The Gemara continues to discuss the sins of the people of Sodom: They had beds on which they would lay their guests; when a guest was longer than the bed, they would cut him (to size), and when a guest was shorter than the bed they would stretch him. Eliezer, servant of Abraham, happened to come there. They said to him: Come lie in the bed. He said to them: I took a vow that since the day my mother died I do not lie in a bed. Sanhedrin 109b

The Gemora (above) describes the special beds with which the people of Sodom subjected their guests. Iyov tells us that this was the sin that tipped the scale for Sodom, resulting in its complete destruction. But what about this sin made it worse than all of their other sins?

The Ben Ish Chai (Yosef Hayim of Bagdad 1835 –1909) explains that there are people who do all kinds of sins, such as stealing, killing, and serving idols. Yet, they can very often explain away all these sins that they do, and how they are otherwise good and kind people. But this particular sin with the beds caused strangers to avoid even passing into the city of Sodom. It removed the possibility of the Sodomites having an external third party protest their actions, and therefore this particular sin showed that they sinned only because they wanted to do bad. This is in contrast to when people have a logical reason to do bad. Being that this is the case, there was no way for them to rectify themselves, and the only option left was for Hashem to destroy them.

I think that we can all relate to this idea. We ourselves do a variety of things that we know we shouldn’t be doing (some of them repeatedly), but we have excuses why we are doing them. The reason is definitely not because we want to be bad. Whereas in Sodom, the concept was “what evil can we do?” They were so interested in doing bad things that they didn’t want to chance being told off by any visitors. Such a society is truly decadent and must be obliterated, therefore Sodom was destroyed.

It could well be that some of us sin even more than the people of Sodom, but it is not born out of a principle (shita). Rather, we think that we have certain needs that can only be met by sinning in these particular ways. We need to realize that means we are better than Sodom at least in our “shita” of life.

But it does not make us into righteous Jews!

To be dissimilar from Sodom we must not sin at all because, bottom line, a sin is a sin. Instead, we need to do mitzvos because they are mitzvos. This is how we eradicate our “internal Sodom.”

As we learn the parsha of Sodom, it should teach us to feel an obligation to do the right things for the right reasons. And not to do the wrong things for any reason.