noach
parasha noach, Genesis chapters 6—11
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…and thoughts
Noah
The Man, the myth, the legend
It’s all about morality—ours, and God’s
The imagery that the story of Noah’s Ark invoked in my child-mind was fabulous. I conjured a never-ending parade of animals, birds, insects, and beings too small to see (including the Who people of Dr. Seuss fame), all marching up a great ramp and onto a boat as though hypnotized.
I may have since come to terms with the fact that the Who people have never existed, but I still find an inexhaustible amount of wisdom to extract from both Horton the Elephant and the narrative of the Great Flood.
It’s fascinating that primitive cultures around the globe all have a great flood in their mythologies, but I’m particularly interested in how the Torah’s version compares to the stories of the peoples who existed around us in our neck of the woods, in the ancient world. There are similarities between our Parasha Noach and the Great Flood in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. In both stories, the world is covered by water and only the hero survives. But in that tale, the gods decide to destroy the world on a whim. Utnapishtim is saved because he’s a personal favorite of one of the gods, Enki. The gods act randomly upon humanity and there’s nothing the humans can do, save performing sacrifices to hopefully appease them.
In Parasha Noach, the world is flooded, not because God randomly decided to destroy the world for amusement, but because it had become corrupt and destructive. It’s about morality. Noah is not arbitrarily saved. He is deserving. He is a "righteous man, perfect in his generation. With God, Noah walked."
But the flood changed Noah. The flood lasted 40 days, and it took another 7 months for the waters to receed. After a year on the ark, Noah is finally commanded by God to leave. Why does he need to be commanded? Any normal person would have bolted off that smelly, overcrowded ark the very moment it was safe to do so. Why is Noah hesitant to leave?
The First Survivor
Elie Weisel, holocaust survivor, philosopher, humanist, and some dare say prophet, offers a poignant insight. Weisel calls Noah the “first survivor." The world had experienced a Holocaust, and Noah was reluctant to walk out of the ark because he knew that the entire world was one giant graveyard for all the people he had known--and he just couldn't face it. Noah's response to the flood is not dissimilar to the reactions of some Holocaust survivors in Weisel’s own generation. Whether in battle, in a pandemic, or in any situation where one survives and so many others lose their lives, the question is almost always asked—why me? Do I deserve to live more than the others? Did God protect me and not them? What does it all mean?
Weisel says, some survivors were just not capable of facing the fact that they were singled out to live, while their beloved friends and relatives—mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters—had been slaughtered. For the rest of their lives, they were never really able to get it together.
Noah is suffering from PTSD. Once on dry land, after giving thanks to God and bringing sacrifices, the Torah tells us that Noah's reaction to the flood is to plant. But anyone who goes through an event such as the Great Flood is going to be profoundly affected, and different people deal in different ways—some healthy and others not so much. Planting after a great destruction is surely a meaningful and satisfying response. It represents hope and belief in the future. But what does Noah plant? He plants a vine and makes wine. He becomes a drunkard and wallows in the muck in his tent. He can’t face the fact that everyone, excepting himself and his immediate family, is gone. He’s unable to face his reality. He needs an escape and resorts to alcohol.
I can’t help but wonder about Mrs. Noah, who isn’t even given the acknowledgement of a name. What did she think, how did she feel, how did she respond, first to the building of the ark, then living through the flood, then starting over with only her husband and her sons? How did she deal with Noah’s descent?
In the Oral Torah, our sages were able to deduce her identity by following the genealogical information we’re given at the end of parasha Beresheet. Noach's wife is Na'ama, daughter of Lemech and Tzillah. Lemech was the fifth descendent of Cain, who slew his brother, Abel. So, Noah’s wife was a descendent of Cain, and Noah was a descendent of Seth, the third son born to Eve and Adam—who was a replacement for Abel who’d been slain by Cain. (And you think your family is complicated?) With the union of Noah an Na’ama, we come full circle. The sages tell us that Na’ama was a righteous woman, even though she was the progeny of Cain’s descendent and his second, trophy wife.
But we still know nothing about Na’ama, personally….if only Torah had been recorded by women…but I digress…
Let’s look at how Noah’s three sons reacted to their father’s mental and emotional condition.
Noah's Sons
Cham "saw [Noah’s] nakedness" and told his two brothers outside. Sheim and Yefes responded to Cham’s claim by taking a cloak and walking backwards into Noah’s tent, so that they would not see their father's nakedness. They took the cloak and covered him.
One classical interpretation by our sages is that this expression has sexual connotations—Cham didn’t just mock his father; he sodomized or castrated him.
You won’t convince me of that one.
The way I see it, either Cham mocked his father or he berated him, or perhaps he did both. He showed no compassion. He saw his father stripped—perhaps of his clothes, but more significantly of his manliness, of his self-esteem—and ground him deeper into the muck.
Sheim and Yefes walked backwards so that they wouldn’t see their father’s nakedness. They didn’t look at what Noah had become, rather they looked backwards and saw him as he had been before. They showed him the respect due a father. They covered him. They built him up; they helped him re-cover.
And Noah does recover. When Noah awoke from his stupor, he knew what his youngest son, Cham, had done to him. Noah cries out, "May Canaan be cursed." Oddly enough, Noah doesn't curse his own son, Cham, but Cham's son, Canaan. "He will always be a slave to his brothers."
No one in the Torah is either punished or exalted because of the actions of someone else. The idea that no one bears guilt because of the actions of another and no one can atone for the sins of another is a major tenet of Judaism and in fact sets it apart from other faiths. If Noah’s wife, his sons, and their wives were saved, it’s not because of their relationship to Noah, it’s because they were all deemed righteous.
Why does Noah curse his grandson and not his son? Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be a curse in the way we think of cursing someone. Perhaps it was more of a prophesy. Cham was the only one of Noah’s sons who was himself a father by that time. Even more than his brothers, as a mature man he should have been sensitive to what Noah must have been feeling, but he showed the least tolerance. He was judgmental and unkind, and that’s the example he set for his son, Canaan. And children learn what they live. Imagine, if this is the way Cham responded to his own father, how would he act towards a similarly suffering stranger?
In actuality, it was Cham who cursed Canaan. Noah was saying, if that's the way you behave, if that's the model you intend to provide for your children, if you respond to a person in need by acting insensitively, the end result will inevitably be that your own child, Canaan, will absorb this way of thinking from you. Just like you, he will be uncharitable and cruel. He’ll grow up to be a slave to his baser nature, just as you are.
What About Us?
When we walk past a drunk or an addict on the street, what’s our thought process? How do we react to someone who’s “down on their luck?” What suppositions do we make about that person? The Torah tells us that our Patriarch, Abraham, was a descendant of Sheim. I’m thinking that I’d do well to remember that and not behave as though I’m descended from Cham.
Ultimately, by the end of the parasha, God shows compassion on all of the earth, deserving or not. God promises to never destroy the earth by flood again. And God sets the rainbow in the sky to remind us of that promise, to remind us that the colors and the beauty are still there, always, even when we can’t see them.
So, what shall we eat?
This week I’m going full-on vegetarian.
Rainbow challah is so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Here’s how to do it. (You’ll find a link here to my Golden Shabbat Challah recipe, as well.)
According to Torah, on the 17th day of the month of Sivan in the year 2104 B.C.E., Noah’s ark touched down on the top of Mount Ararat. And, on the 27th day of Cheshvan, Noah and his comrades left the ark, the ground having finally dried enough for them to do so. The terrain must have looked pretty bleak to them.
And what if….But, what if, when they opened the door, they’d opened a time portal that dropped them 6,150 years in the future, exactly two weeks from this Shabbat? The landscape would have been quite different. They would have found themselves in Doğubeyazıt, Turkey. The locals would have insisted that they try the Abdigör Köfte, a special dish available nowhere else. But.. they might have been hesitant, having been vegetarians their whole lives. Most likely, they’d have been more comfortable with Mercimek Köfte, which are made from lentils. So, that’s what we’re going to have for dinner tonight. Once your lentils and bulgur are cooked, these “meat”balls get no further cooking. They’re served room temperature or chilled, with lettuce leaves for wrapping them up, and with a squeeze of fresh lemon.
Is one cold dish enough for Shabbat dinner? I think not. So, it’s gonna be Turkish mezze night!
After the waters had receded, Noah sent out a dove to find out whether or not the conditions were favorable for them leaving the ark. The third time she came back with an olive branch. Hence, a salad of mixed olives with herbs that’s thrown together in minutes.
Check out the menu to see the full array of delicious delights….