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Order, Compassion and the Moral Society The people of Sedom had beds for guests. If the guests were too tall, they were cut down to size. If the guests were too short, they were stretched out. (Sanhedrin 109b) This gemara clearly conveys the rampant cruelty of Sedom but we can still wonder about the specific imagery chosen for this purpose. The gemara could have employed many different manifestations of cruelty and it decided to go with this intriguing image of adjusting the guest to match the bed size. Rav Moshe Avigdor Amiel, Rabbi of Antwerp and then of Tel Aviv, brilliantly elucidates the meaning of this talmudic imagery in his Hegyonot El Ami. According to R. Amiel, some societies perform acts of charity more as a solution to an aesthetic or bureaucratic problem than as a genuine kindness. In such societies, motivation for helping the poor and the destitute is primarily that these disadvantaged people blemish the landscape of the city or prevent maximum economic efficiency. From this bureaucratic perspective on charity, one can conclude that the needs of the poor must be adjusted to fit the help we give them rather than adjusting our help to match the need. We refuse to acknowledge the reality of the poor and adjust them to fit the beds we have prepared. In a chilling passage, R. Amiel describes what happens to societies that express benevolence purely as a means of keeping order. He points out that it was the most orderly of twentieth century cultures that produced the greatest atrocities of the century. When efficiency and order supplant authentic compassion, the door leading to cruelty has opened. While Rav Amiel certainly refers to both Fascism and Communism, the danger he warns of can be found in any political system. Let us first figure out the reality of those in need and then proceed with true sympathy and kindness to go about finding beds of the appropriate size.
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