[Avodah] s&amora

[Lisa Liel]

On 2/2/2012 2:52 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 05:05:45PM -0600, Lisa Liel wrote:
>
> : The Midrash says that they used to mark the coins in Sdom so that if you
> : gave tzedaka, you could be found out and punished. What the people of
> : Sdom did was the flip side of what the Dor ha-Palga did. They simply
> : abolished personal ownership entirely. Everything belonged to the king,
> : or society, or what have you. In both cases, the very essence of being a
> : human being, with personal autonomy and the corresponding responsibility,
> : was eliminated. And without that, physical destruction is pretty much
> : just an afterthought.
>
> While RSRH also reads the Dor haPelaga as being totalitarian, he says it
> was Fascist rather than Communist. (See 19 Leters, 6th Letter.) Thus the
> loss of a brick was more mourned than the loss of a person. Everything
> became about the state's goals. People were reduced to cogs in a machine
> to accomplish the Fatherland's mission.
>
Fascism would be letting people own their own things, but controlling 
how they use them.  Communism is saying no one owns anything.  It seems 
to me that the former fits Sdom, and the latter fits Dor HaPalga.  YMMV.

Lisa