D'Var Torah - Mark Burger, Noach, Bereshit 6:9-11:32, 6 Heshvan 5760, October 15, 1999

The more I read the story of Noah, the world and God, the more I've been troubled. Noah seems so colorless and void, John Voight's recent portrayal of him notwithstanding. Even Torah has an ambivalent view of him. Noah was considered an "eesh tzadik", a righteous man, but could have been a "nefesh tzadik", a righteous, or spiritual soul. He was "tameem", blameless without fault, the word "tameem" can also mean meek, nebbish, like the way Jacob was compared to Esau. Noah walked with God, but not the Lord. Noah was an ultra nice guy.

This was not a good time for God. His creation was going sour before him. This was not a case of two people, Adam and Eve, disobeying him. Nor of one guy killing another, as Cain did to Abel, and at least regretting it somewhat later. No, the whole place was going down.

So Noah was told to prepare for the ultimate corporate downsizing. He was given a budget and a small staff to salvage what assets the Boss considered saving. The Lord Himself handed out the pink slips. No corrective action. No golden parachutes. No outsourcing, spinoffs or vote by the Board of Directors or shareholders - well, wait, there was a vote by the only Board Member and Share Holder.

Boom, or whoosh, that was it. And Noah did as he was told. No protest. No comments. No anguish. Noah did "k'chal", just, as he was told. Now, wiping out all human and other terrestrial life is an astounding thing. It can make one speechless. Maybe that's what happened to Noah. Maybe he is the first case of post-traumatic stress disorder, getting drunk as soon as life on earth became "normal".

One sees floods about to happen every day. Businesses, governments, entire societies go along on their grooved rails. They sometimes are lawless or corrupt, described in Torah as "chamas", but more likely they are "yashav", or settled, soft or complacent as the people who tried and failed to build a tower at Babel to God.. And maybe that was Noah's gift. Maybe God was speaking to everyone, but only Noah paid attention. Noah at least prepared for change, did something different, risked ridicule and got out of a rut. That at least is something we can take with us in these times of mergers, technology driven changes and uncertainty, avoiding complacency in the face of an impending flood. Amen.

D'Var Torah Cynthia Barnard, October 31, 1997

For merchandising value, the best part of Torah is here: adorable images of animals traipsing into a big wooden ark, led by Noah and capped by a vivid rainbow. We can buy this cuteness packaged into wallpaper, quilts and toys.

But read the actual words of Noach - it's a shock. It's a violent, ugly story. And yet through the ugliness we can hear a challenging message, G-d directing our energies to save our world and ourselves.

The story of Noach is anything but cute. Mankind has descended from Adam and Eve to a vicious state. The world is full of "chamas" - corruption, robbery, lawlessness. The earth itself has become "nish-chatah," has suffered. It is "shacheit" - corrupted.

The evil in Noach's time was directed both against other people and against the earth itself. The rabbis tell us that rich men carefully sheltered marble statues from the freezing rain, ignoring shivering human beings in agonized need of the same protection. Midrash suggests that a person might come to the market carrying a full basket of beans and find it soon empty, as each passerby stole just one. Universal petty thievery - reflecting the loss of basic respect and lawfulness. Selfishness rules.

In the midst of this, we are told, "Noach ish tzaddik tamid haia b'dorotav" - Noach was a righteous man, perfect in his generations. Is this praise or not? Noach was perfect in his generations -- which, we have just learned, are notable for exceptional wickedness! And, as the story progresses, Noach does behave himself ignobly.

It took 120 years for Noach to construct the ark. We may imagine him, lonely and isolated, mocked by his community. I see him as ploddingly obedient to G-d, perhaps not very imaginative. Consider Noach's failure to argue with G-d about the impending devastation. Not one word is uttered to challenge G-d's intention. Later, both Abraham and Moses will be successful in persuading God to avert destruction on behalf of a few virtuous people.

In fact, the haftarah refers to the flood as "the waters of Noach" - how was he responsible? The essence of Noach's failing was that he merely followed G-d's explicit instructions. He did not emulate the chamas, the evil, of his neighbors, but still he did not actively improve his world or fight for the good in it. Noach clung to his own family and protected them, and only them, through his obedience to G-d. Perhaps our own day echoes this, with its sometimes smug focus on the well-being of our own, while ignoring the crying needs of those who may not look, or speak, or believe as we do.

And then -- the flood. As the earth has become shacheit - corrupted, destroyed - so G-d uses the same verb to describe what will happen - "l'shacheit kol-basher asher bo ruach chaim mitachat hashamayim"... to destroy all flesh which has a breath of life under the heavens." The corruption of the earth has been so terrible that there is no remedy. It can only be swept away along with all other life.

Noach and his family cared for the animals in the ark for one year and ten days. They must have felt thoroughly abandoned. Midrash tells us that there was never adequate sleep for the eight people on the Ark. It was a year of pure devotion to thousands of creatures - four men and four unnamed women feeding, cleaning, smelling, hearing animals of every description. Of all of G-d's attributes, the one we can most readily emulate, and which brings us closest to G-d, is unstinting kindness and giving. Indeed, some of the rabbis claim that this single redeeming merit of kindness to the animals led G-d to remember Noach's family and the animals, and to cause the flood to ebb.

G-d's symbol of the new covenant which is now sealed with humanity is the rainbow. We are told by the rabbis that the rainbow had always existed, since Creation; only now G-d gives it new significance, teaches Noach and his descendents to see it as a symbol of this relationship. Perhaps the meaning here is that we must renew our appreciation of the irreplaceable beauty of Creation. God's covenant need not be sealed by a new symbol - as Proust reminds us, the real journey of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing the extraordinary ones we already have with new eyes. Nature's magnificence should be evidence enough of G-d's covenant, if we can only see it.

The balance of nature comes back into focus after the flood's destruction, but it has changed. There is a new mutual understanding between G-d and man, an acceptance that humans have an innate capacity for chamas, for evil, but that it must be controlled and managed. G-d's bargain is that Noach and his descendants shall "be fertile and multiply" and shall rule humanely over the animal kingdom, but only on condition that a rule of law and value for human life shall also prevail. It is this condition that Noach is about to violate.

His behavior on returning to everyday life was ugly. He still had no concept of the innate value, the potential for redemption, in every human life. His first act was profane: he planted a vineyard and made himself drunk. He "uncovered himself" in his tent, and his son Ham "saw his father's nakedness" and told his brothers. The two other sons managed to cover their father's nakedness without viewing his humiliation directly and Noach responds with a curse upon Ham's son Canaan, raging that he shall be "a slave of slaves" to his brothers.

We are left, in our final glimpse of Noach, with a sad portrait of a man who was obedient, whose righteousness saved G-d's creation, and who was able to give care to animals, when locked in a floating zoo with them; but he never did understand the value of a human being. He did not argue with G-d when told that all humanity was about to die; and he closed his life with an ugly act of drunken folly and savage revenge on an innocent grandchild.

Noach came to maturity in a time of terrible evil and lawlessness. He was mocked and jeered by his society, and then subjected to an unimaginable experience of storm, destruction, death, and a year of imprisonment in a floating world of animals. In Noach, we see that those who are brutalized and traumatized may well brutalize and traumatize in their turn, and that we - like Noach's sons Shem and Yapheth, who covered their father without witnessing his nakedness - must shelter our fellow creatures from the humiliation of their own frailties.

The message of this parasha comes to its full conclusion in its final section - one which may seem incongruent at first.

We might hope that Noach's descendents would have learned from Noach's abuse of the earth and its fruits, his drunkenness and its ugly aftermath, would live their lives in the balance of nature which G-d restored after the flood. Instead, they build a tower of Babel, an edifice of worship of technology and civilization. G-d's covenant, symbolized by the rainbow, is forgotten; mankind now seeks to compete with G-d, to build a tower reaching past the rainbow and into the heavens.

What is particularly important about this is G-d's response. In response to mankind's pillage of the earth and violence inflicted upon each other, G-d destroys humanity. But when men challenge G-d, building their tower into the heavens, G-d merely interferes with the building project by confusing their languages, splintering them into seventy nations. I infer from this that G-d is enraged by our disregard for each other and for nature - so enraged (to use a human emotion to characterize G-d) as to invoke that same violence, that chamas, to destroy the offenders. But if mankind merely threatens G-d, we may almost say that G-d "can take it," merely gestures perhaps more in sorrow than in anger and fractures mankind's communications and civilization to prevent such an intrusion where humans do not belong. G-d's own sanctity is not threatened by humanity's chutzpah.

In the haftarah, Isaiah quotes G-d speaking to Israel in Babylonian exile, "In slight anger, for a moment, I hid my face from you, but with kindness everlasting, I will take you back in love, as I swore that the waters of Noach nevermore would flood the earth." On reading Noach, let us take away that single profound thought: humanity's redemption will be in God's "kindness everlasting," if we can find that kindness in ourselves for our fellow creatures.

This is such a powerful statement as we reflect on our responsibilities to our world. We must focus our energies, our resources, on mankind's relationship with all of humanity and all of nature. Our paramount responsibility is to repair, to nurture our world. To genuinely see our rainbows, to understand their significance. To learn unstinting kindness, to give of ourselves to those who are like us, and perhaps even more to those who are not - to seek out and find, and to champion the righteous among us. To generously understand that those who are brutalized victims may tend to brutalize in their turn, and must be generously aided.

G-d can handle challenges to G-d's authority, and let us leave that task to G-d.

G-d cannot protect the fragile creation of Bereishit unless we participate vigorously in its defense.

Let us close with the blessing we are taught to utter upon seeing a rainbow, "Baruch atah adonai, elohenu melech ha-olam, zocher ha'vrit v'ne-eman bi-vitro vkayom b'ma'amaro." Blessed is our G-d who remembers the covenant and faithfully keeps G-d's promise.

May we keep ours as well.

Judy E. Gross, D'var Torah for October 27, 1995

Everybody knows the story of Noah. It is a beautiful story. The wickedness of man was so great that God decided to destroy the whole world. But in his mercy, God saves the righteous man, Noah, his family, and representatives of every kind of animal on earth. Not only does God tell Noah how to build the ark to save life, after all the people and animals are on the ark and the deluge has begun, God closes up the ark to make sure they are safe. The ark floats upon the water until the Flood had lasted its ordained period. Then the breath of God -- the same breath that created the world and brought life to Adam -- separated the Flood waters and dried the land. And we cannot forget the animals; you know, the animals coming onto the ark, fourteen of each kind of the clean animals and two of each kind of the unclean animals.

We generally do not read the story of Noah carefully. I always am amazed that people think that two of each kind of animal got onto the ark as stated in Genesis 6:19-20, and seldom or never note the contradictory instruction in Genesis 7:2. That is not the only inconsistency in the rather short story of Noah. It is not clear how long the flood lasted, why Noah sent out a dove to look for land when a raven was flying around with the same task, or even whether Ham was his middle or youngest son. These are only some of the problems within one translation; the problems multiply with different translations or if one wonders where the dove got the olive twig if, except for occupants of the ark, every living thing on earth had been destroyed. Nevertheless, I believe we can answer our most basic questions about life by studying the stories carefully and paying attention to the contradictions.

By the way, these contradictions aren't things I just noticed. People have argued about them literally for millennia. Until about the past hundred years, people, accepting that God dictated the Torah to Moses, ingeniously explained away the contradictions. More recently, the predominant theory has been that there are at least two stories of Noah, written at very different times, intertwined in the various redactions of the Torah. Although the same process applied to all parts of the Bible, the inconsistencies seem more glaring in Noah than in most other stories. Both Plaut's Commentary on the Torah (The Torah: A Modern Commentary, pp.62-63) and Richard Elliot Friedman's wonderful book Who Wrote the Bible? are good sources to study the separate stories of Noah.

So, why were the contradictions allowed to remain in the Torah? Perhaps the redactors did not want to delete any part of two separate sacred traditions, although other sections of the Torah seem to be abbreviated versions of other ancient sacred traditions. Moreover, some sacred traditions of the ancient Jews were lost or otherwise entirely omitted from the Biblical cannon. And, one might ask, what does the fact that there are multiple stories of Noah have to do with Reform Judaism? My answer is that both the contradictions and the actual substance of the Noah story offer important insights about the source of authority in Judaism.

Arguments about how to interpret the stories of Noah and other parts of the Torah continue because there is no final, authoritative Jewish interpretation of any of the stories; in fact, Jewish tradition explicitly permits and encourages multiple interpretations. Even at the time that the Bible was being canonized (about 100 C.E.), Rabbi Akiba stated that there are seventy ways to interpret Torah. The rabbis recognized that over time, people would discover new meanings of the Torah, so no one person could claim the definitive interpretation of sacred texts. Even a limited study of Talmud makes this lack of final authority obvious, with numerous disputes about Torah and points of law appearing on every page, representing hundreds of years of controversy. Some of the best known sections of Talmud are the disputes between Hillel and Shammai, who took opposite sides of every point under discussion. Both are revered as great teachers, and their argument was recorded so that later students would learn both positions. Apparently, both were right, for the Talmud summarizes their arguments: "These, too, are the words of the Living God." ( quoted in Where Are We?: The Inner Life of America's Jews by Leonard J. Fein, Harper and Row, 1988). I do not mean to imply that the Talmudic rabbis thought all interpretations of Torah were equally authoritative, but they believed that everyone had the obligation to study Torah and try to understand its precepts.

To me, this is the essence of Reform Judaism: we, each of us for ourselves, must study Torah - and Talmud and other historical texts, to answer for ourselves the big questions -- What is the meaning of life, what is true, right, and good, and what is our relationship with and obligations to ourselves, the Jewish community, the world, and God? But the Torah is an ancient, complicated book containing contradictions and ambiguities. We cannot just skim the stories and find Truth. Moreover, we can't just turn to a pope, the Talmud, or a rule book, or halaka, or our rabbi to tell us what to do; we must each think and decide for ourselves. This does not mean that we are free to ignore the questions or the answers that we honestly derive - and it doesn't count to just look up a quote to justify whatever action we already intended to take. The Bible is not Bartlett's. Nor are we free to ignore tradition; it would be extremely foolish to dump thousands of years of wisdom. It is equally foolish to ignore our own rabbis, modern scholars, or our own experience. We should use all available resources to find Jewish answers to our questions.

Let's get back to Noah. To me, the lessons of the story do not depend upon its truth - it really doesn't matter whether the whole world was submerged when the windows of heaven opened or whether one flood in Mesopotamia inspired the story. It doesn't matter that the story reworked the themes of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic. Given the obvious contradictions in the text, I don't even think that it was necessarily important to the writers or redactors that it be true. What makes the story important is that it gives us a Jewish way to think about God and the questions of existence.

We learn that human beings have free will, both to do wrong and merit destruction or to do right, to act to save life and to be responsible for their own salvation. God chose Noah to survive because Noah was good, but it is important to note that Noah was otherwise an ordinary person; he was not a god, a king, or even a hero. God told Noah to build an ark, how to make it, and what to put on it, but God did not build the ark for Noah or gather the food needed for survival. The ark Noah built could not be controlled by its occupants, so their survival did not depend solely upon their efforts. Their efforts would have been in vain without God's instructions or for that matter, if the Flood had outlasted their food. But nothing would have survived the Flood if Noah had not acted. Ordinary people must choose to act -- when they do, their behavior can change the world.

Another lesson is the one that God Himself learned: it is wrong to destroy the earth. God regretted His action and in at least one version of the story, promised never to destroy it again (the other version merely promises that it won't be a flood the next time). In fact, in the next story after the Flood, the Tower of Babel, all people sin, but the punishment is a confusion of languages, not death. We, like God, can learn from our mistakes and do better next time. Note that God apparently sides with the Endangered Species Act; at least a pair of all animals, clean or unclean, ugly or pretty, useful or not, snail darter or spotted owl, were on the ark. (Well, not snail darters; fish were apparently not on the ark). We have an obligation to prevent extinction of any form of life.

The Noah stories also make clear that no-one is or can be perfect. Noah is righteous in his generation and walked with God -- and Noah walked off the ark, planted a vineyard, and got drunk. Then, while Noah was in a drunken stupor, his son, Ham, uncovered Noah's nakedness (the meaning of which has occupied many a rabbinic mind). When Noah discovered Ham's sin, he cursed not Ham , but Ham's son. Rabinnic authorities considered both of these actions to be Noah's sins. But even before these sins, God concluded that the "devisings of man's mind are evil from his youth" (Gen. 8:21). There was no point in destroying all people to root out evil; man and woman are made in God's image, but they are not God. Sometime people will exercise free will to do wrong. Moreover, we are not free to rely on Cohens or Levis for holiness -- or descendants of famous rabbis either. Noah arguably was as close to perfect as people get, but his son, Ham, sinned. Perfection is not genetically assured.

Perhaps the most important lesson from Noah is that although we each must interpret the stories and find our own answers, not all possible answers are equally correct. Truth, good, and justice are not relative. God judged the world and Noah according to God's standard, not according to the thoughts or intentions of the peoples of the earth. Even God in the Bible is subject to these same standards. When Abraham later asks "Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?" (Gen. 18:25), we know the answer is "Yes." We each must find our own path to that truth. We Jews have the incredible gift of Torah to use as our map of those paths. Please note, however, that reading that map requires analysis of right and wrong. Merely because something is reported in the Bible does not make it right. The most obvious example involves Noah's failure to act, which revealed man's evil nature to God. The Zohar, written in the thirteenth century, beautifully explains Noah's sin:


When Noah came out of the ark 
he opened his eyes and saw the whole world completely destroyed. 
He began crying for the world and said 
"Master of the world! 
If you destroyed your world because of human sin or human fools, 
then why did You create them? One or the other you should do: 
either do not create the human being 
or do not destroy the world!" 
[Noah continues:]"You are called Compassionate! 
You should have shown compassion for Your creatures!" 

The Blessed Holy One answered him, "Foolish shepherd! 
Now you say this, but not when I spoke to you tenderly [about making 
an ark to save your family].... 
I lingered with you and spoke to you at length 
so that you would ask for mercy for the world! 
But as soon as you heard that you would be safe in the ark, 
the evil of the world did not touch your heart. 
You built the ark and saved yourself. 
Now that the world has been destroyed 
you open your mouth to utter questions and pleas?"

The Zohar points out that Abraham argued with God to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if just ten innocent people could be found; Moses pledged his life for the people of Israel to save them after they built the golden calf. The Zohar continues:

So all the righteous heroes shielded their generations.... 
And Noah? 
The Blessed Holy One lingered with him and spoke many words to him; 
perhaps, he would ask for mercy for his generation. 
But he did not care and did not ask for mercy. 
He just built the ark 
and the whole world was destroyed. 
(Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment, translated by Daniel Matt) 

Like Jacob who became Israel, we must struggle with God and with Torah. One more quote, this one from Hillel: "Now, go and study."