Go Positive - CHRONICLE Online/The WORD 11/06/25

Weekly On-line Rabbi's D'var-Torah

November 6, 2025

15 Cheshvan 5786

Parashat Vayera

We may not be able to agree as to whether we should be happy or sad about the election results from Tuesday. However, we can ALL agree on one thing—we are all grateful that the political ads will finally stop (at least for a while!).

As we all know, political campaigns go negative because the negative ads seem to work. Anger motivates people to vote more than any other emotion. Campaigns try to drum up that anger in order to get us to vote the “right” way.

In this week’s Torah portion, we see someone behave in the exact opposite way.

God shared with Abraham the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorra because the people living there were evil. It would have been easy for Abraham to look at the residents of the two cities and see exactly what God saw—evil people. Surely, God had to be more convincing than any negative ad created by political consultants.

But, that’s not what Abraham saw. He saw human beings. He saw the potential for good. Abraham asked God for the opportunity to make sure that there were not 10 good people within the borders of the two cities. And it was only after he verified with his own eyes that there were not in fact any righteous people in Sodom and Gomorra—except for his nephew Lot and his family—that Abraham gave up on the people of Sodom and Gomorra and “allowed” God destroy them.

Abraham assumed the best of people until he was proven wrong, and that is one of the reasons that he himself was considered a righteous man. And I imagine it is one of the reasons that we continue to tell this story today—because it is the ideal toward which we should strive.

Sadly, many of us today—and I include myself—think the worst of people until we are proven wrong. Perhaps the end of the political campaign season, with its pause in negative ads, is an opportunity for us all to look around and see the best in our neighbors—regardless of which party they may have voted for.

Shalom,

RAF