Embrace the Rainbow
Much ink has been spilled, and many voices have grown hoarse, over the LGBTQ+ community’s use of the rainbow as a symbol of its journey and the colors of its flag.
What chutzpah, some say, for “those people” to appropriate this covenantal sign! Their godlessness and promiscuity, the argument goes, brought on the Flood in the days of Noah (see Rashi on Gen. 6:13, keitz kol basar, drawing on Midrash Rabbah). And now they pervert God’s message to humankind once again?!
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, the father of German Neo-Orthodoxy and of Torah im Derech Eretz, and in my opinion one of the most prescient commentators ever, seems to offer an answer to the righteously indignant. His comment on Genesis 9:15 follows (translated from the Hebrew):
Perhaps there is an even closer connection between the colors of the rainbow and all that has been said. From now on, God’s governance will take this form: whatever the future paths of humanity’s development, God will never again decree destruction upon the human race. Rather, on the basis of the great diversity within human existence, He will educate humanity toward the divine goal.
The rainbow is, at its root, one uniform and complete ray of light in its pure form, refracted into seven colors: from the red ray, nearest the light, to the violet ray, farthest from the light and merging with darkness. Yet all are kinds of light, and together they form a single white ray shining in full purity.
This hints that the infinite variety of living individuals and species, from Adam, the “red” one (see the comment on 1:26), closest to God, down to the lowliest form of life, the worm, “every living soul in all flesh”, and especially the broad spectrum of the human spirit, from the person of lofty, refined spirituality to the coarse person in whom one can scarcely discern more than a small spark of divinity, are all united by God in a shared bond of peace. In each of them is a refraction of a ray of God’s spirit, and even those lowest in spirituality, farthest from the light, are “children of light.”
Hence our Sages liken the different ranks of the righteous to different shades of light, from the brilliant light of the sun to the dim light of the lamp in the Sanctuary. All of it is light, revealed in different hues: “Seven classes of the righteous… their faces resemble the sun, the moon, the firmament, lightning, stars, roses, and the menorah of the Temple” (Yalkut Shimoni, Emor 651).
The Flood argument is the one Hirsch sets aside. In his reading, the rainbow means God will never again decree destruction, and will instead educate humanity “on the basis of the great diversity within human existence.” The answer to human difference is education, not annihilation.
That lesson applies to all of humanity, and it binds the Jewish community most of all. We are the people who read the biblical narrative as an ideal and an imperative for how to live Jewishly today. The Flood is not ancient history to us; it is a text we are commanded to learn from. If the Torah’s own story of the rainbow teaches that God answers human diversity with education and a bond of peace, then Jewish communities are the first places where that teaching must be lived.
I love the irony of this comment, rooted as it is in midrashic interpretation and scientific knowledge. Those who champion Hirsch while deriding LGBTQ+ people in the name of God and Torah will have a hard time explaining why his words don’t apply.
Hirsch obviously wasn’t speaking of the LGBTQ+ community, and he might well have struggled to accept them in his own. Still, his effort to bridge the Jewish and “secular” worlds that were colliding in nineteenth-century Germany succeeded, and his Torah lives on.
It isn’t a big leap to apply his lesson today. I like to imagine him seeing the rainbow flag and exclaiming:
“Yes! The rainbow is the perfect symbol for the LGBTQ+ community! It reminds the rest of us that every creature contains the Pure Light, and that without all the colors of the rainbow, the Light would be lacking in its purity and humanity would lose out. Let us welcome them into our communities and learn from their values in ways that can enlighten us all.”
The rainbow is not a symbol the LGBTQ+ community appropriated. It is the symbol the Torah handed them first and it behooves us to remember that only by embracing “every color” can we achieve the “one light” of God.
