Après le déluge
Every year, when we read the story of Noah, I’m amazed at how the tale hits just a little bit differently. From nursery school, when we sang at the top of our lungs about the “ark-y ark-y,” to years spent wondering how we were supposed to imagine the ark itself could even have been built, the narrative is reinvented. There are years when I ponder the lessons learned from a God so furious at humanity that the only remedy is its near total destruction. And years when I am left hoping that, despite ourselves, we will be granted a second, if undeserved, chance.
This year, though. This year I am in a constant state of worry, or existential dread, over what happens next. After the flood. Après le déluge. All through the last two years of the war, it has been incredibly painful to watch the American Jewish community on the brink of all out war with itself, only to pull back with a loud chorus of — but the hostages! — an appeal to a more urgent goal that we could nearly all agree on.
Now that we, thank God, no longer have this national tragedy to bind us together, now that the prospect of a longer term ceasefire is in the offing, will we be able to talk to one another? To pray side by side? Will we be able to be in community with fellow Jews who have, for the last two years, expressed ideas that are abhorrent to who we believe ourselves to be?
When I was a teenager, if I heard Noah’s name, the Spotify that lives (subscription fee free) in my head would play Matti Caspi’s song of the same name. In the last verse, the animals are asking Noah to let them out of the ark. They are tiring of each other. The enchantment that kept them from eating their roommates seems to be wearing off. The honeymoon, or more accurately, the collective trauma, is nearing its end, and they want to return to their inherent nature.
Recently, I have spoken to a number of people who left their lifelong communities because of differences over Israel. I’ve had countless conversations about who people will have around their shabbos tables, who they can tolerate sitting next to in shul. Who should be allowed to be “inside” in our summer camps, our day schools, our college campuses. Rabbis afraid to speak up because they fear losing their jobs. Rabbis who speak with such force that congregants who disagree are made to feel like strangers in their own homes. Jews cutting off family members over political beliefs.
Don’t get me wrong. Two Jews, three opinions, right? With the exception of a very few closed communities, we love to debate. To argue. To fight, even. Cooperatively interrupting when we absolutely need to make a winning point. My own family dinner table is a shining example of such behavior, which only rarely results in someone running from said table in frustration, possibly tears.
But we’re a family. We’re stuck with each other. So, even if there are hurt feelings, we have to figure out who needs to apologize, who needs to do better. We lick our wounds, and move on.
Maybe it’s the internet, where cruelty can hide behind avatars, and there is no repentance. Maybe it’s the muscle memory of the pandemic, which provided a daily workout for our anxiety, allowing it to grow stronger in new and creative ways. Maybe it’s the aftermath of October 7th, and the increase in antisemitism, fear blinding people from seeing the pain in someone else’s face. Maybe it’s the way a certain politician talks, berating anyone who disagrees with him, burning bridges like so many unattended pieces of toast, with little regret.
Whatever the cause, the result is a community where children can’t talk to parents, where neighbors avoid one another in fear of ideas they disagree with. Where our ever-narrowing ideas about what it looks like to be a “proper” Jew leave so many on the outside, peering longingly, angrily through the glass.
The parasha about Noah ends with a seemingly disconnected story, the tale of the Tower of Babel. The story has many interpretations, but, at its core, it is about people trying to get closer to the Divine. Since they all speak the same language, have the same culture, they are able to agree on building a tower so high that God takes notice. Whether they are getting too close to the truth, or too far away, is never clear. But God destroys the tower, and the monoculture that has created it, gifting them with (condemning them to?) a world where we often don’t understand one another.
Some Jews will believe Bibi makes Israel vastly more secure, and some will march in the streets against him, believing he threatens Israel’s very existence. Some communities will have barriers to entry, and some will practice radical inclusion. Some young Jews will campaign against Mamdani, and many more will likely vote for him. Some of us will live as a Diaspora with Israel at its center, and others will understand our prayers about Zion as a metaphor for a yearning we will forever have, a thirst we will never slake.
At this fraught moment in our history, there is one thing we can be sure of. The Tower of Babel teaches us that we can none of us be certain we know what God wants of us. In fact, the story seems to say, stop trying to build a tower up to something you will never be able to truly understand. Instead, in all of our messy language and disagreements and anger and self-righteousness, we should have been spending our time building bridges all along.
