Parashat Noach Chanting

Plaut p. 64

The story of Noah is one that, despite the folk songs and the kiddie art of giraffes and elephants poking out of the side of a boat, challenges us profoundly. What does it mean that Noah was righteous in his generation? What does it mean that the world was full of violence? What does it mean that the only way to silence that violence was the mabul, the drowning of the world, leaving nothing left alive that was not on that te’evah, that ark?

All of those are all good and important questions, and it is right to focus our attention on them, on the question of ‘what if’: what if Noah objected as Abraham and Moses do? What if there was another way? But that is not how the story unfolds. That is not our text.

It unfolds as we remember, and with God promising to never again destroy the world, placing God’s Keshet, the Divine bow, the rainbow, in the sky, pointed away from the world. It is a beautiful image, of course, one full of hope for a better time. But as God puts the weapons away, metaphorically, it raises another question for us. What do we need to do to do the same? How do we put the weapons away in our interactions with one another?

So many have commented on how we as a society and individuals speak about each other has resorted to the language of enemies and allies. You are either with me or against me, and if you are not with me, you must be my enemy. This is about our politics, of course, about Israel, but increasingly about everything else. Our disagreements have led to a sense of existential dread. And I get it. We are living in a time when civility feels like a luxury, when justice and freedom and even the very nature we dwell in feel under threat, and where we as Jews have agonized over our place in the world, a place that we felt—that we hoped—was more secure than it was. And it is good to lift up our voices in civil disobedience. But we have reached a point where we are, pardon the comparison, drowning in our own assumption of ill-will and hostility in others, and rather than put our weapons down, we go through the litany of what-ifs, as if we could rewrite the past. But we cannot. What has happened has happened. How do we put the weapons away? How can we return to seeing the other as something other than “other”?

My teacher R’ Tali Adler teaches that Jonah—who shares his name with the Dove who brings evidence of the receding waters—is consumed by the ‘what if’ of God not promising to not blot out injustice, no matter the price. And for those who see this world consumed by pain and violence, who want, as she writes, a grand accounting, then the story of the rainbow is, effectively, unsatisfying. But if we can see the world as God does, and see it full of individuals, not faceless entities, trying to make a life and a purpose under the heavens, who struggle with what the right action is, who, in their humanity, make mistakes all the time and strive to move forward anyway, Then the Rainbow becomes a sign of God’s grace, and a model for ours as well. So let me ask again, what will it take to put our own metaphorical weapons away, so that we can see the world—so that we can see each other—with chesed, despite all that is wrong. That is what the Rainbow reminds us to do. May we find a way. Amen.