Israel has abandoned all hope of mitigating the spread of Omicron, the highly contagious variant the COVID-19. Though predictions say that one out of every two Israelis will be infected by the virus, the government still has not changed its policy to limit fatalities. “We have to know how to accept severe cases and also to accept deaths, because this is a pandemic and in a pandemic people die,” said Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked in August.

That this policy that has not changed since reveals a profound lack of care for Jewish lives, as well for non-Jewish Israeli citizens. But given that Israel is still a Jewish state, failing to do more to limit deaths is like tacitly saying that Jewish lives don’t matter, that neigh the people or state of Israel matter. This is not surprising given that the present government has partnered with the Arab Ra’am party – the Israeli version of the Muslim Brotherhood – that denies Israel’s right to exist.

Though not the invention of this government, the expansion of the surrogate law by gay Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz means that LGBTQs will be able to use surrogacy as a way of procreation. Until now surrogacy in Israel was limited to heterosexual couples and single women with fertility issues. “Today (Jan. 4), we are putting an end to years of injustice and discrimination,” said the progressive minister who adores Che and Chávez. “A week from today,” continues the health minister who’s more concerned with surrogacy than he is with COVID-19, “we will also give equal access to surrogacy in Israel to single men, future fathers, as well as [male] homosexual couples – actually to any individual.”

The erasing of male/female demarcations is one of the signs of an ideal society. This shouldn’t be all that surprising for Christians, given that when asked about the case of a resurrected widow who married seven brothers, Jesus said that in the Messianic age there will be no gender. People will “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20). Paul seems to apply it to the present, for he believed that the Messianic age has come, hence there is “no male and female.”

It is only when this idea of genderless society is secularized and forced upon the present that it becomes “Sodomized,” a term Jews understood to mean the most extreme version of an “enlightened” godless society. The men of Sodom, said the Talmudic sages, “waxed haughty only on account of the good which the Holy One, blessed be He, had lavished upon them”(Sanhedrin 109a). Sodom, to be reminded, was described as “the garden of the Lord” (Genesis 13:10), which is why the people of Sodom thought they were living in “heaven.”

In such a perfect place, the stranger, outsider, the ‘other,’ was not welcomed. This is why the people of Sodom loathed hospitality and procreation. Both meant disturbing the equilibrium of their paradise. Specifically, says the Talmud, it was possible to safeguard this heaven only by distributing Sodom’s wealth among its living citizens and no one else, including guests and newborns. This is why this atheistic heaven encouraged homosexuality, a xenophobic means of enjoying sex without risking procreation. Later we would enable much the same – free sex devoid of morality – by developing the birth control pill. Though perceived as enlightened by atheistic standards, this society was bound to reach the inevitable – complete annihilation.

The expansion of Israel’s surrogacy law means, among other things, the endorsement not of homosexuality as such but of a sterile way of life by choice, based on the belief that the world’s wealth has reached its limit, and more people means the depletion of limited resources. As a consequence, the more people there are the more chance for war and strife over resources. Sterility, thus, becomes a virtue. The Sodomites, to be sure, were convinced they were virtuous.

Things would have looked bleak if Israel as a whole stood behind Horowitz’s agenda. Sodom became uninhabitable, a place that cannot sustain human life, all because the entire society of Sodom chose to live according to atheistic norms and values. But Israel, with all of its problems, has more than enough people whose righteousness is diverting the otherwise inevitable wrath.

And as for the why such a government for whom Jewish life doesn’t matter is now at the helm, maybe it is for the sake of the faithful, for whom defeatism at this time would be as detrimental to Israel as it was in the time of the 12 spies, when the people of Israel had to choose between human logic and divine wisdom, reality and promise, faithlessness and faith.