Sermon: Vayeira – Why we read the difficult bits

Written by Rabbi Hannah Kingston — 23 November 2025

There are Torah portions people hope for when they become B’nei Mitzvah: familiar stories, strong moral messages, even laws that we still live in practice today. And then there are the portions that are less inspiring: long lists of precise measurements, colours and construction instructions. They may not stir our enthusiasm, but they are also reasonably unoffensive.

And then you get the stories like the one Stella read for us today, passages that make us uncomfortable, that describe actions that we do not want attributed to our name. And whilst they make great material for a D’var Torah, they also leave us questioning why? Why do we read the horrible bits and not just gloss over them? And further, why would we inflict them upon our children to read for us?

Within Reform Jewish communities we read approximately a third of the weekly portion each year, meaning that over a three year period we will read the entirety of a parasha. We are guided in these readings by a nationwide calendar sent out by the Reform movement.

Some communities do routinely omit passages which feel particularly offensive or distasteful when read with a modern day lens, deciding to pick and choose based on an array of external and internal factors.

Yet we have inherited this canon, it is not changing. The Torah doesn’t shy away from showing us humanity at its worst, and nowhere is that clearer than in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I believe it is our responsibility to read the difficult texts so we can evaluate how we will use them. We do not need to ethically resolve every passage of Torah, but we do need to be exposed to the negative so we can choose to live differently.

For we do not only face problematic stories in Torah, but we are surrounded by them in the society that we live in. Our news is filled with stories of destruction, our social media feeds filled with  images and behaviours  that cause pain, and the video games that draw our children in are often rooted in violence.

We cannot censor it all, pretend that the world and its problems don’t exist. With exposure, through reading texts or visualising images that challenge us, we have the opportunity to change behaviours moving forwards, and to set our own healthy boundaries.

We make choices every day about how we interact with the world. Similarly Lot, in this week’s parasha, chose how to interact with the society of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We read  last week in Parashat Lech Lecha that he chose to depart from Abraham’s journey to Canaan and live in Sodom, despite the fact that it was a known place of evil. The text tells us, ‘Lot chose the whole Jordan plain for himself and moved away toward the east’ (Genesis 13:11), having seen that the land was fertile. Despite the risk to his family, he bought into the narrative of the people, and like the Sodomites, his choice was for selfish reasons.

And even in this week’s parasha, when commanded to leave Lot is hesitant. Potentially because he cannot tear himself away from the lure of debauchery, or because like many of us he has a morbid fascination with what motivates people to do bad things.

What exactly were the sins of the Sodomites, that Lot seemed so drawn to?

Sodom was home to the wealthiest people in the world, people who were fat with their pick of plenty. Yet the Sages tell stories throughout Midrash and Talmud of the lengths the residents would go to, to protect their wealth and punish acts of charity.

They tell of games played with beggars, where they would give money but no food, so they could collect it back when the person died. They tell of violence enacted on visitors under the guise of offering a bed to a weary traveller.

The final straw for our Rabbis, comes in the story of a maiden who secretly carried bread to a poor person in the street, hidden in her water pitcher. When the residents suspected the girl, they covered her with honey, placed her atop the city walls and left her until the bees came and ate her. Her cries, say our Sages, were what reached God and triggered divine judgment.

The Sodomites were greedy, perhaps made this way by their wealth and lifestyles of excess. But the cruelty of Sodom was not just violence and greed, it was institutionalised selfishness. In Pirkei Avot we read:

One that says: “what’s mine is mine, and yours is yours”: this is commonplace; and this is a Sodom-type of character.

Why is the characteristic of Sodom stating ‘what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours’? The Rabbis call this an “ordinary” attitude, and it is something that we may feel describes our own personal preferences. Surely we could argue that being inherently evil is believing ownership of everything, what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.

But the Rabbis are teaching that Sodom is a mindset, the residents inherently selfish, driven by desperation to protect their own property and not concerning themselves with the other. And they are increasingly insular, only concerned about their own possessions.

This teaching from Pirkei Avot tells us that when we stop caring for others, when we protect what’s ours and close our hearts only, society begins to rot from within.

So we go back to the initial question…

Why do we read this rather gruesome passage, rather than just ignoring its place in our canon?

Like Lot, many of us gain morbid pleasure from reading or viewing things , be them biblical stories, or true crime podcasts. Evolutionary psychologists say that we’re drawn to these tales because murder, rape and theft have played a significant part in human society since our hunter-gatherer days. We remain highly attuned to criminal misdemeanours, so we can find out what makes criminals tick, to better protect ourselves.

And further, the sins of Sodom are not ancient history. We too live in a world that prizes comfort, privacy, and possession, sometimes at the expense of compassion. We are increasingly insular as we spend more time on our phones that we do socialising. Our young people are often consumed by  social media, with the average London child spending less time outside than most prison inmates.

But unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, it is not too late to change our fate. We can’t pretend the world’s cruelty doesn’t exist, but we can choose how to respond to it. Censorship isolates us; engagement empowers us. We can take small actions and put boundaries in place so we can create healthier habits moving forward.

Like Lot, we can be drawn into the spectacle of destruction, or we can choose to take a step back and learn from it. Reading this story in Torah challenges us not to look away, but to turn within.

May we find meaning in the moments, both in Torah and in the world, that challenge us

May they inspire us to make small, courageous, changes, so that in time we can build healthier long term habits, both for ourselves and for our children.

And may we strive to learn from the mistakes of the past, so that together we can change the narrative of the future.