Noach
Genesis 6:9-11:32
Isaiah 54:1-55:5
The Torah tells the mythic tale of a time when the earth grew so filled with evil that God decided to destroy it. All life on earth would be annihilated, including all living beings except those needed to propagate their species. How would God choose the one human family through whom the new human race would be generated? In short, what sort of person was Noah?
The Torah text tells us, in characteristically tantalizing style. “Noah was a righteous man; he was whole-hearted (tamim ) in his generations; Noah walked with God.” (“et haElohim hithalech Noach”) (Genesis 6:9).
What a fascinating description, but does it tell us what we want to know? Who was Noah? What would it take to be the person to break the news of mass destruction to one’s family and to make the real-life preparations for Armageddon? What qualified Noah for this unimaginable task?
The classical biblical commentators, not surprisingly, are fascinated by these questions. They immediately note the unusual description “whole-hearted in his generations.”
Rashi summarizes a long literary debate, saying that some view this phrase as a great compliment. A person who could live as a tzaddik, or righteous person, in a time of utter depravity would have shone even brighter in easier times.
Others see the description as a qualifier. Noah was righteous, by comparison to others of his time, but might have seemed merely average in better times.
The commentators also note that Noah was described as walking alongside God, while God commanded Abraham to “walk before Me.”
Why the difference? Again, Rashi summarizes many views in a brief comment: “Noah needed support [i.e., needed God to walk with him] but Abraham could find his own strength and walk in righteousness on his own.”
These debates, I think, are more than mere literary play. In fact, they are even more than exercises in character analysis. Everyone who has closely engaged this classic text must ask what sort of person could have done the superhuman work of serving as the bridge from a world destroyed to a world rebuilt.
God had to find a person who would believe the voice of the Divine in his life, even when the voice called out unspeakable and unbelievable things. This person would have to find people to share his vision and maintain the strength of his convictions in the face of enormous ridicule. He would have to perform Herculean creative tasks — building an ark, gathering the animals, shepherding the family — on the basis of a call from this invisible God, all without any tangible sign that the predicted calamity would come. Then, I imagine, this person would be the one to whom all would turn during the long, unimaginably dark weeks and months in the ark.
I find this description particularly compelling in our own time. We do not face the destruction of our world as we know it, at least not imminently. But we do live in a time of enormous violence and immorality, tragically far from our vision of how the world is supposed to be. And we have recently witnessed a series of natural disasters in rapid succession that in other times would surely have been understood as a message from the cosmos.
What does it take of us to live in this time and to “walk with God,” to place ourselves in partnership with the forces of goodness, creativity and peace, rather than the forces of violence, depravity and chaos?
What sort of faith do we need to continue to believe in our vision of a more perfect world? How can we sustain this vision, and continue to act wisely, in the presence of so much contrary evidence? How do we cultivate faith and patience, and choose good partners in the work of repairing a very broken world?
May the story of Noah help us deepen our knowledge that each of us can contribute to the creation of a better world.