After Sodom's destruction, Abraham journeyed on. He left the ruined plain behind and moved — not fleeing, not grieving, just continuing. Job had the language for this: "The mountain falls away and the rock is moved from its place" (Job 14:18). The world that Abraham had known, the world in which Sodom and the surrounding cities existed, had literally crumbled. And he walked forward into the next chapter.
The rabbis read Abraham's departure as a moral statement about his own scruples. He had been living near Sodom — not in it, not of it, but near enough to see. He explained himself: he had stayed because travelers needed hospitality on the roads, and he provided it. But Sodom had been generous to no one. "The hand of the poor and needy found nothing there" (Ezekiel 16:49). The very hospitality Abraham offered was an implicit rebuke to the city that refused it. When Sodom was gone, the rebuke had nowhere to land.
So Abraham went to Gerar. He started over in a new place, with the same tent opening that faced every direction, the same table set for strangers. The mountain had fallen. The rock had moved. He was already building the next place where someone could stop and be fed. This is what the rabbis admired most in Abraham: not the dramatic moments — the binding of Isaac, the argument with God — but the quiet continuity. He did not stop being Abraham after catastrophe. He never stopped being Abraham at all.