Oh, No, Noah!

I was listening to a comedian, Danny Jolles, the other night and boy, did he make me laugh—unlike the story of Noah and the destruction of life on earth (check out what I wrote last year).

First Jolles says, “So many people say to me, how can you still believe in God? The Bible? It’s thousands of years old. How can you still be reading that? Science, buddy! That’s the truth! It’s proven!”

Jolles counters: “But how often do the scientists say, ‘Here, We’ve got this great new drug! It will solve all your problems.’ And twenty years later, you see your doctor and they say quietly, Oh, …uhh…you’re still taking that? We made a mistake. We’ve updated it.

“I mean, we don’t look at science journals from twenty years ago, so why should be read a book thousands of years old?

“So maybe God is up there saying, ‘Oh, you’re still reading that? Uhhh…’”

It got me thinking…Yeah, we’re still reading that, and it is really outdated, but there is still so much old wisdom to be gleaned from the stories, the same way there is great medical wisdom from thousands of years ago that is being brought back—because there are ancient ways of healing in gentler ways than the pharmaceutical companies want us to be believe.

I’m also continuing to think about Creation as we make our way into the second parsha of the year. How can you not, when all of Creation, just created (last week it was In the Beginning…), has just been destroyed?

With the flood, God destroys all that he’s just made, except for one family, headed by Noah, “the one tzadik,” or righteous person, of his generation, along with pairs of animals, to start things over again. God commands Noah to build an ark (in only seven days—things must be urgent!), and two by two…You know the story.

I was reading a drash, or interpretive writing, by Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman published by The Shalom Center and she talks about Noah not challenging God to defend humanity and the earth against destruction.

We are not the first to ask the question, “How much of a Tzadik—how righteous—could Noah have been? He obviously didn’t have enough righteousness to even question God in protest—maybe he didn’t have enough faith in humanity—or himself!

In fact, as Friedman points out, the Kedushat Levi, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, answers the question by saying that Noah, though blameless, didn’t even have enough faith in his own voice to have an effect on God’s decree.

Noah gets drunk afterwards, and Friedman suggests this is because he can’t deal with the utter destruction he witnesses plus the fact that he was silent and allowed it to take place without even a word!

If this is so, if Noah’s conscience spoke to him, so did God’s conscience speak to God.

It’s true; God realizes immediately that he’s made a mistake; he swears he will never destroy life on earth in its entirety again.

But recognizing his mistake doesn’t prevent him from making more mistakes.

Generations go by and the descendants of Noah are getting very spread out, Torah tells us. Everyone still speaks one language, but they seem to be concerned about losing touch, because they have this great idea; they will build a city with a solid brick tower, the famous Tower of Babel, high into the sky. According to some sources, this is a multi-layered temple-like thing: a meeting place between heaven and earth.

This is usually read quite cynically as, the people want to be equal to God.

But the Hebrew says, “Let’s make a tower and we’ll make a name for ourselves.” I want to be less cynical and read it as, maybe—just maybe—they want everyone to stay together, as a recognized people, and they’ll be able to be closer to God way up there in the sky!

To me, it could be the ultimate act and intention of unity—among humans and between humans and God.

God did not agree with me.

God’s take was, by trying to reach so high, they were overstepping, and what is this “making a name for themselves,” thing? Who do they think they are?

So God punishes them by “mixing up their speech” so they can’t understand each other, making their plan impossible to complete, and from then on, the people of the earth spread farther and farther apart, speaking many different languages.

It says in Torah that God scatters the people, and the word for “scatter” in Hebrew even a sense of “shattering.”

What if God knows now, and I do mean now, that “he” made a mistake—not only in destroying all life with a flood, but by scattering, or shattering, the unity between people?

And what if God is really up there thinking, “Hey, you’re still reading that? You need to get the new, revised, version. I’ve evolved since then. I realize now that those people were just trying to get closer to me. Maybe I was being a little touchy and misinterpreted their intentions.”

Religion teaches that God is perfection, but it’s obvious that God is far from perfect. Mistakes are a part of God’s journey, as they are for us. Imperfection is just a part of the universe as Creation continues to change and evolve.

Also, recognizing a mistake doesn’t automatically stop us from making more.

It has taken generations of "mistakes,” accidental and sometimes even intentional, to get to the place where global flooding is a reality that’s becoming more real every day, threatening all life.

Rabbi Friedman quotes the 13th century mystical text, the Zohar Chadash, which contrasts Noah’s silence to Abraham’s protests for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (coming soon, to a theater near you!).

Friedman imagines Noah as an ancient man of over 900 years meeting Abraham when he was a young boy, seizing the child by the arm, hissing desperately into his ear: “When the Judge of All the Earth comes to you and tells you He plans destruction, make Him act justly.”

Friedman challenges us to remember that Jewish tradition demands that we speak up and act. We are not to lie back, despairing as we see the destruction of the world happening before our very eyes.

We really have no choice but to say, “Oh, no!” and move on to try and fix what we’ve done. We are not to give up our faith in humanity just because of our mistakes.

Let us speak for a new and revised God, whose voice we can only hear through the cries of the people, a God who now knows that separation and scattering are a mistake, and find our way back to a healthy, balanced earth though our own unity, a unity that requires our voices, our time and our money—for the righteous cause of saving life on our planet.

Let us have faith, the faith that Noah didn’t have, in the power of our words and actions to change the course of events.

And let us say Amen.