창세기 13:7의 Musar

One must make great efforts to avoid personal strife. If a quarrel is in the offing, one must immediately strive to remove the cause of such quarrel, as our sages said in Sanhedrin 7 when commenting on Proverbs 17,14: פוטר מים ראשית מדון, "Starting a quarrel is like opening a sluice." Abraham demonstrated this virtue when he said to Lot: "let there not develop a quarrel between us." I detect a special meaning in Abraham employing the feminine form for the word strife, i.e. מריבה, although the Torah had already reported a "strong" quarrel, ריב, having occurred between their respective shepherds (Genesis 13,7). Abraham considered מריבה as a development of ריב. He considered the "fruit" of ריב to be מריבה. The latter word is akin to מתרבה, "constantly increasing." Since women produce children, he used the female form of the word ריב, i.e מריבה, in order to allude to the peculiarity of quarrels which keep increasing. He viewed ריב as something masculine, unable to give birth.

When Bereshit Rabbah 41,6 says that the facial features of Lot resembled those of Abraham, what they mean is that just as Abraham was a spiritual giant among men, i.e. אדם, so the numerical value of the letters in the name לוט add up to 45=אדם. We have repeatedly set out that the word אדם is an acronym for אדם-דוד-משיח. Lot wanted to take possession of the land of Israel prematurely, believing himself to be Abraham's heir, as explained by Rashi on 13,7. Since Abraham, however, had not yet acquired that land, seeing the Torah described it as belonging to the Canaanite and the Perisite at that time, this proved impossible. Lot thought that Canaan being cursed however, could not possibly claim legal title to the land. Actually, at that time Lot was also in the category of someone who is cursed since the word לוט is also an expression of לטותא, the Aramaic word for "curse." Even though his facial features may have resembled those of Abraham, he was like an ape i.e. only similar when compared to אדם but not a real אדם. Only at the coming of the Messiah will Lot's facial resemblance become translated into the equivalent of אדם.