My dear chavruta,

Rabbi Warren Goldstein was giving the dvar Torah on Parashat Vayera, and the more he spoke, the more I heard the voice of the Mishnah underneath everything.

You know how he has spent more than twenty years with Pirkei Avot. He does not treat it as a collection of nice sayings. He treats it as the living transmission of the wisdom of our fathers, the same chain that begins “Moshe received the Torah from Sinai.”

He opened with the words of Shimon HaTzaddik in Avot 1:2:

שִׁמְעוֹן הַצַּדִּיק הָיָה מִשְּׁיָרֵי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה. הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, עַל שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים הָעוֹלָם עוֹמֵד, עַל הַתּוֹרָה וְעַל הָעֲבוֹדָה וְעַל גְּמִילוּת חֲסָדִים.

Shimon the Righteous was one of the last of the Men of the Great Assembly. He used to say: The world stands on three things — on Torah, on the Temple service, and on acts of loving-kindness.

The world does not merely benefit from gemilut chasadim. It stands upon it. Without that pillar, the other two cannot hold the structure. That is the frame for everything that follows in Vayera.

The Mishnah Names the Trait of Sodom

Then he turned to the famous Mishnah in the fifth chapter:

אַרְבַּע מִדּוֹת בָּאָדָם: הָאוֹמֵר ”שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלִּי וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלָּךְ” — זוֹ מִדָּה בֵינוֹנִית, וְיֵשׁ אוֹמְרִים: זוֹ מִדַּת סְדוֹם; ”שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלָּךְ וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלִּי” — עַם הָאָרֶץ; ”שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלָּךְ וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלָּךְ” — חָסִיד; ”שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלִּי וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלִּי” — רָשָׁע.

There are four types of people. One who says, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours” — this is an average type; and some say this is the trait of Sodom. One who says, “What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine” is an ignoramus. One who says, “What is mine is yours and what is yours is yours” is pious. One who says, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is mine” is wicked.

The Bartenura explains why some call the first type the trait of Sodom: once a person becomes accustomed to saying “mine is mine,” he will eventually refuse even the benefit that costs him nothing. That is exactly what the people of Sodom legislated. They had plenty and still made hospitality a crime. The Mishnah is not describing random cruelty. It is describing a society that wrote the refusal of kindness into its law.

Rabbi Goldstein paused there and said, in essence, that when “what is mine is mine” becomes the civic creed, the Garden has already become Sodom. The Path that began when a hand stretched out in Eden has reached its end.

The Same Words Appear Again

He then walked us through the precise linguistic connections that Rabbi David Fohrman has taught for years. In Eden, we have a hand stretched forth, someone sent out of a garden, angels, divine fire, something that turns (mitapechet), and, finally, the guarding of the Path of the Tree of Life. Every one of those elements reappears in the destruction of Sodom, and the eighth element is stated openly: Abraham will command his children to keep the Path of Hashem — to do tzedakah u’mishpat.

The Mishnah and the Torah are speaking the same language. The Path that the cherubim guard is the living balance of justice that refuses the taker and righteousness that still reaches for the one who is down. That is why Hashem speaks to Abraham at all.

Looking for the Good

Here the conversation turned personal. Rabbi Chaim Richman has taught for decades that Hashem keeps the record of the quiet acts. Lot is remembered in the Midrash and by Rashi on Genesis 19:29 not for any dramatic rescue inside Sodom, but for a silence years earlier in Egypt.

When Abraham said Sarah was his sister, Lot knew and did not speak. That one restraint — unseen by almost everyone — was the kindness Hashem recalled measure for measure when the fire fell. Rabbi Richman has said it plainly: look for the good in people. Most of the world would have written Lot off. Hashem did not.

Rabbi Zev Leff once put the same truth in a single sentence: “Hashem wanted us to be God-like, so He put us in a world the furthest away from Him.” The distance is the point. The world that looks like Sodom is exactly the place where a quiet choice of loyalty still registers in Heaven.

The Open Door

The Mishnah also gives us the opposite picture. In Avot 1:5 we read:

יְהִי בֵיתְךָ פָּתוּחַ לִרְוָחָה, וְיִהְיוּ עֲנִיִּים בְּנֵי בֵיתֶךָ.

Let your house be open wide, and let the poor be members of your household.

That is Abraham sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. The Gemara (Shabbat 127a) learns from that moment that hospitality to guests is greater than the reception of the Divine Presence. The world stands on gemilut chasadim because Hashem Himself is the One who only gives. When we keep the door open, we are walking the Path the cherubim still guard.

You asked me once how we can see the good in people when some systems declare that anyone who does not confess a particular name is already lost. The Mishnah does not speak that way. Every human being is already connected.

Some have wandered far into the Garden that looks like Eden but is actually Sodom. They still carry the capacity for the one quiet act that Hashem has never forgotten. Our work is not to declare them lost. It is to stand at the open door, as Abraham did, and keep the Path clear.

That is what I learned sitting in Rabbi Goldstein’s class. The oral Torah does not add a new idea. It names the Path that the written Torah has already shown us. The world still stands on acts of kindness. Hashem is still watching the small ones. And the Path of the Tree of Life is still open.

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Brief Biographical Notes

Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein

Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein has served as Chief Rabbi of South Africa since 2005, the youngest person ever appointed to the position. He received his rabbinic ordination from the Yeshivah Gedolah of Johannesburg, qualified as a dayan through Eretz Hemda in Jerusalem, and holds a PhD in human rights and constitutional law from the University of the Witwatersrand.

He is widely known for his deep engagement with Pirkei Avot, having taught and written on the tractate for more than two decades, and for founding the global Shabbat Project. His dvar Torah on Vayera consistently reads the parasha through the lens of the mishnah’s ethical categories.

Rabbi Chaim Richman

Rabbi Chaim Richman served for three decades as International Director of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem and is the founder of Jerusalem Lights. He is a leading English-language teacher on the Holy Temple, the weekly Torah portion, and the practical meaning of chesed. His teaching that we must “look for the good in people” has shaped countless students, including the recollection that Hashem remembers Lot’s silence in Egypt.

Rabbi Zev Leff

Rabbi Zev Leff is a longtime teacher and author in Israel whose writings frequently return to the theme of emulating Hashem through the distance of this world. The sentence recalled above has circulated among his students for many years as a concise statement of why the work of becoming God-like happens precisely where the world feels farthest from Him.

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Footnotes

1. Mishnah Avot 1:2.
2. Mishnah Avot 5:10.
3. Bartenura on Avot 5:10.
4. Rashi on Genesis 19:29, drawing on the Midrash.
5. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 127a.
6. Ezekiel 16:49, which the commentators link to the “trait of Sodom” in Avot 5:10.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Against Your Will You Were Born
• Parashat Vayera: The Path Still Stands Open
• Nitzavim–Vayelech: Courage, Return, and the Door Noach Opened
• The Tree of Life: Why Christianity Should Come Home: The Real Sin of Sodom and the Path Back to the Tree of Life
• The Path Still Stands Open: Sodom and Gomorrah