Five Years of Blogging: Parashat Noah, From the Flood to the Work of Repair

This is my fifth-year writing about parashat Noah. I began blogging in 2022, in the midst of COVID, when writing became a form of escape. But with parashat Noah, something changed: I began writing every week, without fail. Each year, I returned to the same biblical story, but I found myself asking different questions, shaped by the world I was living in.

This year, an unexpected discovery brought me back to Noah’s wife. While teaching from the pseudepigraphal Book of Jubilees (Sefer ha-Yovlim), I discovered something I had not known: Noah’s wife actually has a name in this text—Amzara, daughter of Rakiel, and Noah’s niece (Jubilees 5:28). I had often taught about Mrs. Noah, who remains unnamed in the biblical account, although rabbinic tradition usually identifies her as Na’amah. Now I encountered another name in another ancient retelling of the story.

My immediate reaction was: Why not write about Noah’s wife again? Then I remembered that I had already written about her. Looking back at my previous blogs, I realized that the story of Noah has become a kind of mirror, reflecting not only the biblical text but also the anxieties, moral dilemmas, and tragedies of our own time.

Over five years, I have moved from the 2022 elections, to the horror of the Flood and the fate of those left outside the ark, to Noah’s unquestioning obedience to God, to the experience of the residents of Kissufim finding refuge in Omer, and finally to the contrast between Hanoch, who was taken up by God, and Noah, who remained in the world to rebuild it. And now I have returned to Noah’s wife. Perhaps the question connecting all five years is this: Who is seen, and who remains invisible, in a story of destruction and survival?

2022: Noah’s Ark Is Not a Children’s Story

My niece asked whether I planned to write about Noah’s ark and connect it to the COVID lockdown. For most people, lockdown was a horrifying experience, but Noah’s story is even more disturbing.

I imagine the screaming and panic of those left behind, the desperate attempts to survive, and the terrible knowledge that Noah and his family were saved while their friends and neighbors drowned. The Torah’s lengthy descriptions of the ark and its provisions can make the story seem almost quaint. But behind those details lies an appalling account of mass destruction.

The JPS translation makes the account more palatable by using the passive voice: all living creatures on dry land died, and existence was blotted out (Genesis 7:21–23). But who did the blotting out? Robert Alter’s translation makes the answer unmistakable: God wiped out all living things, from human beings to animals and birds. The Hebrew va-yimach connects the Flood to God’s earlier declaration that He would erase the human beings He had created (Genesis 6:7), and to the language of erasing Amalek (Exodus 17:14).

Noah’s ark is not a charming children’s story about cute animals entering two by two. It is a horror story. When I teach the Flood, I show my classes the disturbing video The Other Side of the Story, which portrays a squirrel mother and father leaving their young behind to die. It forces us to imagine the suffering of those who were not chosen to be saved.

I am also troubled by the disappearance of Noah’s wife into the background. Although she presumably helped care for the ark and its inhabitants, the Torah says nothing about her contribution. Midrash ha-Gadol, interpreting the woman of valor, credits Noah’s wife with helping make her husband righteous and suggests that she and her daughters-in-law were morally superior to the people of their generation (Midrash ha-Gadol on Eshet Hayil).

Elsewhere, the rabbis identify Noah’s wife as Naamah, sister of Tuval-Cain. One tradition associates her name with pleasant deeds; another portrays her playing music in the worship of other gods (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 4:22). Even after she is given a name, her reputation remains ambiguous.

Imagine her experience during the Flood. She watches friends and neighbors perish, has no time to mourn, and is confined for months in a vessel full of wild animals. Afterwards, she must begin life again with her husband, neither of them young. The biblical story gives us little sense of what this meant for her.

The Haftarah offers a more comforting perspective. Isaiah compares God’s promise never again to flood the earth with God’s promise that His loyalty to Israel will not be shaken (Isaiah 54:9–10). Yet there is an irony: God makes this promise after Noah sacrifices some of the surviving animals and birds. God then declares that He will never again destroy every living being, even though humanity remains inclined toward evil (Genesis 8:20–22).

Can we trust a God whose promises seem to depend on human behavior? We are still living through war and a global climate crisis. I wish there were easy answers and that humanity could redeem itself before another catastrophe overtakes us. Otherwise, as the French saying goes, après moi, le déluge—after me, the flood.

2023: To Be or Not to Be—Noah and the Existential Question

The following year, I asked whether to write at all. I realized that I write these blogs as much for myself as for my readers.

It was shortly after October 7th , and we were living through despair, confusion, anxiety, and, at times, pride in the face of an overwhelming tragedy. Many of us knew people who had suffered terrible losses. One particularly heartbreaking story concerned a grandfather who was relieved that his granddaughter had died rather than endure captivity. I thought about the elderly residents of the communities near Gaza who had to decide whether to leave their homes. Some stayed, but many had no real choice as the area became a war zone.

These experiences made the story of Noah and the destruction of the world painfully immediate. Why would God destroy a creation that He had declared not merely good but very good?

Genesis attributes God’s decision to the wickedness of humanity: human thoughts and plans had become evil (Genesis 6:5). The Torah says that God regretted creating humankind and was grieved by what He had made. The Hebrew root נחם (n-ḥ-m) is striking because it is also associated with consolation, as in Isaiah’s call to comfort God’s people (Genesis 6:6–7; Isaiah 40:1).

Noah, meanwhile, finds favor in God’s eyes. He is described as righteous, blameless in his generation, and as someone who walked with God (Genesis 6:8–9). But what kind of righteousness does Noah represent? When God tells him that all flesh will be destroyed because the earth is filled with lawlessness, Noah does not protest (Genesis 6:11–13).

This silence troubles me.

How different Noah is from Abraham. When God announces the impending destruction of Sodom, Abraham challenges Him: surely the innocent must not be swept away with the guilty. Such an outcome would be a desecration of divine justice—ḥalilah lekha, “far be it from You” (Genesis 18:23–25).

The rabbis repeatedly distinguish Noah, who was righteous in his generation, from Abraham, whose righteousness was of a different order. This distinction raises a difficult contemporary question: when we face an enemy that threatens our very existence, can we justify destroying everything in its path without considering innocent civilians? How do we defend ourselves without allowing hatred to govern our actions?

Even when survival is at stake, we must pause, ask questions, and confront the moral consequences of our decisions.

The Flood thus became more than a biblical story for me. It became a question about how we behave when we believe that our survival is at stake.

2024: Kissufim Finds Refuge in Omer, a Modern-Day Ark

In my third year of writing about Noah, I focused on the residents of Kibbutz Kissufim, many of whom came to live temporarily in Omer after the October 7th attack. At least 18 members of the kibbutz were killed, and numerous buildings were destroyed. Seventy-eight housing units were constructed in Omer as part of the temporary arrangements for displaced families.

I befriended a young woman whose brother had been murdered on October 7th, and through her I came to know the community. Most members have since returned home, only about 45 minutes by car from Omer. That proximity itself is frightening: what happened “there” was so close to us.

The name Kissufim means longing or yearning, a poignant name for people longing to return home. In our prayers, when we put the Torah scrolls back in the ark, we say ḥadesh yamenu ke-kedem—renew our days as of old. If only we could return to an Eden before the Flood.

The residents’ sojourn in Omer was much longer than forty days and forty nights. But for a time, they were together and had a place of refuge. Omer became a modern-day Noah’s ark.

Rabbi Tali Adler, in “Surviving the Flood,” suggests that we ask the wrong questions about the Flood. There is no human achievement or moral merit that can outweigh the horrors people inflict upon one another. Humanity continues not because it deserves to, but because God makes a promise. The rainbow represents hope: even when humanity is at its worst, there will be a future.

Yet the promise has a disturbing side. God will not start over, destroying the wicked to create a new world for one righteous man and his descendants. Instead, victims and perpetrators must continue to inhabit the same world, and their descendants must find ways to share it.

Today, we are desperately waiting for a rainbow at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps eventually necessity will force us to confront the painful reality that we must find a way to live in the same world as those who perpetrated such horrors.

2025: Hanoch and Noah—Two Ways of Walking with God

My fourth blog took me away from the Flood itself and toward Hanoch, known as Enoch in English. His brief appearance in the genealogies of Genesis intrigued me. His name, Ḥanokh (חנוך), contains the letters of ḥen (חן), meaning grace or favor; it also contains the letters of Noaḥ (נח) when the first two letters are reversed. The connection seemed fitting because the previous parashah ends by telling us that Noah found favor in God’s eyes, while this week’s text describes Noah as someone who walked with God.

Only two people in Genesis are explicitly described in these terms: Hanoch and Noah. The Torah says that Hanoch walked with God and then disappeared because God took him (Genesis 5:24). Noah, by contrast, is described as righteous and blameless and as walking with God (Genesis 6:9).

What does it mean to walk with God? Abraham receives a different instruction: to walk before God and be blameless (Genesis 17:1).

According to Bereshit Rabbah, Hanoch was sometimes righteous and sometimes wicked, and God removed him while he was still righteous, before he could decline morally (25:1). Later mystical traditions transform him into Metatron, an exalted heavenly figure. His path is one of ascent and transcendence.

Noah’s path is different. He builds an ark, cares for living creatures, endures the storm, survives, and begins again. Rashi, comparing him with Abraham, suggests that Noah needed divine support, whereas Abraham could walk before God independently (Rashi on Genesis 6:9). Nechama Leibowitz develops this contrast as a difference in moral maturity: walking with God may mean relying on God, while walking before God involves initiative, courage, and the willingness to argue for justice.

Other commentators emphasize Noah’s integrity in a corrupt generation. Ramban and Sforno understand his walking with God as moral steadfastness. Malbim contrasts Noah’s active righteousness with Hanoch’s more inward purity. The Sfat Emet similarly contrasts Hanoch’s spiritual separation from the world with Noah’s service of God within the material world.

Rav Kook presents Hanoch as the saint who ascends and Noah as the saint who repairs the world (Orot HaKodesh; Midbar Shur). The Aish Kodesh, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, writing during the Holocaust, makes Noah a model of spiritual survival in catastrophe: the task is to continue walking with God even when the world is drowning.

These readings speak to our own time. There are those who long to ascend, imagining that transcendence, sacrifice, or even destruction will bring them closer to God. And there are those who choose to stay, build, nurture, protect, and repair. They find holiness not by escaping the world but by remaining beside others and doing the work of life.

Noah is far from perfect. After the Flood, he becomes drunk and fails to become the kind of moral challenger Abraham will be. But he survives, plants a vineyard, and helps humanity begin again. Survival itself can be a form of faith.

This contrast is especially meaningful in Israel today, where emigration has increased amid security concerns and political, economic, and social challenges. I do not criticize those who leave; I understand them; I have a daughter who left. Their decisions lead me to ask: Is holiness about climbing upward and escaping the world, or about remaining rooted in its mess and doing the difficult work of tikkun olam, repairing the world?

In an age of zealotry and despair, Noah’s path reminds us that holiness need not mean abandoning a broken world. It can mean refusing to give up on it.

2026: Amzara—The Woman in Noah’s Ark

And so I return, for the fifth time, to parashat Noah.

This year, while teaching from the Book of Jubilees (Sefer ha-Yovlim), I discovered that Noah’s wife has a name: Amzara, daughter of Rakiel and, according to this ancient text, Noah’s niece (Jubilees 5:28). The Bible gives her no name. Rabbinic tradition usually calls her Naamah. Now I  encounter another name, tucked away in an ancient retelling of the story.

Who was Amzara? What difference does it make that an ancient author gave Noah’s wife a name? And why has this woman, who presumably helped care for the ark and its inhabitants, remained so invisible in the biblical narrative?

Perhaps the name Amzara is simply a detail in an ancient retelling. But for me, it opens up a larger question: Who gets remembered in a story of destruction and survival, and who disappears into the background?

Noah occupies center stage, celebrated as the righteous man who saved humanity. But what of the woman who shared his ordeal? What did she feel as the world drowned around her? What did it mean to survive, to lose an entire generation, and then to begin life again?

The Flood has become, for me, much more than a story about divine punishment and human wickedness. Over five years, it has raised questions about the morality of destruction, the responsibility to challenge authority, the experience of displacement, and the meaning of spiritual life in a damaged world.

Noah obeys God and saves life, but Abraham teaches us that righteousness may also require protest. The residents of Kissufim remind us that refuge and community can sustain people through catastrophe. Hanoch offers the possibility of transcendence, while Noah represents the harder work of remaining in the world and rebuilding it. And Amzara reminds us that even those who seem to stand at the center of a catastrophe may disappear from the story.

The rainbow promises that God will not destroy the world again. It does not promise that human beings will stop destroying one another. That responsibility remains ours. I began blogging before the fateful election that brought the present government to power in 2022, and now, two weeks before the next election, I find myself returning to the same question: what kind of world do we want to create? Let us hope that this time we choose more wisely. And let us keep in mind what it means to walk with God: not to ascend above the world, but to remain in it, helping to keep the ark afloat.