…..And Jehovah was just getting started. Remember, He’d given Lot, Lot’s wife, and a few other pious townspeople safe passage out of the two heretical, decadent party towns he was apparently planning to nuke. God’s mercy towards these faithful few was their reward for punctilious obedience to His word: for example, devoting the Sabbath to lazing around watching their crops wither in the desert heat because getting the irrigation pumps going would be work punishable by death.
Even so, these exit visas were not exactly free. I was soon to learn that with Jehovah there’s no such thing as “free”. No out and out gifts. Nothing without strings. No selfless bursts of unconditional divine benevolence. One always had to score well on some arcane test, meet some existential prerequisite, make some sacrifice, but most particularly, display one’s absolute obedience if one were to have any hope of receiving His benefaction. For our Sodom and Gomorrah’s refugees, as they beat it out of town, that condition was “No looking back!” [That mushroom cloud behind you is none of your business.]
Now let us trudge in the sandals of Lot’s wife. Having just been given what – maybe all of 30 minutes’ warning, she’s been dashing around the family hovel retrieving and packing up their valuables, shutting off the utilities, canceling subscriptions, putting the goat in a kennel, chiseling a change of address slate, burning the steamy parchments from her amorous neighbor with poetic suggestive unmentionables, and so on. With all that going on there was scant room in her memory banks for yet another of God’s numberless admonishments. And so, as this disheveled, disoriented band of displaced Jews scurries up the road away from the doomed towns – quite understandably Lot’s wife turns for a last sad, backward glance at what had been her home for many years, a home she knew she would never see again.
BAM! God turns her into a pillar of salt!
Jeez! Was that really necessary?
And why salt, Lord? Why not, say, pepper? Or lithium sulfate? For gosh sakes why not turn her into something useful like a huge loaf of Jewish sour rye with caraway seeds, or maybe a poppyseed bagel some six feet in diameter they could roll along as they trekked through the Sinai?
Admittedly I bring forth this sophisticated socratic dialogue decades after the fact. Back then, not quite 13, I lacked the sophistication for so erudite a query. The best I could do was ask the rabbi1 whether he knew if the salt which had replaced Lot’s wife was iodized?
And finally, on February 26th, four days after my biological birthday, the denouement – my Bar Mitzvah ceremony day – was upon me, ostensibly the most important Saturday of my young life. I was now just moments from rebirth.
The time had come for me to formally join a storied people who through the millennium had repeatedly faced extinction. Although Adolf Hitler had fairly recently given antisemitism a singularly bad name, pogroms of variable lethality directed at Jews had been a venomous component of most civilized societies for as long as there had been Jews. Were history to repeat itself (and for Jews it invariably did), I could look forward to an illustrious career packed with celebrated achievements, albeit circumscribed by a dicey life expectancy.
(to be continued…..)