Lee Meyerhoff Hendler

            On October 28, 1995, the 4th of Heshvan, Lee delivered this Dvar Torah during our JUF Shabbat. We are now republishing it.

            It's a great story isn't it? A classic. It's got chaos, divine intervention, human collaboration, destruction, redemption and finally, the ultimate happy ending, a promise that nothing like it will ever happen again. A great story. But when I thought about trying to do something with it -- well, quite honestly I was intimidated. More honestly, I was scared. Too much big stuff. psychologically, theologically, literally. Too much I didn't understand, couldn't take in. So like many people faced with a difficult task I found plenty of ways to avoid it. Meetings, memos, car pools, holidays, household chores, campaign solicitations, phone calls, letters. And then one day the wonderful irony of the situation hit me. What if Noah had had the same response? What if Noah had been as willing as I had been to avoid a task that frightened him, a task he didn't completely understand? We might still be waiting to reemerge from the primordial ooze while God got the experiment up and running again. But according to the story we're here because Noah was a "righteous man, blameless in his age". A stubborn man. A determined man. A quiet man. Perhaps even... a selfish man? One commentator suggests he was righteous enough for the times but not righteous enough for God's purposes-- that is not righteous enough to be the father of the Jewish people. Not righteous enough to challenge God on the eve of destruction as Abraham did over Sodom and Gomorrah. But righteous enough to stand out in that time. Righteous enough to get the job.

            This wasn't exactly what my husband, Nelson, calls a week-end project. (The set of bookshelves he plans to put up on a Sunday morning and is still putting up four weeks later?) More importantly it was something that couldn't be put off - "When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noah, 'I have decided to put an end to all flesh for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood...’ " and God lays out the specs and Noah builds this 450' long, 75' wide, 45' high vessel that displaces about 43,000 tons when floating. Not your average backyard boat building project. The last time Nelson started one of these it was a handcrafted, precut, wood canoe kit. It took him 10 years of week-ends to complete and he only had to suffer a little good-natured ribbing from his wife and kids. We can only imagine the ridicule Noah had to put up with as folks watched this thing taking shape outside his hut. And yet he did it. The world was going to hell in a hand basket. Folks were reveling in all kinds of debauchery. God had already set the date, time and place of their destruction, but Noah, "blameless in his age", day after day, doggedly persisted in building the ark, the tevah.

            The word appears only one other time in Torah, as the vehicle that carries baby Moses toward his salvation. A tevah is a craft that floats on the water without benefit of navigational devices or steering mechanisms. Now why in the world would someone build a boat that couldn't be steered? They wouldn't if they expected to be doing the steering. The point here is that the builders didn't expect to be doing the steering. They were leaving the navigation up to God. The fate of the crew, the fate of the craft rests in both instances on the will of God. In each case such a profound leap of faith it's almost beyond our imagining. When is the last time any of us were able to summon up that kind of faith or even thought about it as a possibility? We're not talking about a passive faith, a resigned sitting back and waiting for God's will to be done. On the contrary, in both the Noah and the Moses story, the protagonists act. They have to do something in order for God's will to be done. They have to meet God in history in order to be part of God's history. It's the act itself that declares their faith. Not their intent but their behavior. Not their hope for the future but their willingness to take responsibility for the fate of their lives in the present. In both cases there is an undeniable urgency. Noah knows he's got a deadline. Though he may not know the exact moment he knows it's sooner rather than later and God means business. As for Miriam and Yocheved, they didn't wait for instructions from God at all. They figured out what to do themselves. "A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months. When she could hide him no longer, she got a wicker basket for him and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. And his sister stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him." Pharaoh's decree calls for the death of every Hebrew male child; mother and sister could hide a newborn but they can't conceal a toddler (as any of us who have tried can attest). Yet, the story of Moses we buy and the story of Noah we don't. At least not in the same way.

            When I say we buy it I mean we own it. We've made it part of our story. We can both read ourselves into it and read ourselves out of it. The baby in the bulrushes may be apocryphal but the purpose it serves is so essential we accept the story on its terms anyway. It helps us make sense out of who we are and how we came to be that way. It connects us to our past in a way that is compelling enough to sustain our disbelief It sustains that disbelief long enough for us to rediscover our faith and our purpose all over again. When we picture that little baby floating down the river in his flimsy craft and we know he's going to be saved we can almost picture ourselves doing the same thing under the same circumstances. At that moment we are reading ourselves into the story. We can almost imagine ourselves having that same faith, making that same desperate, though calculated, leap.

            And when we see the story as the foundational story of our history as a people it becomes the lens through which we view the world; we read ourselves out of it into the world beyond. We are able to relate to the world in a different way; we read ourselves out because we were able to relate to the story first on a personal level.

            We could read ourselves in. But how can we do that with Noah? How can we read ourselves in or read ourselves out? Build an ocean liner in our backyard on the basis of a two-minute conversation with God? Perhaps even an imagined conversation at that? Play amateur veterinarian for everything that creeps and crawls across the earth for almost a year inside a pitching, overcrowded, stinking boat? Live in a world with a God who could only find eight human beings worth saving when He's decided to wipe it all out? And then trust that He won't change His mind and dump you in the drink too? It's easier to do what I wanted to do, ignore the story.

            We've really made an art of that anyway. In turning the story of Noah and the ark into a children's story we have for all intents and purposes ignored it. We've infantilized it. Taken all the scary stuff out, all the really demanding stuff, and left ourselves instead with a Hallmark greeting card. You know the scene. We can all close our eyes and call it up: the endless line of animals patiently queuing in pairs while a serene Noah and Mrs. Noah (she doesn't get a name), watch from the deck like kindly zookeepers.

            Or, we see a tiny ark come to rest on a verdant hill with animals streaming off as Mr. and Mrs. Noah, eternally unflappable, stand on the deck still smiling. Most of us get upset when the kids walk through a dustpile we've just swept up. How well do you think we would have done on the ark?

            In our "Hallmark" version we never see the world that had become such a disastrous mistake God wanted a "do-over". We never see the effect of what is essentially a nuclear holocaust inside a tidal wave. We never see animals and human beings drowning, vast cities disappearing under water, the bloated carcasses of dead babies and cows bobbing in the waves.

            We never think about the despair of a God whose disappointment was so profound there was no question of warning the world of its impending destruction. His disgust and resolve were so thorough He had no misgivings about his decision.

            We never talk about a man so unswerving in his faith that he could build such an absurd vehicle. We could do midrash, for sure, and it might be wonderful to try later on.

            What were the conversations that Noah had with his neighbors? How come there weren't any stowaways? Just exactly how righteous was he? Not righteous enough to plead for his doomed brothers and sisters, but righteous enough to listen to God in the midst of the corruption surrounding him.

            Would we be able to hear God speaking to us under the same circumstances? And perhaps the biggest question of all, at least for me, why is the story there? Not is it true or not true but what's the point of including it? If we start to deal with the more difficult pieces of it what can the story say to us as human beings and as Jews today? How does it help us make sense out of who we are and how we ought to function in the world? How can we make it our story?

            One way is to understand it has a genealogical purpose. The Jewish strand of humanity descends from Shem, the first-born son of Noah. So when God saved humanity through a set of prototypes, He had a specific purpose in mind for Shem and that purpose leads directly to Abraham. The story tells us our salvation as a People has its roots in the salvation of humanity. We cannot detach our story from the story of humankind.

            The story also tells us something about the importance of religious ritual and our ability to create it. It contains the first complete recorded sacrifice. God destroys "Creation, Experiment 1" because corruption has spread from man to beast to bird to the very earth itself. The Flood is the cleansing mechanism and when the cleansing process is complete Noah, without any divine prompting, performs a sacrifice as his very first act. (I wonder what most of us would do after being cooped up on a boat for almost a year with a bunch of noisy, smelly animals and only our in-laws and their kids for company?)

            The first thing Noah does is perform a ritual. He builds an altar and thanks God by offering up at least one clean animal of every kind.

            Actually, once you get started it isn't that hard to read ourselves into Noah's story. It doesn't take much imagination at all to figure out what Noah and family have been doing while the world is under water. They don't exactly have a whole bunch of choices. Go to Blockbuster for a tape?

            But what do we think God has been doing? It's a little harder to imagine God. Was He beholding the Flood and saying, "This is good." Or worse, "This is very good." Perhaps God has done more thinking than watching and has used the time to reflect on both Himself and humankind?

            One thing is clear, God has accepted the notion that humanity has an evil impulse. Infants may do bad things but we don't hold them accountable for them. It's only when we're able to distinguish between right and wrong that we hold one another responsible for our actions and their consequences.

            Developmental psychology tells us we're unable to make that distinction until we're old enough to have a sense of self and other, a cognitive process that begins somewhere around the age of two, the time we universally acknowledge as the end of babyhood.

            God Himself makes the connection between youth, consciousness and the evil impulse, "Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man's mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done." (Genesis 8:21)

            In some ways this is the most powerful biblical expression we may find of man's ultimate autonomy and of God's acceptance of that autonomy. Man's evil impulse isn't something God can control. It derives from the condition of being human and it comes with our youth; the time we begin to discover the very quality that sets humanity apart from all the rest of God's creation: consciousness.

            So how did God come to understand humankind's evil impulse after wiping out 99.9% of the evidence? It could be a retrospective conclusion, or maybe He's been watching the family of the only righteous man He could find on the face of the planet. Or perhaps, just perhaps, He has come to the understanding by taking a good long look at Himself.

            Perhaps God regrets the catastrophic effect of his own impulsive decision. Perhaps God has witnessed, has come face to face with, His own capacity for evil and in so doing acknowledges that man, the only creature made in His image, must of necessity be capable of doing equally horrible things.

So how do we read ourselves into the story? We have to relate to Noah. With some work we can probably all do that to a greater or lesser degree. But once we're in the story how do we read ourselves out? I would suggest that although we get into the story through Noah, we get out of it through God.

            First, we have to believe that we are made in God's image. If we can accept that, then we know from the story that we get out the same way God does. We follow God's example.

            We must struggle like God to understand our capacities and then, like God, we must take responsibility for controlling them. The struggle to understand our capacities is the struggle to consciousness, the effort to control and limit them, a leap toward holiness. Isn't that what Judaism is about?

            Judaism is first a call to consciousness. Our liturgy, our texts, our laws all ask us to wake up, confront the world around us, see it as it is, see it as it might be and vow to be personally responsible for what we do about the things we see.

            The leap we must make is summoning the determination and the faith to transcend all in our nature that may prevent us from fulfilling God's holy purpose. That is what Torah and being Jewish is all about.

            In this story God makes the same journey. God does some serious soul-searching about His own capacities, understands they must have limits, makes a promise to limit them, and offers a permanent reminder of the promise He has made.

            It's no accident that a rainbow is chosen as the seal of that covenant. When do rainbows appear but at the end of storms? How might that sight, a supreme expression of the power of light, have reminded a God tempted to indulge His capacity for destruction in pursuit of His compulsive desire to get things right, once and for all? It's almost as if God knowing how sorely He may be tempted to keep the storm going chooses the loveliest most ephemeral thing imaginable to stick up in the sky, a permanent Post-It of His historic resolution.

            It seems that God like us not only has the capacity for evil but the tendency to forget His promises. Particularly the ones that are hard to keep. He knows enough about the capacity for evil and the impulse to act on it that any resolution needs something permanent and visual to safeguard it. Think of it. It wasn't enough for God to make the statement. Dayenu. He had to seal it with a rainbow.

            So here's the real reason the story scares me. We haven't read ourselves out of it yet. We're still stuck in the story. Perhaps because it's unfinished, incomplete.

            Who ever heard of a unilateral covenant a one-way agreement? God spoke and we never responded. For that matter we never even acknowledged we'd heard the original promise. This wasn't an agreement established with a people but a promise made to a traumatized remnant of humanity just recovering from seeing the entire world swallowed up around them. What could they have said? "Um, gee. Thanks, God. Uhhh. Same goes for us?"

            I'm sure they weren't feeling overwhelmed by their power at the moment, but awestruck by God's. Simply grateful, stunned and perhaps guilty at being alive. What would any promise they have made meant at the time? How binding could it possibly have been under the circumstances?

            Or maybe it's incomplete because God had not yet figured out how to close the deal? It takes until Sinai for God to understand that a true covenant requires the buy-in of both parties. Still it cries out for closure. "The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky - everything with which the earth is astir - and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand."

            Every living thing will quake in our presence just because we might eat it or have dominion over it? Nonsense. A pride of lions can devour a handful of men. A herd of elephants will go where it wishes. A swarm of locusts can wipe out an entire harvest.

            No. Every living thing quakes and lives in fear because one day we would discover our Godlike capacity to destroy the world and we never made any promise that we wouldn't. We still haven't. Will we like God have to do it once in order to regret the consequences or can we learn from God's example and know that since we are made in God's image we have both the capacity to do it and the capacity to refrain from it?

            I think it is only in recent generations that we have made this a children's story, for it is only in recent generations that we have come to understand how much of a children's story it isn't.

            It frightens me because it speaks to my deepest childhood terror of being vaporized in a mushroom cloud that would instantly destroy everything I knew and loved. It calls out to me as a citizen of the late twentieth century, the century of the disappearing ozone layer, overpopulation, global starvation, and the disappearance of the rainforests - all the result of our irresponsible stewardship of the stunning gift we've been given.

            I fear the power we have precisely because we are made in God's image. I fear the "devisings of our mind from our youth." I fear I am not righteous enough in my generation to do what needs to be done to confront this capacity; to know it own it and subdue it. I fear this unfinished story for we haven't figured out how to read ourselves out of it and if we don't it may be the last story we ever hear.

            But I also know from this story, and from the story of Exodus, that I come from the tradition of the tevah. It is not for me to sit back and wallow in my fear, hoping that somehow or other God or someone else will save me from it. I have to use the materials at hand to create an ark that will float us safely into the next generation.

            It won't be wicker or gopher wood for we don't have to float in water anymore, nor be reborn through it. Now the materials might be words and deeds, for we have to navigate through history which judges by word and deed alone.

            There is a third time in Torah when we build an ark. By then, it is an aron and we build it cooperatively to exacting divine specifications. Nothing's left to chance. Down to the last thread and stone it is defined.

            But I think this time, re: Miriam and Yocheved, we're on our own. There will be no divine intervention, no directives delivered from on high.

            Besides, we were given everything we needed thousands of years ago. Our tevah is Torah, for it tells us all we need to know and more than we can do. It tells us what we should say and what we should do to be God's partners in finishing the work of creation: hallowing life and defending against the impulse to destroy it in the pursuit of either perfection or evil.

            Torah, if we can listen above the noise of the times, ignore all the bright and gaudy distractions, will speak directly to us; as clearly as God spoke to Noah. It will help us to be "righteous before God in our generation" - righteous enough to find a way to deal with this story, righteous enough to read ourselves out of the story after we've read ourselves in.

            And God said, "I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters will never again become a flood to destroy all flesh."

            God signed his side of the covenant and he kept his promise. He read himself out of the story. We cannot read ourselves out of the story until we do the same.

            When will we sign the covenant between ourselves and God's earth? What will we use to seal it? How long will we keep our promise? Y