How Long Can You Tread Water?

With a tip of the yarmulka to Bill Cosby.......


Noach
Genesis 6:9-11:32

Précis: The story of Noah and Flood appear in this parasha. Noah, called by God, builds the ark and collects the animals (two by two, except when he collects 7 pairs). Then it rains and rains. Noah and his family are saved. They leave the ark, build an altar, and make sacrifices to God. God sets a rainbow as a promise not to destroy mankind again. Noah plants a vineyard, and becomes drunk. The story of the Tower of Babel follows, and the parasha ends with a genealogy of the ancient peoples of the Bible, ending with Abram.

Gen. 6:5-6 “And God saw that great was humankind’s evildoing on earth and every form of their heart’s planning was only evil all the day. Then God was angry that He had made humankind on earth, and it pained His heart.”

Rabbi Marc Wolf, writing in the JTS Torah Weekly Commentary (11/5/05) suggested that we should look at the Book of Genesis as a commentary about the development of God’s character. It seems that this parasha is a particularly good example of his theory.

At first glance, it is presumptuous for us to think about God, the Eternal One, omniscient and omnipresent, all-knowing, and all-seeing, as being capable of change, development, or growth. It seems to fly in the face of our concept of Jewish “dogma” (if there is in fact such a thing as Jewish “dogma”).

On second thought, we have been presented with a written work, the Bible, which (whether one believes it is the actual Word of God or not) can only be comprehended in human terms. If we focus on the lessons we can glean only from the life of Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses, we may be missing other insights to be gleaned from God’s role in the story.

In this parasha, we find a God who is so angry with His creation that He plans to destroy it entirely. This certainly was not what He “expected.” The free will which had been given to Adam, Eve, and their descendants was used and abused. Noah is chosen as the new Adam because he was pure and “walked before God.”

Noah soon proves that he is also endowed with free will. He sends out a bird before God orders him to do so; he offers God a sacrifice after he leaves the ark (again, without God’s command). Faced with these exercises of free will, God is pleased: he offers the rainbow and promises not to destroy the world again.

God has grown. He begins the parasha angry enough to destroy the world because of the exercise of free will, but at the end of the story, another exercise of free will is the basis for the rainbow.

One could argue that it is not the exercise of free will per se, but rather the result of the exercise that pleases God. I prefer to see it another way: God has (as the Kabbalists would say) withdrawn part of Himself from the universe to leave room for the exercise of free will by human beings.

What does this teach us about Judaism? Our God is one who “savors” the free will sacrifice, the election to serve, to live ethical lives, to “walk before God” as did Noah. As Rabbi Wolf notes, “All we need to do is stick our hands outside the ark.”