Noah

All Class of 2026 Senior Sermons

In the Talmud (), Rabbi Yohanan teaches that animals prior to the flood were mating not only across species but also across genera, and that humans were mating with “everyone.” This interspecies orgy was the “corruption of all flesh” () that caused the Creator to destroy life on earth. The Torah’s orderly procession of animals into the ark “two by two,” emphasizes species differentiation, which the Bible apparently believes to be a priority of the Creator.

God is not alone in valuing species distinction. From early childhood a favorite learning activity for our children is to recognize types of animals, whether at the zoo, in picture books, or with dolls. I believe my daughter’s first “word,” in response to the question, “What does the bee say?” was an emphatic “Bzzz!” Just as God creates the world through a series of differentiations (between light and dark, land and sea, plants and animals, etc.), so too do our minds develop through exercises in differentiation. By sorting through stimuli and noticing patterns, the brain develops into an analytic powerhouse for life.

In its legal sections, the Torah depends upon the physical characteristics of various species to declare some pure, and others impure, with implications for the Israelite diet and sacrificial system. Moreover,  prohibits “mingling” (kilayim) of different species of plants and animals. Nahmanides observes that in creating artificial hybrids, humans undermine the natural order and impute deficiency in the Creator. Rabbinic law applies this ban to the grafting of one plant onto the rootstalk of another, and to the breeding of different animal species together. Mystical texts such as the Zohar see the blending of species as severing a link between heaven and earth, with potentially disastrous results (III: 86b).

What, however, if species distinction is just a crude and inaccurate attempt at freezing a fluid and dynamic reality? What is a species, anyway? That question, so obvious and clear to a child, turns out to be quite complicated for biologists, philosophers, and at least this rabbi. We may say that species are comprised of individuals that can reproduce together in nature, but as Darwin notes in the Origin of Species, hybrids occur naturally among plants and animals of different species. Despite persistent beliefs that hybrids are infertile, Darwin reports that this is just not true. Speciation is not a once and forever demarcation among the “kinds” of animals, but is rather a fluid and constant process of differentiation among organisms. Animals grow apart in their generations, and sometimes they blend back together, as has been observed with the mingling populations of gray wolves and eastern coyotes. Still, the overall effect has been a proliferation of diversity in life and a constant churning as some species grow extinct and others are established.

In the past decade, biologists have rapidly developed the field of epigenetics, studying the role of environment and experience on the development of individuals. DNA essentialism has been exposed as an inaccurate oversimplification. You are not your genes, alone. To define species solely in terms of genetic inheritance is to miss the vast significance of nutrition, nurturing, and general experience in the essence of what makes each “type” of animal distinct. Such experiences affect not only the psychology of individuals, but also some of their physical attributes, and some such modifications may be inherited by the next generation.

Differentiation between species is often a useful exercise, and it is integral to the practice of mitzvot such as the lulav (with its “four species”), and kashrut. The Torah provides “signs” (simanim) for kosher creatures of the land and the sea, and these can be observed whether or not species themselves are a stable and universal phenomenon. The Bible’s recognition of specific species, and its prohibition of hybridization, may reflect a deep concern with the maintenance of order.

Still, there can be too much of a good thing. The Tower of Babel story () may be a parable about the dark side of order. When humans all speak the same language, and cooperate perfectly as a united species, God grows concerned. The Torah doesn’t spell out why, but with our understanding of totalitarianism, we can appreciate the dangers of Bavel. Large groups of people who speak with “one language” and prize their solidarity above other values may come to prey upon outsiders in order to validate their communal value. Perhaps this is why the Torah makes such a point of protecting “the stranger in your midst.” And perhaps this is why in our portion, the Creator decides that it is best for the humans to disperse and diversify. Instead of keeping the human species distinct in one location with one language, God varies their language and scatters them across the earth.

Parashat Noah is the Bible’s story about how civilization developed from a simple society to one that is complex, and from a centralized human settlement to a global presence. While the Creator initially favors order and simplicity, the blessing to “be fruitful and multiply” ultimately requires complexity. For contemporary people too, simplicity can be seductive, but an honest and successful engagement with the world requires exploring it in all of its baffling and beautiful diversity.

This commentary was originally published in 2014.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Torah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (��”l) Hassenfeld.

Parashat Noah provides a genealogy of the descendants of Noah’s sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—who were born after the Flood (Gen 10:1). In addition to the family lines, the text includes detailed information about their “clans (mishpehotam), languages (leshonotam), lands (artzotam), and nations (goyeihem)” (10:5, 10:20, and 10:31. Verse 10:5, describing the offspring of Japheth, omits a reference to “lands,” perhaps because so many of his descendants are described as being maritime peoples.) Chapter 10 concludes that “from these the nations branched out over the earth after the Flood” (10:32). But the very next sentence, the first of the next chapter, states: “Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words” / וַיְהִ֥י כׇל־הָאָ֖רֶץ שָׂפָ֣ה אֶחָ֑ת וּדְבָרִ֖ים אֲחָדִֽים׃  (Gen. 11:1). How could it be that everyone had the same language, when we have just concluded a chapter that lists numerous different nations and their various languages?! 

The next eight verses tell us how this came to be and how God responded. The conventional reading is that the people wanted to come together to build a tower higher than any of them could have built as individuals, and that God prevented the power of human unity by confusing their speech. However, the idea that God would improve the world by preventing people from understanding one another seems nonsensical. It would eliminate the problem of extreme collaboration and prompt God’s desired outcome of dispersing the people throughout the world, but it would surely create other, even more severe problems. A close reading of the text, however, provides a more sophisticated understanding about how people can navigate the reality of difference and diversity of languages (literal and figurative) and in doing so experience healing and foster peace. 

Commentators have debated whether or not the builders of the Tower committed a sin and, if a sin was committed, what it was. Four aspects of the story could be considered mistakes or sins on behalf of the Tower’s builders: (1) they spoke one language instead of many according to their clan and location, (2) they wanted to “make a name” for themselves, (3) they wanted to make “a tower that reaches to the heavens,” and (4) they desired to not be “scattered over the face of the whole earth” despite God’s command to Adam and later to Noah to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28; Gen. 9:1). 

The Netziv (Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, 19th c. Lithuania) believed that having one language was not a sin in and of itself but it “caused the first sin”: because they could all communicate, “they agreed to stop in one single place. And this is against the will of God that said to ‘fill the land and replenish it’—that is, to walk to all its places, since the land was created to be settled.” He further explains that the reference in 11:1 to devarim ahadim, “the same words” spoken by all of humanity, does not spell out what these words were “to teach us that it wasn’t because of the content of the words themselves that the Holy One of Blessing was distressed.” God was alarmed not by what they were saying, but by the fact that they “all thought the same thing, and this came to be the problem of the settlement.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sees in the Netziv’s interpretation of the building of the Tower of Babel as “the first totalitarianism:” “It is a supreme act of hubris, committed time and again in history . . . . It is the attempt to impose an artificial unity onto divinely created diversity” (The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, 52).

The problem was not all of humanity speaking the same language, rather what it would lead to.  God’s response to the construction of the Tower did not suggest that having multiple languages was inherently better; this was simply the mechanism that God chose to get the builders to halt their work on the Tower. However, the result of this mechanism was the emergence of a world riddled with miscommunications and limits in understanding. Surely, this would bring about conflict. 

In his book To Heal a Fractured World, Sacks explores two Jewish conceptions of peace as ways to navigate difference. First, he identifies universalist prophetic visions of peace including Isaiah’s “They shall beat their swords into plough-shares, Their spears into pursuing hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isa. 2:4) or Micah’s “They shall sit, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, And none shall make them afraid, For the mouth of the Lord of the Hosts has spoken” (Mic. 4:4).

Sacks suggests, however, that rabbinic tradition presented a contrasting model for how to navigate differences peacefully; it can be found in the rabbinic concept and instructions regarding darkhei shalom, the ways of peace, often understood as practices for maintaining peaceful community relations. One statement of these principles is found in Tosefta Gittin:

עיר שיש בה ישראל וגוים, הפרנסין גובין מישראל ומגוים, מפני דרכי שלום. מפרנסין עניי גוים עם עניי ישראל, מפני דרכי שלום.

מספידין וקוברין מיתי גוים, מפני דרכי שלום. מנחמין אבילי גוים, מפני דרכי שלום.

A city that has Jews and non-Jews—the charity collectors collect from the Jews and the non-Jews, in the interests of peace, and they provide for the needs of Jewish and non-Jewish poor, in the interests of peace. One eulogizes and buries non-Jewish dead, in the interests of peace. One comforts non-Jewish mourners, in the interests of peace. (Tosefta, Gittin [Lieberman edition] 3:13-14)

Sacks characterizes darkhei shalom as “a programme for peace in an unredeemed world.” The rabbis who articulated this program know that “in this not-yet-fully-redeemed world, peace means living with difference—with those who have another faith and other texts. That is the fundamental distinction between the prophetic peace of religious unity and the rabbinic peace of religious diversity, with all the compromise, restraint, and mutual respect that coexistence requires.”

Significantly, the Tosefta’s instructions include practices of caregiving.

Another debate among commentators is who was living at the time of the building of the Tower of Babel (as well as who was involved in its building). Seder Olam Rabbah, a second-century CE Hebrew text that provides a chronology of biblical events from Adam to Alexander the Great’s conquests, states that due to long lifespans Noah was both present at the time of the building of the Tower and the dispersion. David Kimchi writes that “Noah, Shem, Eber, and Japheth were also there.”

Genesis Rabbah imagines Shem and Eber establishing a yeshiva to which numerous subsequent ancestors studied. My teacher, Rabbi Morton Leifman, of blessed memory, used to emphasize the special power of the classic midrash that suggests that after the akedah, Isaac went to this yeshiva to study with his ancestors (Genesis Rabbah 56:11). Rabbi Leifman suggested that Isaac went there following his experience of trauma, to grapple with existential questions and to seek healing. If we imagine that Noah and his children were present at the building of the Tower of Babel, and that their children were born to parents who survived the flood, we can understand that they were all grappling with intergenerational trauma. In this created, broken, and unredeemed world in which people are different and struggle to understand one another, practices of caring for one another seem exactly what is needed to establish a sense of shared humanity while doing justice to the variety of human experience. Sitting with people during crisis, listening to them with compassion and empathy, and bearing witness to their subjective and affective experience pave the way toward healing and peace.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

In this week’s parashah we learn the origin story of the rainbow as a symbol. Following the catastrophic flood in which God destroys nearly every living thing, save for Noah and his family and the animals he brings with him onto the ark, God promises never to bring about destruction on the same scale again.  God establishes the rainbow as a sign for this covenant, declaring that it will be a reminder for God always: “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures . . . ” (Gen. 9:8–17).

This is truly extraordinary: it is the only time God pairs a covenant with something that is visible in nature to us all. It is not surprising, then, that there a plethora of commentaries on the rainbow, discussing whether and how we can reconcile the scientific traits of the rainbow with the verses in the Torah; remarking on both the negative and positive significance of the rainbow; and instructing us on what to do when we see a rainbow including what to say, how we should look at it, and whether or not to call attention to it.

As I delved into commentaries about the rainbow, I discovered some fascinating ideas which gave me a newfound appreciation for why so many of us are drawn to it, and why it carries so much meaning beyond its natural beauty.

To begin, it is helpful to understand the science behind how the rainbow forms. A rainbow results when the sun’s rays are refracted by drops of mist or rain into separate bands of color. When we look at regular sunlight we do not see these colors. It is only through the prism of water that we are able to see the vibrant colors inherent in sunlight.  

Biblical commentators offered different ways of reconciling this natural occurrence with the notion that God created the rainbow as a covenant after the flood. Some commentators, such as the Ramban, concur with Greek scholars that the rainbow had always been in existence, but after the flood God changes the status of the rainbow by assigning it as a covenant. Ibn Ezra (9:14) offers a different take on this idea. He suggests that the rainbow was always in existence, but that we weren’t able to see it before. However, “after the flood God strengthened the sun’s light” to enable us to see the rainbow. 

This highlights the remarkable quality of the rainbow: the colors are always present but are only revealed to us at a particular time. Specifically, we can only see the rainbow after rainfall, perhaps at a time when its message of hope is most meaningful to us. This serves as an important reminder that there is beauty everywhere; we just don’t always have the ability to see it. Especially when we’re going through a challenging time in our lives, it’s helpful to consider the beauty that we will be able to see once the sun’s rays are shining brightly down again.

It is also interesting to observe the quiet nature of the rainbow, especially as a choice for a sign from God. The rainbow is a beautiful sight; however, it can also easily go unnoticed. There are no loud sounds calling our attention to it, such as thunder. It doesn’t even appear immediately in our view—we need to look up into the sky to see it. Perhaps assigning the rainbow as a covenant is God’s way of calling upon us to be an active partner; to seek out rainbows and to take time to consider their significance, thus coming closer to God.

Finally, I want to note that the rainbow did not always carry with it a positive connotation. Keshet, the word used in the biblical narrative for rainbow, is also the word used for a bow, as in bow and arrow. In the Jewish Publication Society Bible commentary, Nahum Sarna writes that our understanding of the rainbow as a symbol of the covenant is actually distinct from other ancient Near Eastern notions of the bow as a sign of war, military victory, and dominance. Through the story of Noah, Sarna says, “hostility is transformed into a token of reconciliation between God and Man.”[i] Ramban also discusses the connection between the rainbow and the bow used in battle, noting that God made the rainbow with its feet bent upward, like an inverted bow, which is similar to what warriors do when they are calling for peace from their opponents. 

The notion that the rainbow, a sign for God’s covenant, has negative roots, is quite remarkable! What could have been used for war and destruction is turned around, signaling peace and hope for the future. What a powerful lesson. If the meaning of the rainbow can be changed so significantly, we are called upon to consider what else we can turn around in our personal lives or in the world.

May we all merit to have rainbows revealed to us, and to see the ones that are in front of us, throughout our lives. And may we gain strength from the rainbow and its promise of transformation, blessings, and peace.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

[i] Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis (Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 62–3.

Human beings have changed the Earth in such profound and dramatic ways that some geologists say we have entered a new epoch—the Anthropocene. While debate exists on when this new era began, there is strong support for the theory that the catalyst was industrialization and the introduction of a fossil-fuel economy in the eighteenth century.  The ability of human activity to cause major geological and ecological change is, in this sense, uniquely modern. 

Today it’s common to find divrei torah that use Parashat Noah to raise awareness about our impact on the environment. Yet I recently discovered a voice from the first stirrings of modernity that seemed to already intuit, within a theological framework, the devastating impact of humans on the global environment. For Obadiah Sforno (1475–1550), the “lawlessness” during the days of Noah did not just cause God to flood to earth. It was a force capable of ruining the climate and planet, and thereby shaping the course of human history ever after. 

It is perhaps no surprise that the Italian biblical commentator was preoccupied with the interrelated fates of humans and the planet. A scholar, physician, and philosopher, well-versed in Jewish and secular knowledge, Sforno was active at the height of the Renaissance, a time of renewed engagement in the study of astronomy, anatomy, geography, and natural philosophy. This was, after all, the era of Copernicus and Galileo.

As the biblical text offers only few clues about specific causes and effects of the flood, the commentators step in to fill in the gaps. What was the source of human “lawlessness”? What did it mean for God to call for the destruction of all creation “et ha’aretz,” which could mean both “from” or “with” the earth” (Gen. 6:13)? Sforno understands God’s words as follows:

I will destroy the climate which could support life on earth by interfering with the sun’s orbit and rearranging it from the beginning of the deluge for the entire future . . . . This accounts for the lifespan of man having been drastically reduced after the deluge. The climate of the earth changed, there were greater extremes of heat and cold, the produce of the earth was considerably less capable of supporting a long lifespan. As a by-product of this deterioration in the quality of the vegetable products, man was allowed to eat meat as a compensation.

Elsewhere Sforno explains that after the flood, the sun’s orbit of the Earth was no longer circular, but elliptical. (He has not fully integrated heliocentrism into his account.) Thus a climate that was once “an eternal spring” for the planet’s populated regions was now characterized by uneven temperatures during different parts of the year: “Seedtime and harvest, Cold and heat, Summer and winter, Day and night” (Gen. 8:22). Sforno argues that these “rapid changes of climate have a deleterious effect on human health,” accounting for the decline in longevity. That’s why humans now live for mere decades instead of centuries. The flood takes us another step further away from the Edenic ideal. Only in the time of the messiah, as alluded to in the book of Isaiah, would the earth be restored.

The story of the flood thus explains both the spiritual and physical decline of humanity. Human sin causes natural disaster; natural disaster changes major aspects of the Earth’s climate, the sun’s orbit, the quality of its vegetation—and this in turn has disastrous consequences for humans. The moral decline of humanity and the physical deterioration of natural world (from vegetation to human bodies) are intertwined, part of the same tragic trajectory. 

Sforno brings together religious and scientific thought to suggest that the flood’s drastic alterations to the planet caused significant changes to human bodies, lives, and history that could only be rectified in some future time. The new extremes of weather and seasonality were a well-deserved punishment, given that our sins had sparked the flood in the first place.  

There are clearly vast differences in how Sforno and we today understand the human contribution to a global climate catastrophe. And we are not content to imagine a return to Eden in some future utopian era, dependent on Divine rather than our own agency. Voices from today’s Jewish and secular environmental movements call on us to do what we can to create a safe, stable world for all creation and to take discrete actions to create a sustainable economy and society. Yet I read his interpretation of the flood narrative as a profound expression of the idea that humans have the power to transform nature on a global scale and are, in turn, vulnerable to the consequences of those changes to the natural world. His commentary calls on us to see the world as a unified, interconnected whole and to act within it with this awareness in mind.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

67% Sub-Saharan African, 30% Northwest European, 2% Indigenous American, 1% unaccounted  for.

I already knew that my ethnic heritage was decently mixed up. I had spent enough years peppering my grandmothers with the kinds of questions only a child feels comfortable pursuing: “Where was your mother from? Where was your father from? Belize?! Which city? Dangriga? Sounds weird. Never heard of it. Wait, grandma, your grandmother was a white woman from Louisiana?!”

But there was something intriguing about seeing my genetic make-up. Witnessing my genes splattered in Pollock-esque hues across a map of the world gave me an unexpected, concrete sense of belonging. It pointed toward lands and collective memories that preceded the stories of my grandmothers.

It is common to be interested in one’s roots. In fact, it has become cliché. All one has to do is take a  quick look at the ever expanding commercial landscape of genealogy kits and the proliferation of prestige media to know that identity and personal origins are big business. And I get it; of course we want to uncover the stories of our origins! These stories help us make sense of our world. In fact, as a theatre maker and (almost) rabbi, I spend most of my time outside of 91�첥 creating narratives that test and tug on the knotty intersections of identity, race, religion, and text. But within this understandable impulse to know our roots, there is also the potential for danger. Afterall, we humans are storytelling animals, and as such, we can succumb to the temptation of creating false lineages and mobilizing them for less than optimal purposes. This week’s parashah contains an infamous example of that.

In Parashat Noah, we read the epic story of a family who survives a world-ending flood with a menagerie of animals aboard a vast, floating ark. As a kid, I was drawn to this story. Maybe it was that I imagined being stuck on a cruise with lemurs, dogs, giraffes, and chinchillas wouldn’t be so bad. An only child can dream, right?! During adolescence, however, I became aware of a seemingly innocuous little pericope within this saga that had been used for egregiously oppressive purposes. In Genesis 9, the story goes that Ham, one of Noah’s sons, happened upon a drunk Noah and saw עֶרְוַ֣ת אָבִ֑יו (his father’s nakedness). As a result of this transgression, Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, to be a slave to his brothers. These few lines of text were eventually built into a robust pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical theory called “The Curse of Ham,” which posited that Africans were the descendants of Ham, and thus worthy of being enslaved. This idea of African descent from Ham proved so resilient that even long after the end of slavery and Jim Crow, I encountered a faint whiff of this “origin story” in the Black churches and racially mixed Southern communities I grew up in.

As any student who has taken a 91�첥 history class can tell you, there is no greater sin one can commit than the sin of presentism—the process of uncritically interpreting the past through the cultural contexts and assumptions of the present day. What slave owners and a fair amount of their contemporaries did was just that—they read themselves and their contemporary realities into the text. From there, they made the mental leap that connected Ham and his descendants with slavery and Black Africans—an idea that is nowhere present in the biblical text. This “leap” didn’t arise in the antebellum South, however. As noted historian David M. Goldenberg writes in his meticulously detailed reception history of this text, Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham, the history of viewing Black people as those cursed to be slaves winds its way back through Christian Europe and even into some etiological myths of Black enslavement in Islam. This myth can also be found amongst certain Jews starting in the medieval era. Most notably, the commentator ibn Ezra subtly pushes back against this ideology using the genealogies of the Tanakh.[1]

But my purpose here is not to blame Jews, Christians, or Muslims of any specific era for the rise of anti-Blackness; history is far too complex to paint past realities with such a broad brush. Rather, my intent is to highlight that in our yearning to know our origins and shore up our group identities, our cultural memories can become highly impressionable. And left unchecked, this can lead us to read our worst impulses into our sacred texts and justify unethical abuses that can be as destructive as the mythic deluge of Noah’s generation.

As real as this concern may be, I do not think that it needs be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with many warnings and challenges, if we approach them from a different vantage point, we may also find opportunities. I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna, implying that within every hardship is a silver lining; some realities are too hard to rehabilitate with a “paradigm shift.” What I am saying, however, is that it takes a clear-eyed pragmatism to see life as it is and then choose to perform a feat of creative daring and construct what could be. From my perspective as an artist and theatre-maker, I believe that bringing a critical awareness of ourselves to the projects of history, Jewish tradition, and collective memory can unleash unexpected creative possibilities.

This year at 91�첥 (in partnership with The Hendel Center for Justice and Ethics at 91�첥, , , and ) I’m privileged to be collaborating with seven amazing artists to launch —North America’s first arts fellowship centering the work of JOCISM (Jews of Color, Indigenous Jews, Sephardi, and Mizrahi) artists and culture-makers. As Jews of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who are deeply interested in matters of identity and origins, we will spend a year studying ancient Jewish texts around the theme of collective memory. We will ask of both the texts of our heritage and of ourselves, “What does it mean to remember? How is that memory recorded? How, if at all, does what we, or a text “remembers” align with historical events? How does remembering shape our sense of identity? And most consequentially, who has the power to create or destroy memory?” From our study, we will generate new works of art that will wrestle with these questions in ways that are sometimes bold, sometimes subversive, occasionally unexpected, often entertaining, and always nuanced.

My hope is that by engaging Jewish text both with other JOCISM folks and in conversation with the New York Jewish community, our artists will craft tales, dances, pictures, songs, theatre, and other visions that are as constructive for klal Yisrael as they are challenging. Such art is good for the Jews. What is more, it is good for humanity. And maybe through the transforming power of creative imagination and Jewish community we will be able to perform some small tikkun —deconstructing and repairing those longstanding narratives that have saddled us with curses that no longer serve us.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

[1] See his comment on לאחיו in Genesis 9:25

In a normal year, we would be reading this week’s parashah in an entirely different setting: after a summer of sun, camp, and trips, and following the long holiday season, we would be entering our homes and settling into the fall, saying goodbye to the physical togetherness that defines the summer and the holiday season, just as the day gets shorter and the month of Marheshvan commences. In a normal year, the portion of Noah reminds us of this motion: when the rain starts, we go inside—and the tale of Noah and his family reminds us that there is indeed a sunny future ahead, waiting for us a few months down the line. The introspection we would have experienced in Elul and Tishrei, in our synagogues and schools, would now be replaced with an introspection in our homes, as we hunker down for the winter and try to stay warm.

But this is not a normal year. We have all been cooped up now for months in our own “arks”—alone or with others—as we seek protection from contagion, and, in some parts of this country, from the sheer, life-threatening force of the elements. The advantage of our arks is apparent: quite simply, staying home is supposed to help us stay alive. Yet there are of course risks in such isolation. Loneliness intensifies. And for many, the home is tragically a place of danger, of insecurity, perhaps even of physical violence.

Noah was certainly lucky—he was saved. His first reaction upon exiting the ark was to immediately build an altar and offer a sacrifice to God (Gen. 8:20). It is not surprising that most sources understand this as an act of giving thanks: Noah exits the ark, realizes that he was fortunate to survive (and notices that God made him take a lot of animals with him), and therefore offers God a sacrifice to convey his thankfulness.

Yet, the Bible does not state this explicitly. What it does say is that God, after smelling the sacrificial fumes, tells Himself that “never again will I doom the earth because of man” (Gen. 8:21). Is this a reaction to an act of thanks, or to something else? According to the book of Jubilees, a Second Temple-era text that rewrites the book of Genesis and the first half of the book of Exodus, Noah atones “for the earth”—for the sins committed by all who had perished, that had defiled the earth (Jubilees 6:2).

Zoharic texts also consider this to be an atonement sacrifice, but one that serves a different purpose. Picking up on a theme found already in some rabbinic sources, these texts blame Noah for not doing enough for those of his generation. The Midrash Hane’elam, a commentary embedded within the Zohar, retells Noah’s departure from the ark :

Our rabbis have taught: How did the blessed Holy One answer Noah when he came out of the ark and saw the world destroyed, whereupon he began weeping for it, saying, “Master of the World! You are called Compassionate! You should have shown compassion for Your creatures!”? (Pritzker edition translation)

Upon exiting the ark, Noah is aghast at the sight of destruction. He cannot believe that God, the Compassionate One, caused such calamities—and he tells Him so! God turns the blame around, reprimanding Noah:

The blessed Holy one replied, “Foolish shepherd! Now you say this—but not when I spoke to you tenderly . . . . I lingered with you and belabored you with all of this, so that you might seek compassion for the world. But as soon as you heard that you would be saved 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—muttering questions and pleas before Me!”

Now Noah is asking God why He did all of this?! Noah, the “righteous of his generation” (Gen. 6:9), knew that this was coming! He should have prayed on his generation’s behalf and called upon them to change their ways.

God’s rebuke, though, also betrays God’s own weakness: He needed humans to help Him solve the world’s problems, particularly those that stem from humankind’s own misdeeds. But when they failed to do so, and when even the righteous of the generation did not do enough, the only path that God could take was one of utter destruction.

The retelling ends with Noah internalizing the depths of his personal failure:

As soon as Noah realized this, he presented sacrifices and offerings, as is written: Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every pure animal and of every pure bird, and offered ascent-offerings on the altar (Gen. 8:20).

Noah’s sacrifice, in this reading, is not one of thanks, nor one of atonement for the sins of those dead and the defilement of the land. Noah’s sacrifice serves to atone for his own sin—the sin of inaction, as he let civilization devolve until the Earth as he knew it was destroyed, content as he was with his own survival. We can imagine Noah waiting in his ark, knowing but not fully coming to terms with what was actually going on outside; only once it was too late did he realize what should have been clear to him all along. And this reading also draws the later elements of the story into sharper focus: when God states that “the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21), He is referring also to Noah’s selfishness; and when Noah turns to alcohol (Gen. 9:21), it is from the recognition that he had looked out only for himself.

It is hard, in our own arks, to think beyond ourselves. To be sure, at times we must focus inward, in order to ensure our own vitality and health. But the challenges facing our generation—and those that we are poised to leave for the next generation—are simply far too great for us to ignore as we weather out the storm. The climate crisis that is impacting every aspect of our lives, even if we are not always noticing; the ills caused by systemic racism in this country; the fight for democracy and for equality—these are all challenges that we must address here and now.

Noah’s experience reminds us that there will still be life when we exit the ark, but that we must constantly work to ensure that this reality is available to as many people as possible. Even as we focus on our very own survival, we must fight and pray for the survival of our entire world.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

וַיִּנָּ֣חֶם ה’ כִּֽי-עָשָׂ֥ה אֶת-הָֽאָדָ֖ם בָּאָ֑רֶץ וַיִּתְעַצֵּ֖ב אֶל-לִבּֽו:

“And Adonai regretted that God had made humanity on earth and God’s heart was grieved.” (Gen. 6:6)

God is heartbroken. The people whom God formed with such care, the people into whom God exhaled God’s own divine spark, the people God loved—had chosen a path of corruption and crime. God sees this corruption, is filled with regret over having ever created humans in the first place, and is overcome by grief.

The idea of a grieving God is complicated. To help us better grasp God’s emotional experience, Rashi points us to an example of human grief that employs the same root word.

וַתְּהִ֨י הַתְּשֻׁעָ֜ה בַּיּ֥וֹם הַה֛וּא לְאֵ֖בֶל לְכָל־הָעָ֑ם כִּֽי-שָׁמַ֣ע הָעָ֗ם בַּיּ֤וֹם הַהוּא֙ לֵאמֹ֔ר נֶעֱצַ֥ב הַמֶּ֖לֶךְ עַל-ְּנֽוֹ׃

“That day was turned into mourning for all the people, because on that day the people heard that the king was grieving over his son.” (2 Sam. 19:3)

Rashi links God’s grief over the shameful state of the world to King David’s grief when he learns of the death of his rebellious child, Absalom, at the hands of David’s own troops. In the aftermath of their enemy’s defeat, the victory of the royal army is turned into mourning when the people hear David grieving over his fallen political rival, his slain beloved son.

As we hold up these two texts, our metaphors for God as Parent and God as King (familiar from our recent High Holiday recitations of Avinu Malkenu) mingle in David, a flesh-and-blood parent, a flesh-and-blood king, who cannot reconcile his duty to protect his people and his duty to protect his child. Rashi’s comparison between the grief of our quintessential human king and the grief of our Divine King helps us see God as a distraught parent, longing for a relationship with God’s children and fearing that too much damage has been done, too much distance has come between God and the people to ever find a way back into relationship.

This linguistic link of grief may provide greater context for God’s heartbreak, but it doesn’t make our story any easier. The scale of violence required to annihilate everything is unfathomable. Acknowledging that God is both Parent to all and Destroyer of all is what makes Parashat Noah so painful. This pain is hard to live with, so we try to sanitize our text. Today when we read the story of Noah, we dehumanize the other humans of Noah’s generation; we blame Noah for not protesting. We morph these words into a children’s story; we decorate nurseries with rainbows and animals in pairs of two. We do everything we can to avoid the horror. And yet if we can resist our urge to pretty-up a devastating narrative, we can come a little bit closer to knowing God’s grief through our own heartbreak.

When the ark is built and the animals accounted for, God seals up Noah and his family. Then God recedes from the story. While the floodgates of the sky break open, while the springs of the earth burst forth, while the rains last for forty days, while the ark floats for a full year with no sign of life; God is nowhere to be found. The Torah does not explain God’s absence during the year that the whole world drowned, but our text’s attention to God’s grief and regret offers a possible insight: God’s sadness was so great that God had to step away as the earth was consumed—not by rage or Divine retribution— but by God’s own intolerable grief.

This intolerable grief and Divine absence is not how our story ends. From the depths of water and the depths of despair, from the near annihilation of everything, God comes back to us. By coming back, God resolves to never end the world again, and enters into specific covenantal relationship with human beings. (Gen. 9:9-17) By coming back, God demonstrates to us that coming back is possible.

If we are able to access God’s grief through our own heartbreak, we open ourselves up to profound possibilities. When we witness God almost give up on everything, we see the power of persisting when there is no reason to hope. It is easy to permanently disengage from the horrors of the world, but our Torah urges us to resist that temptation. In Parashat Noah, God teaches us, above all, the significance of resilience through relationship. God shows us that it is possible to come back from paralyzing despair. Again and again and again.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).