The Opportunity to Change

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 7 November 2025

This week we come to what I think of as one of the lowest moments in the Torah – which is strange given that we just re-started the process of reading the Torah a few weeks ago – a few weeks ago we had the opportunity to be together with family, friends and community to mark Yom Kippur and to think about all the things about our lives that we had got wrong and thought about how we could do better. We did teshuvah – we turned or returned in our ways, endeavouring to make the year 5786 besotter than the year 5785.

And yet, I am standing here saying that this week’s is one of the most difficult Torah portions – one of the lowest moments of our textual tradition – with God’s destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gemorrah.

I think this is one of the lowest points, not necessarily because the cities were destroyed – commentators have long considered the question of the justice of the destruction of the cities. The sages of old were convinced by the argument that the cities deserved to be obliterated. But the Hebrew Bible is full of times when people or places are destroyed or put to the sword – this isn’t even the worst of them.

Rather, the reason I think this is a low point is because God decides that the cities should be destroy without giving the people the chance to do teshuvah – without giving them the chance to do things differently.

This made me think of Yom Kippur because of the story we read on Yom Kippur: the story of Jonah, the prophet who flees from his prophetic calling. He flees from God’s call to go and prophesy to the people of another great and sinful city, Nineveh. In some ways, the case of Nineveh is a repeat of the case of Sodom and Gemorrah – a city that is beset by wickedness and sin, and which God has decided to destroy.

The difference is: in the story of Jonah, God gives this great and sinful city the opportunity to turn things around – the opportunity to repent and do better – an opportunity which the people of Nineveh accept. They put on sackcloth and ashes, they sit on the floor and they repent.

We read this story on Yom Kippur afternoon as a way of reminding ourselves that repentance is possible, teshuvah is possible, changing ourselves is possible.

And yet this week, the world seems to have regressed – God says to Abraham: I’m going to destroy these two massive cities – and there is never a moment in which God sends Abraham or anyone else to try to persuade the people of those cities to change their ways.

We are in need of another Yom Kippur – we need to rebuild that marquee and sing Kol Nidrei and hear the sermons and beat our chests all over again. Because already we may have forgotten how to change – how to do teshuvah – how to return to the path we need to be on.

We are just three weeks into the new year and we need to be reminded of this … and that is because we are human. We tend to slide back quite a lot – and that is nothing to be ashamed of. But it is a good reason to be part of a religious community that can keep reminding us – keep reminding us that we can be better, rather than just accepting that we are one way and always will be.

Here’s another question: in this scenario, are we Sodom or are we God? Are we being reminded that we should still be busy repenting, even though we have just put Yom Kippur behind us? Or are we being asked to put ourselves in the place of God, and to see what it means to take away from people the ability to change?

Perhaps our tradition is trying to remind us in this moment to give each other a chance – to allow each other the space to change and the opportunity to do teshuvah – not to assume that our parent or our child or our sibling or our friend was made one way and will be so for evermore.

This Shabbat, as we read about the terrible deeds of Sodom and the fate to which they were condemned, let us take this as a reminder that although it is no longer Yom Kippur, we still have the power and the ability to do teshuvah, the power to change. And let us take it as a reminder that we owe it to others to allow them to be different and to do better. May that be the intention that we take into this Shabbat.