The Blogs: After the rainbow: Our test as American Jews

Rachel Goldberg is getting remarried.

Last year, I wrote about her husband, Rabbi Avi Goldberg of blessed memory — a reservist and beloved educator who fell in Lebanon.

This year, she’s engaged.

Rachel isn’t superhuman, and she isn’t unscarred. Yet her choice to love and risk again captures the quiet grace we’ve seen in so many across Israel since October 7: people who mourn and rebuild, who keep choosing life

It’s the faith Noah, the central character of this week’s Torah portion, could not find after the flood.

We bless our children to be like Ephraim and Menashe, like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. But no Jewish parent says, “Be like Noah.”

There’s something uneasy about him—he’s not a villain, but not quite a hero either.

We American Jews need to understand why. Because right now we’re at risk of repeating his mistake.

Think of Noah’s life in three acts.

Before the flood, he’s righteous.

During the flood, he saves humanity and every animal species.

After the flood, he plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and shames himself before his children. The man who had saved the world can no longer live in it.

Consider what he endured: humanity decayed and destroyed, 120 years building an ark, 40 days and nights of endless labor in the flood.

Then, after a year waiting for the waters to recede, Noah finally steps out. God offers him the covenant of the rainbow: I will never again send a flood.

Here’s my theory about what went wrong after this:

Noah misunderstood. He saw the rainbow as permission to rest. The world is safe now. The struggle is over. He could finally exhale.

But life after the flood still demanded work — hard, messy work. Building a civilization. Managing family tensions. Dealing with his own trauma and his sons’ dysfunction.

The world still needed tending.

Noah wasn’t ready for that kind of struggle. He’d prepared his whole life for catastrophe — for survival, for rescue — but he had no framework for the slower, subtler work of living after disaster.

That’s the trap: when we believe we’ve reached safety, we lose the capacity to face what comes next. The expectation of ease weakens the very muscles that help us endure.

So Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, and ended his story naked and humiliated.

Now compare him to his descendant Abraham, who understood God’s promise differently.

As Jon D. Levenson writes in Inheriting Abraham, Abraham’s covenant “does not guarantee freedom from adversity or a life without suffering…. To the contrary, the adversity and suffering are now included” within the covenantal promise.

That difference— between the illusion of ‘happily ever after safety’ and the discipline of endurance—is not just theological. It’s civilizational.

Noah’s failure wasn’t that he gave up. It’s that he thought he could. And that’s exactly where American Jews find ourselves today.

* * *

For decades, we American Jews have lived under our own rainbow. We never called it that, but we acted as if safety were permanent — secured through liberalism, tolerance, and memory of the Holocaust.

The postwar order. The civil-rights coalition. Social acceptance. We thought we’d finally earned Jewish safety, the so called American Jewish exceptionalism.

We were so confident in it that we stopped worrying about antisemitism altogether.

Consider this: The 2013 Pew study on Jewish American didn’t even include questions about antisemitism. Jewish leaders at the time told the research director the questions weren’t needed.

So we stopped teaching our children how to fight — because we thought the fight was over.

Then the waters rose again.

October 7th — and every day since. Campus protests. The silence from friends. Jew-hatred explosively amplified by social media algorithms. The realization that our alliances were conditional, our safety negotiable. We were shocked.

But here’s what we must understand for the work ahead: the comfort we achieved didn’t just dull our vigilance; it erased it. Comfort can make courage feel unnecessary — until it’s too late.

Many Israelis, by contrast, never thought the fight was over. They built a state knowing they would likely have to, tragically, live by the sword.

Their children learn to fight not as a contingency, but as a given, and to sing, even when welcoming captives coming home, that “the people of eternity are not afraid of a long road.”

Rachel Goldberg embodies what Noah forgot: that covenants aren’t promises of ease; they’re invitations to purpose. Resilience isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the refusal to let pain become life itself.

The rainbow was a test Noah failed.

The question for American Jews is whether we’ll fail it too.

Will we keep planting vineyards in a diaspora we mistake for Zion? Or will we learn what Abraham knew—that Jewish life has never been about safety, but about purpose, agency, and the daily choice to build, to fight, and to resist the seduction of rest?

The world that believed in our rainbow is gone. The challenges are already here.

In New York, we may soon have a new mayor who, when first asked, could not bring himself to say that Hamas should disarm — a man many of us believe poses a genuine threat to Jewish well-being.

Facing that, and all it represents, means rebuilding our muscles for struggle. There is no happily ever after. There never was.

To be a Jew is to struggle — not bitterly, but faithfully. We live, rejoice, and insist on Jewish joy, knowing the covenant never promised ease. Our task is not to wait for safety, but to choose life.

Not because it’s easy.

Because the covenant demands it.