Noach 2020 - The Flood - The Drunkenness of

The very notion of a deluge of cataclysmic proportions raises the question as to the origin and historical setting of the narrative.

It is unlikely that the topography of the Land of Israel, a hill country with a dry climate, could serve as the source of inspiration. No accumulation of clay deposits, the telltale evidence of extensive flooding, has been uncover in excavations there. … Mesopotamia, on the other hand, supplies a natural locale for a flood tradition.

It is safe to conclude that the parallels between the biblical account of the Flood and the Mesopotamian stories, being so numerous and detailed are more than the result of mere coincidence. …

In the Bible, the Flood is a climatic turning point in a larger history of humankind. … The identical situations present in the Sumerian stories. … A crucial point of departure by the Bible is the deliberate divine decision to save the hero … in the Mesopotamian tales, humanity was supposed to have been completely wiped out; the rescue of the hero occurs inadvertently by dint of the subterfuge of one of the gods.

In the Atrahasis story the flood is the gods’ solution to the tumult of mankind, which increasingly disturbs them. In Genesis, the Flood is God’s response to the pollution of the earth by the moral corruption of the human race. -Sarna. JPS Commentary pp. 48-49

In his generation, R. Yohanan pointed out, but not in other generations. However according to Resh Lakish, the verse intimates that even in his generation Noah was a righteous man, all the more so in other generations.

R. Hanina said: R Yohanan’s view may be illustrated by the parable of a jar of wine stored in a cellar filled with jars of vinegar. In such a place, the fragrance of the wine is sensed (because of the vinegar’s fumes) in any other place the fragrance might not be sensed.

R. Oshaia said: Resh Lakish’s view may be illustrated by a vial of (fragrant) spikenard oil lying in excrement; its fragrance is sensed in such surroundings, how much more so amid spices. –Genesis Rabbah

What was their “corruption” and “lawlessness”? The people of that generation said: “For what reason do we need God? . . . We have no need of rain. We get an abundant supply of water from other sources, from all the streams and wells of the earth.” (Sanhedrin 108a)

A man would take two wives—one for childbearing, the other for pleasure. (Midrash ha-Gadol 10:5) They exchanged wives. (Genesis Rabbah 23:3)

When a person brought a basket full of peas to the marketplace, he would be surrounded by a group of people. Each would steal an amount worth less than a pruta (so small an amount that it was not considered a punishable offense). But soon the basket would be empty. The victim would be unable to present his case to a judge because each thief had cleverly taken less than the amount that was punishable by law. (Genesis Rabbah 31:50)

They removed the landmarks of their neighbors in order to extend their borders. If someone saw an ox or a donkey in the hands of an orphan or widow, he took it away. (Midrash Tanchuma, Noach 26) -Fields, A Torah Commentary for Our Times

Habakkuk 2:15 and Lamentations 4:21 also mention exposure of nakedness by the inebriated. The act is associated with shame and with loss of human dignity, as Genesis 37,21 make clear. -Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary

The Hebrew word for “saw” used here, ba-yar, appears only twice in the Torah, once here and once in “When Moses was grown, he went out to his brethren, and saw their burdens” (Ex. 2:11). He saw their burdens, even though they were sunk into the lowest levels of depravity, where as our Sages tell us, both the Egyptians and the Israelites were idolaters. Yet in spite of this, Moses saw their suffering and their burdens. But with Ham, the exact opposite was true – even though Noah was a righteous and perfect man, Ham did not see his father’s righteousness and his good deeds, but all he saw was his father’s nakedness. Quoted from a Certain Great Sage – Torah Gems

– Cursed is Canaan. Ham sinned and Canaan is cursed! R’ Yehudah explains that God had already blessed Noah and his sons, and there cannot be a curse where a blessing had been given. Therefore Noah cursed his grandson, who, as noted above, was deeply involved in the humiliating incident. R’ Nechemiah follows the view cited above that Canaan bore responsibility because he instigated the tragedy (Midrash).

Noah foresaw that Canaan’s descendants would always be wicked and morally degraded; thus we find the Patriarchs scrupulously avoiding marriage with the accursed Canaanites (Radak). -Artscroll

The text is silent as to why Canaan, not Ham, is cursed. Saadia and Ibn Jana}) construe it to mean "Cursed be [the father of] Canaan," a phrase that has already appeared twice in this brief narrative. A reasonable assumption would be that in the fuller story Canaan, son of Ham, was a participant in the offense against Noah, a detail omitted here on grounds of delicacy and on the assumption that the original story was well known to the reader. -Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary

ותלד הבכירה בן ותקרא שמו מואב, “the older one gave birth to a son whom she called Moav (from the father).” Our sages say: “do not read this name as מואב, but as מאב, “from the father.” The naming of the baby was certainly not a chaste thing to do. The younger daughter, by contrast, displayed more discretion when she named her son בן עמי, “a member of my people.”

Our sages in Horiot 10 taught that G’d does not withhold a reward even for such minor things as appropriate conversational expressions. When G’d told Moses not to harass either Moav or Ammon, He used different terms for the type of harassment the Israelites were not allowed to employ. In the case of Moav (Deut. 2,9), G’d said אל תצר את מואב ואל תתגר בם מלחמה “do not harass Moav and do not provoke them into war,” whereas in the case of the בני עמון G’d said: אל תצורם ואל תתגר בם “do not harass them or start a fight with them (Deut. 2,19).” The latter were not to be harassed in any shape or form by the Israelites. This added prohibition was the way G’d rewarded their ancestral mother for employing discreet language when naming her son. -Rabbeinu Bahya

EMERGING FROM A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE

We all find it difficult to acknowledge how deeply ingrained violence is in our culture. How do we account for our concurrent fear of violence and insatiable appetite for it? We will cross the street to avoid a threatening person leaning against a lamppost—and then stop at the corner video store to pick up our nightly ration of slickly packaged violence. Do we really believe that television would be so clogged with tales of violence—real and fictional—if something within us didn’t clamor for them so insistently?

Humankind has made many impressive advances in the millennia since the biblical era. We’ve cured diseases, lowered infant mortality, and more than doubled the average human life span. But the deadliest affliction of humankind—violence—has only grown worse with the passage of time. From our city streets to outer space, the entire planet bristles with armaments. The very survival of the earth hangs in the balance. To quote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.”

The story of the Flood sounds an urgent alarm at the fragility of the earth, and it reminds us of our individual responsibility and potential for becoming an island of rescue in a sea of violence. The child in us would like to believe that the protective powers of a rainbow will shield us from our violent nature. But an adult reading of the Flood commands us to subdue the violence in our midst. The Flood should not be read as a story of natural calamity or the wrath of God. Rather, it tells us that human violence and lawlessness, if allowed to continue unabated, will eventually drown us all. We need only look back to the 1940s to find a time when virtually the whole world was submerged in violence. And in every decade since then, whole countries have been buried beneath uncontrolled spasms of self-destruction.

The Bible takes a very realistic view of humankind’s violent nature. At the end of the Flood story, God comes to a sobering realization about the human beings He created in His own image. Even the best of them will always embody a mixture of good and evil impulses. He accepts this inescapable truth while acknowledging that humans remain the only partners He has, His only hope to repair and preserve His creation. The world will survive or be destroyed according to their deeds.

But Genesis resists pessimism by encouraging us to recognize evil in the world and in ourselves and to use our God-given free will to subdue it. After the Flood has subsided, God renews His call for humankind to preserve His creation and offers the rainbow as a symbol of the eternal covenant of preservation between God and humanity. . –Wrestling With Angels: What Genesis Teaches Us About Our Spiritual Identity, Sexuality and Personal Relationships. Naomi Rosenblatt

Zachor: Why Jewish Memory Matters

The Jewish past is not merely remembered, but continuously re-enacted.

By Avinoam Patt

Judaism is a religion built on a foundation of memory. In his masterwork on the subject, “Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” the historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi notes that the Hebrew word for remember — zachor — is repeated nearly 200 times in the Hebrew Bible, with both Israel and God commanded to remember: to remember the Sabbath, to remember the covenant, to remember the exodus from Egypt. As Yerushalmi suggests, one might argue that the commandment to remember has been central to the survival of the Jews in dispersion over thousands of years. How else can we explain the continuity of the Jewish people through millennia of migration, persecution, destruction, and renewal?

On the Sabbath before Purim — appropriately named Shabbat Zachor — the Torah reading includes the following verses:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt. How, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!Deuteronomy 25:17-19

The commandment to remember Amalek in Deuteronomy is in fact the second time this tale is recounted. In Exodus, God tells Moses to write a document as a reminder of His promise to wipe out Amalek. This is the first reference in the Torah to the act of memorial writing.

The explicit implication here is that the act of writing and reciting, recording history and recounting it verbally, will blot out the memory of Amalek, even though every generation will be forced to confront Amalek again and again. Saul and Samuel battle the Amalekites and King Agag, as described in the Book of Samuel (also read on Shabbat Zachor). Later in Jewish history, we learn in the Book of Esther that Haman, a descendant of Agag, set out to destroy the Jewish people. During and after the Holocaust, comparisons between Hitler and Haman were commonplace.

Remembrance has taken on new implications in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The commandments to remember and bear witness have been integrated into modern Jewish observance through holidays like Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) and Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day). Indeed, the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Portrait of Jewish Americans found that 73 percent of Jewish Americans found “remembering the Holocaust” to be an essential part of Jewish identity, more than any other response.

Zachor — in both the context of Amalek and the Holocaust — reinforces the importance of the victim’s voice and the role of the persecuted in recording their history both during and after collective trauma. This act of remembrance has not only historical and ethical value, but is of great psychological importance, too.

But remembrance in Judaism does not only refer to historical events. Zachor also serves as a reminder of God’s covenant with Abraham and the Jewish people. As part of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, the rabbis made the theme of zichronot part of the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading, which recounts God’s remembering Sarah with the birth of Isaac. And in the Rosh Hashanah musaf service, zichronot is one of the three main themes (the other two being shofarot and malchuyot).

On Rosh Hashanah, the blowing of the shofar connects memory and observance. Blowing the shofar is a reminder of the covenant at Mount Sinai and the patriarchs. In the same way, on Shabbat, observance and remembrance (shamor v’zachor in Hebrew) become interconnected as one utterance in the Lecha Dodi prayer.

Performance of the commandments is thus a tool of memory. Every single Shabbat is a memory of two great events in Jewish history: creation and the exodus. What happened when the Jewish people were remembered by God and left Egypt? They became a nation, and in gaining freedom gained control over time.

History for the Jewish people is not merely the duty of scholars or a religious elite. The injunction to remember is a religious imperative that falls on everyone. It is this internalization of history that led the rabbis to say (as repeated in the Passover Haggadah): “In each generation, every person should see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt.” Zachor brings the past into the present and forward into the future.

As former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sacks has observed:

There is no sense in Judaism of the atomic individual – the self in and for itself – we encounter in Western philosophy from Hobbes onwards. Instead, our identity is bound up horizontally with other individuals: our parents, spouse, children, neighbors, members of the community, fellow citizens, fellow Jews. We are also joined vertically to those who came before us, whose story we make our own. To be a Jew is to be a link in the chain of the generations, a character in a drama that began long before we were born and will continue long after our death. Memory is essential to identity – so Judaism insists … To be a Jew is to know that the history of our people lives on in us.

The performance of memory — through deeds, actions, and speech — assists in the process of not forgetting. The act of writing, recording, and performing the events after they have transpired also ensures that zachor — as performed collective memory that transcends the individual’s perception of the present and binds Jews to previous generations — remains a central part of Judaism in the past, present, and future.

Avinoam Patt is an associate professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford and director of the school’s Museum of Jewish Civilization. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/zachor-why-jewish-memory-matters/