Torah Posting: נח
The first thing we learn about Noach is that “איש צדיק תמים היה בדרתיו” — he was special in his generation because of two qualities.
The adjective תמים means something like a combination of “simple” and “complete.” Some people translate it as “perfect,” but that doesn’t work for me. To me it means more like, “completely enough.”
The word צדיק is usually translated as “righteous,” and it is held up as one of the highest aspirational human qualities. This is important because the previous parashah ends by saying everybody else in this time was wicked.
This verse is not holding back. It says Noach “walked with God.” I think what we’re meant to get here is that history is a gradual process of individuation between humanity and God, and we’re still very early in it. Between Qayin and Hevel and here, there was a very long list of begettings, and many of those footnote figures are nevertheless identified by extraordinary spiritual qualities and Divine encounters. That’s just how things were back then.
Of course, by now, the world is populated enough that there’s been a bit of a split, and the rarity (difficulty?) of righteousness has become apparent. There is now a concept of a person being of exemplary righteousness “among his generation,” and the narrator makes quite clear that the rest of humanity in the time of Noach is pretty, pretty rough. In fact, before parashat Noach even starts, we already know God plans to destroy the whole world and start over again because of it.
Now speaking to Noach, God says, “קץ כל–בשר בא לפני” — the end, the cutting, the trimming, the death of ALL FLESH has come before me!
That was quick, huh? This is only the eighth page of the Torah in my book.
I’m not going to parse the whole story of Noach this closely, because we all know what happens, but my thing with this story is that God is really freaking out. Dramatic. Toddler-ish, if you will. Humanity is young, the world is young, God is also young. The Torah is about growing up.
This Divine diatribe transitions seamlessly into very specific building instructions, complete with lists of materials, measurements, et cetera. I mention this because my contention — which will become clearer later in the Torah — is that this is actually the Torah’s most critical genre: concrete blueprints for building holy structures within which to ride out even the most horrible of global events.
Another theme of the whole Torah I find in Noach is religious experimentation, always a collaborative process between people and God. Noach and his family are a crucible, a sort of second Adam and Chavah who repopulate the world again after a bit more learning, and accordingly God gives them more specific instructions. In the list of animals to take aboard the ark, species are distinguished as טהורה or לא טהורה — pure or not pure — for the first time. Religious laws are taking shape.
So Noach does as instructed, and then the מעינות תהום — the fountains of the deep — break open, and creation is sort of undone. We also get our first mystically symbolic lengths of human-scale time — seven days of preparation, 40 days and 40 nights, et cetera. It’s also notable that a specific date is given for the flood beginning. It’s the 17th day of the second month, a disseminating Moon. 🌖
The waters and winds of the creation of the universe are evoked several times. The flood is no joke.
When the rains end and the waters recede, the tops of the mountains are first seen on the New Moon, which is also a super nice touch. Then the birds are sent out for evidence of land in intervals of seven days. The ground is fully dry on another New Moon.
It’s easy to understand this story as a personal Dark Night of the Soul type thing, not simply a global catastrophe, and all the symbolic/astrological time references imbue it with that kind of Meaning, rather than senselessness.
When it’s all over, God brings Noach and his family and the animals out and reiterates that first primordial commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Noach builds an altar and burns offerings of every pure species, a gesture (of death) almost as grandiose as God’s. God smells this delicious barbecue, and this is what prompts all God’s assurances that this won’t happen again.
One of the most subtle and important theological statements about people in the whole Torah happens here.
We hear a lot about “original sin” from the overculture in reference to the previous parashah, referring specifically to the Havah eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge thing covered in the previous Torah posting.
Here, after the flood, is the first place God actually says something like that, which is, “כי יצר לב האדם רע מנעריו”, “the earthling’s heart is inclined toward badness from youth.”
Two interesting points here.
One is that this language is awfully specific about “מנעריו”, which pointedly does not mean “inherited from humanity’s primordial ancestor and inherent upon every human being born” but rather “when they are a little kid.” So this is more about immaturity than karma, to my eye.
But more importantly, the context in which God is saying this is in a vow not to punish humanity for this. People are immature, they screw things up, the whole world should not be punished for that. God knows that now.
One much-commented-on concession to this human nature, which God has now realized, is that God now allows Noach and his descendants to eat animals, which commentators presume was not allowed before, in the paradise-state from which Noach’s now fairly distant ancestors were cast out. But God forbids the consumption of blood. This is an extension of the promises made to Qayin in the wake of his decision to shed the first human blood: Blood is holy and not to be treated wantonly by godly beings.
With this established, God promises no more mass destruction of this kind and sets God’s bow in the sky as a sign that even when clouds gather, they do not portend the destruction of the world as they did this time. Make no mistake here: This is God apologizing and making amends, which should resonate loudly when trying to understand what it means to be made in God’s image.
What happens after all this effort to make amends? Noach, the most righteous man of his generation, gets wasted.
Noach’s sons try to restore his dignity, but it doesn’t work, he is humiliated, he pronounces blessings and curses on various lines, and onward rolls the intergenerational trauma.
This will not be the end of such karmic transmissions through the generations in the book of Bereishit.
The lesson I take from it, starting here after the flood, is that God’s wrath traumatizes even the most righteous people, and they act out of their trauma in ways that shapes their descendants.
Man, the beginning of the Torah is packed. I promise the action slows down later, but for now, the scattering of the sons of Noach leads straight into another of the most famous episodes, the dawn of civilization and the construction of a towering city in the land of Shin’ar.
The people of this city had powerful technologies and the clarity of purpose conferred by a single language and culture. This gave them the sense they could build their tower “וראשו בשמים”, with its head in Heaven.
God is already having second thoughts again. Be like God… but not like that. “Nothing will be withheld from them” if they make it to Heaven. God — speaking in the royal We as God does often at the dawn of time (or is God speaking to the Heavenly Host of lesser divinities in God’s court?) — proposes to “go down” and fix this, but the solution is less destructive this time. Rather than kill them, God scrambles their speech by creating many languages, so they can’t coordinate the project anymore.
The place is then called Bavel — Babylon — a place well known for all its giant towering pyramids and such. The Torah wants the legacy of that place to be the myriad confusions of cultural diversity, as opposed to imperial uniformity.
No one civilization may be granted access to the Divine. If people want to build paradise on Earth, they have to learn to work together, across differences of languages and cultures. Bearing this in mind, I think readers will find striking differences in the way the later Israelite kingdom and its relationship with other nations is described.
Not that it’s perfect at any of that. I’ll go ahead and give away the moral of the story of the Hebrew Bible:
All human kingdoms become decadent and fall.
Many more generations follow, and in the land of Ur-kasdim — a place that should perk up the ears of students of astrology for being referred to in other language as Chaldea — a man named Avram is born. He marries a woman named Saray, they tribe up with his cousin Lot, and there the story of Bereishit turns to the fortunes of one family in a large and confusing world.
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