctity. There is no division into host and guest, into master and servant, into giver and recipient, into a generous philanthropist and an embarrassed individual who is in need. There is a strange halakhic institution, the zimmun, through which Birkat ha-Mazon assumes a new dimension. Saying Birkat ha-Mazon with a zimmun, if truly understood and implemented, represents a communal recitation of the blessings: one person says them aloud, and the rest of the company listens quietly and answers “Amen.” (Such is the ideal practice of zimmun, although we do not implement it in this fashion today; see Mishnah Berurah 183.27.) The idea which this halakhah tries to translate into a ceremonial is that of a community formed by the act of eating. The se’udah is designed not only to satisfy man’s physical needs, but also to take him out of his sheltered seclusion and loneliness and let him join the thou. Eating becomes a cohesive force bringing together people who were shut up in their own small worlds and coalescing them into a community. The Halakhah is aware of the fact that a meal partaken together unites people, fosters friendship, and fashions a company of eaters that may, in the long run, become a community of G-d-seekers and the G-d-committed.
Homeless shelters are dividing Jews on NY’s Upper West Side (JTA, August 2020): The conversion of three hotels on the Upper West Side into temporary homeless shelters has divided the local Jewish community. Rabbis and other area residents are lining up on both sides of a heated debate over the relocation of some 700 homeless individuals, which critics say has brought drug use, crime and vagrancy to the relatively affluent area…. The community response — evident in opposing Facebook groups each with thousands of members, dueling petitions, and countless calls and Zoom meetings with local politicians — touches upon several lightning rod issues, including racism, safety, privilege and the interpretation of the Jewish edict to help the poor. In Upper West Siders for Safer Streets, a private Facebook group that has amassed over 7,000 members over the course of days, local residents have been angrily sharing concerns. “We are for homeless assistance & compassion but we are against registered sex offenders and drug use in our community,” the page description reads… The Facebook group includes numerous photographs of homeless people, largely unmasked, sitting on street corners, injecting drugs and urinating in public… [However] Jewish residents of the Upper West Side have also been mainstays of the counter-effort to support the new homeless residents.
Rav Yuval Cherlow: The prophet’s [i.e. Yechezkel’s] description combined with what the Torah reveals to us gives us the following picture: the people of Sodom insisted on preserving their high quality of living to such an extent they established a principle not to let the poor and homeless reside in their city. Consequently, when a destitute person would come seeking help, they would revoke his right to any welfare – public or private! By doing this they figured they would preserve an elite upper-class community who would monopolize the profits that the bountiful land offers without having to distribute any revenues to a “lower class” of people. An opinion in the Mishna in Avot 5:10 further strengthens this picture of moral depravity when it defines the Sodomite as one who says, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.” The Mishna decries a man who wishes to remove himself from the social responsibility of welfare by closing himself and his wealth from others, even if he makes the claim that he is not taking away from anyone else.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (Horeb, pg. 159): [The requirement of male and female for reproduction of species ensures] that no creature in the world of creation could in its selfishness form a closed circle. Instead, a great order of give and take thus embraced all beings with love and engendered life—life which is naught but receiving and nurturing that which has been received for the further gift of life to others; life which is also giving and by that giving receiving the consummation of self in one’s fulfilment of the duty of creating.
Questions for Discussion
- Read the excerpt from the newspaper article above in “Food for Thought.” Who is right? How should Rav Kook’s teachings – and Torah values in general – be applied to this situation?
- Where else does salt figure in the story of Sodom in this week’s parshah?
- If Avraham was the paradigmatic ‘man of chesed,’ how could he pray to G-d for Sodom to be preserved?
- How does Yechezkel’s description of Sodom’s sin fit with the one provided by the Torah? How can they be reconciled? (See Rav Yuval Cherlow in “Food for Thought” above if you are stumped.)
- It seems like non-Jews are not commanded to give tzedakah. So how could Sodom be punished?
- What other practices did our Sages institute to give a spiritual character to the act of consuming food?
- Where in the parsha do we see Avraham acting as the polar opposite of Sodom?
