Noach Genesis 6:9 - 11:32

CHEVROLET

We expect to read next that Noah emerges. Instead the narrative slows down and for fourteen verses almost nothing happens. The water recedes. The ark comes to rest. Noah opens a window and sends out a raven. Then he sends out a dove. He waits seven days and sends it out again. It returns with an olive leaf. Another seven days pass. He sends the dove a third time. This time it does not return, but Noah still does not step out onto dry land. Eventually God Himself says, “Come out of the ark.” Only then does Noah do so. The midrash is unmistakable in its note of exasperation. When it comes to rebuilding a shattered world, you do not wait for permission.”

What does Noah say to God when the decree is issued that the world is about to perish? What does he say when he is told to make an ark to save himself and his family? What does he say as the rain begins to fall? The answer is: nothing. During the whole sequence of events, Noah is not reported as saying a single word. Instead we read, four times, of his silent obedience: “Noah did everything just as God had commanded him” (6:22); “And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him” (7:5); He brought pairs of animals into the ark “as God had commanded Noah” (7:9, 16). Noah is the paradigm of biblical obedience. He does as he is commanded. What his story tells us is that obedience is not enough.”

This is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is reasonable to assume that in the life of faith, obedience is the highest virtue. In Judaism it is not. One of the strangest features of biblical Hebrew is that – despite the fact that the Torah contains 613 commands – there is no word for “obey.” Instead the verb the Torah uses is shema / lishmoa, “to listen, hear, attend, understand, internalise, respond.”

“Noah’s end – drunk, dishevelled, an embarrassment to his children – eloquently tells us that if you save yourself while doing nothing to save the world, you do not even save yourself. Noah, so the narrative seems to suggest, could not live with the guilt of survival.

The difference between Noah and Abraham is eloquently summarised by the midrashic comment of Rabbi Yehudah:

“Noah walked with God” – The meaning of this phrase can be understood by a parable. A king had two sons, one grown up, the other a child. To the child, he said: Walk with me. But to the adult son he said: Walk before me.

So it was that to Abraham, God said: “Because you are wholehearted, walk before Me” (17:1). But of Noah, the Torah says that he “walked with God.” (6:9)4”

“Essentially these towers – of which the remains of at least thirty have been discovered – were man-made “holy mountains,” the mountain being the place where heaven and earth most visibly meet.”

“Not only is the story of Babel historically precise, it is also shot through with literary devices: inversions, word plays, ironies and puns. One of the most masterly is that the two key words, l-v-n, “brick,” and n-v-l, “confuse,” are precise inversions of one another. As so often in the Torah, literary technique is closely related to the moral or spiritual message being conveyed. In this case the word play draws attention to the phenomenon of inversion itself. The results of human behaviour are often the opposite of what was intended. The builders wanted to concentrate humanity in one place: “Let us build a city…and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (11:4). The result was that they were dispersed: “from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth” (11:8). They wanted to “make a name” (11:4) for themselves, and they did, but the name they made – Babel – became an eternal symbol of confusion.”

“With great poetic justice, it was not a technical problem that caused the builders to abandon the project, but rather the loss of the ability to communicate.”

“For the most part, the ancients saw the world as a perilous and threatening place, full of dangers, disasters, famines and floods. There was no overarching meaning to any of it. It was the result of clashing powers, personified as conflicts between the gods. Religion was either an attempt to assert human power over the elements through magic and myth, or a mystical escape from the world into a private nirvana of the soul. Against this, Judaism made the astonishing assertion that the world is good. It is intelligible. It is the result not of blind collisions and random mutations but of a single creative will. This alone is enough to set Judaism apart as the most hopeful of the world’s faiths.”

“The prisoner’s dilemma suggested an answer. Individual self-interest often produces bad results. Any group which learns to cooperate, instead of compete, will be at an advantage relative to others. But, as the prisoner’s dilemma demonstrates, repeated encounters are needed for such cooperation to develop – the so-called “Iterated (= repeated) Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

“The extraordinary fact is that the first moral principle set out in the Torah is also the first moral principle ever to be scientifically demonstrated. Tit-for-Tat is the computer equivalent of (retributive) justice: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”

“Thus the two great principles of the Noahide covenant are also the first two principles to have been established by computer simulation. There is an objective basis for morality after all. It rests on two key ideas: justice and forgiveness, or what the sages called middat haDin and middat rahamim. Without these, no group can survive in the long run.”

“Faced with primal failure, the man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent. Both deny personal responsibility: it wasn’t me; it wasn’t my fault. This is the birth of what today is called the victim culture.”

“Once again the theme is responsibility, but in a different sense. Cain does not deny personal responsibility. He does not say, “It wasn’t me.” He denies moral responsibility. “I am not my brother’s keeper.” I am not responsible for his safety. Yes, I did it because I felt like it. Cain has not yet learned the difference between “I can” and “I may.”

“We have to do what we can to save others, not just ourselves. Noah failed the test of collective responsibility.”

“By attempting to build a tower that would “reach heaven,” the builders of Babel were men trying to be like gods.

This story seems to have little to do with responsibility, and to be focusing on a different issue than do the first three. However, not accidentally does the word responsibility suggest response-ability. The Hebrew equivalent, aḥrayut, comes from the word aḥer, meaning “an other.” Responsibility is always a response to something or someone. In Judaism, it means response to the command of God. By attempting to reach heaven, the builders of Babel were in effect saying: we are going to take the place of God. We are not going to respond to His law or respect His boundaries, not going to accept His Otherness. We are going to create an environment where we rule, not Him, where the Other is replaced by Self. Babel is the failure of ontological responsibility – the idea that something beyond us makes a call on us”

“What we see in Genesis 1–11 is an exceptionally tightly constructed four-act drama on the theme of responsibility and moral development, presenting the maturation of humanity, as echoing the maturation of the individual. The first thing we learn as children is that our acts are under our control (personal responsibility). The next is that not everything we can do, we may do (moral responsibility). The next stage is the realization that we have a duty not just to ourselves but to those on whom we have an influence (collective responsibility). Ultimately we learn that morality is not a mere human convention, but is written into the structure of existence. There is an Author of being, therefore there is an Authority beyond mankind to whom, when acting morally, we respond (ontological responsibility).”

Excerpt From

Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

Jonathan Sacks

“According to rabbinic legend, Naamah is the name of Noah’s wife. Interestingly, the original location for Naamah as the name of Noah’s wife is not in Parashat Noach, but in the previous portion, Bereshit. At the end of a list of the descendants of Cain, Naamah is mentioned as the sister of Tubal-cain (Gen. 4:22).”

Excerpt From

The Women's Torah Commentary

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

In other words, the moral of the stories—the reason for telling them—is different in each case. The P-teller’s story concludes that human violence is evil, and evil must always be punished. After the evil is punished, the world can go on and multiply and be plentiful again. The J-teller’s story explains how Adonai discovered that people will always be both good and evil.”

Excerpt From

The Torah: Portion-by-Portion

Seymour Rossel

“The text wants us to know that human nature has not changed after the flood—nor, seemingly, will it in any eon we could recognize. What has changed after the flood is not human nature but God’s attitude toward it. The very same shortcomings that had called forth doom and denunciation now elicit forbearance and generosity instead. Judgment gives way to mercy, condemnation to compassion. The crucial lesson is that the same attribute that we see as cause for reproach can often serve as a basis for forgiveness as well; this seems to be what God learns after the flood, and, as we shall see, it is something we should learn as well.”

“God’s foundational blessing, coupled with God’s interruption of the builders’ plans, may offer us a first glimpse of what’s wrong with their behavior. God had made it clear that the divine vision is for humanity to spread out and fill the earth, yet the builders want to stay put, to congregate in one place. In fact their resistance to God’s blessing is clear: They explicitly declare their intention to build their city, and the tower within it, out of fear “lest we be scattered all over the world” (Gen. 11:4). What they most fear is what God most wants. God’s “punishment,” then, may not ultimately be a punishment at all, but a reaffirmation of the initial divine blessing in the face of human refusal and obstruction. What this story ends with, then, is not just judgment but also, and primarily, “an enforced return to the path of blessing.”

Excerpt From

The Heart of Torah, Volume 1

Shai Held

“As Kaplan so poignantly taught, the road to the “impossible” is through the “possible.” He understood that great breakthroughs in the human drama often materialize because at crucial historical moments, the individuals who do what they can to make a difference end up transforming the world. Like Noah, their acts of doing the possible end up achieving the impossible: even saving the world for future generations.”

“Kaplan reminds us that we can all make a difference in the world by simply embracing what is within our reach and following it through, one step at a time. And when all is said and done, perhaps one day we will wake up to discover that we have succeeded far beyond our wildest imaginings.”

Excerpt From

A Year with Mordecai Kaplan

Steven Carr Reuben

The book of Genesis is thus, in more senses than one, a primary source for Jewish theology. It presents its ideas on the relationship of God to nature, to humanity in general, and to the people Israel in particular in ways that are, however, foreign to the expectations of most modern readers. It is therefore all too easy to miss the seriousness and profundity of its messages. For the vehicle through which Genesis conveys its worldview is neither the theological tract nor the rigorous philosophical proof nor the confession of faith. That vehicle is, rather, narrative. The theology must be inferred from stories, and the lived relationship with God takes precedence over abstract theology. Those who think of stories (including mythology) as fit only for children not only misunderstand the thought-world and the literary conventions of the ancient Near East; they also condemn themselves to miss the complexity and sophistication of the stories of Genesis. For these are narratives that have evoked interpretation upon interpretation from biblical times into our own day and have occupied the attention of some of the keenest thinkers in human history.”

“One aspect of narrative in Genesis that requires special attention is its high tolerance for different versions of the same event, a well-known feature of ancient Near Eastern literature, from earliest times through rabbinic midrash. The book presents, for example, two accounts of Abram/Abraham’s attempting to pass his wife off as his sister (12.10–20; 20.1–18; cf. 26.1–11, where Isaac does the same), two accounts of God’s making a covenant with him (ch 15 and 17), and two accounts of how Jacob’s name was changed to Israel (32.23–33; 35.9–15). In these instances, most modern biblical scholars see different antecedent documents that editors (known as redactors or compilers) have combined to give us the text now in our hands. This could not have happened, however, if the existence of variation was seen as a serious defect or if rigid consistency was deemed essential to effective storytelling. Rather, the redactors have chosen a different approach, retaining variant versions and treating them as sequential events in the same longer story. The result is a certain measure of repetition, to be sure, but the repetition is in the service of a sophisticated presentation of themes with variations[…]”

“The book is composed of four major sections: 1.1–11.25, the primeval story; 11.26–25.18, the story of Abraham; 25.19–36.43, the Jacob cycle; and 37.1–50.26, the story of Joseph. (There is little independent narrative about Isaac, the second patriarch.)”

The first section, the primeval story, takes us from the creation of the world through the birth of Abram’s father nineteen generations later.

“There is, however, an overriding theme: the spread of human wickedness, the refusal of humankind to accept their creaturely status, as they seek to blur the all-important boundary between the human and the divine and, as a result, bring catastrophe upon themselves. The center of attention is God, who is portrayed rather anthropomorphically and speaks directly and frequently to human beings, condemning or sparing, announcing His judgment or His merciful forbearance.”

2nd Abraham

“Whereas God’s relationship to human beings in the primeval story is marked mostly (but not exclusively) by judgment, expulsion, and exile, in the story of Abraham the dominant notes are the contrasting ones of blessing and promise, especially the promise of the land and of progeny.”

Excerpt From

The Jewish Study Bible

Adele Berlin & Marc Zvi Brettler

God decides to cause a flood that will destroy the world, sparing only Noah's family and the animals that Noah gathers together on the ark. (6:9-8:22)

Life starts over again after the Flood. The Noahide Commandments are listed, and God uses a rainbow to make a symbol of the first covenant. (9:1-17)

People start to build a city and the Tower of Babel. God scatters the people and gives them different languages to speak. (11:1-9)

The ten generations from Noah to Abram are listed. (11:10-29:2)

The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. Genesis 6:11

base form of hatred and depravity. The 11th-century Egyptian commentator Ibn Ezra says that this word describes two crimes in particular: theft and the exploitation and rape of women.

Chizkuni goes on to detail the type of theft that pervaded the earth before the flood. It wasn’t merely theft in general, but a specific type of theft that undermined faith in the legal system. According to Chizkuni, stealing more than one small unit of currency known as a p’rutah was understood to be a simple and straightforward form of theft, known in Hebrew as gezel. But chamas describes a more nefarious and strategic form of theft in which people would steal slightly less than a p’rutah to escape punishment. He explains this kind of behavior through a specific example:

Human societies, filled with imperfect people, will always include individuals who do wrong. But the kinds of sins that lead to existential threats are those that undermine basic human dignity and public confidence in the proper functioning of the law. Parashat Noach should give us pause when we are inclined to game the system for ephemeral personal gain or attack the dignity of others for temporary personal pleasure. A world worthy of an eternal covenant with God is one led by leaders who model the best of who we can be, and composed of societies that are steadfast in safeguarding the dignity of its members and the moral claims of its legal system.

And remembering is really what a rainbow is about, at least for God. After the flood, God establishes a covenant with Noah and sets the rainbow as a sign of this covenant “between Me and the earth” (Gen. 9:13), says God:

When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. (Gen. 9:14-15)

Within Jewish tradition, it is not unity and monolithic uniformity which are our desideratum, but rather respect for diversity, and the ability to harness multiplicity in order to find the best ways – emphasis on the plural – to navigate the very complex reality in which God has placed us!