How to Stay Open Amid Division
Sometimes the flood doesn’t come all at once. It comes as a slow rising—the waters of change, of loss, of exhaustion and uncertainty—until one day we realize we’re already ankle-deep.
Parashat Noach begins there, at the moment when rising waters meet a human heart. Each of us, in some way, knows what it is to live through rising waters—when the familiar dissolves and we’re not sure what will hold. The story of Noah is not only about surviving the storm, but about learning how to make an opening inside it.
Before the first drop fell, Noah must have already sensed what was coming—the slow unmaking of the world he knew. How would he stay connected to life as everything around him was preparing to dissolve? Into that vast uncertainty, God offered a single instruction that feels, even now, both mysterious and tender: צֹהַר תַּעֲשֶׂה לַתֵּבָה — “Make a tzohar in the ark.”
Our commentators have long puzzled over this verse. What was this tzohar that Noah was commanded to make? Rashi offers two possibilities: a window letting in light, or a precious stone that glowed from within. Ramban notes that the same root connects to zohar (radiance) and sohar (prison). The ark, he suggests, holds both illumination and limitation. Taken together, these voices sketch the paradox of refuge—the tension between protection and confinement, safety and stagnation. The very structure that shields us can also become what traps us. Every vessel—whether ark, word, or idea—must find a way to breathe.
We might think this story is ancient, but the question it raises is urgent: How do we stay open—to one another, to complexity, to life itself—when the world around us is closing in? We live in a time when our social fabric, like Noah’s world, feels waterlogged—heavy with outrage, rigid with certainty. Public discourse has become a series of sealed boxes. Our words, designed to connect us, so often become weapons or walls.
The Hebrew word teva offers another way in. In Torah it names the ark itself, but in later Hebrew it also means “word.” Tevat Noach—Noah’s ark—can also be heard as Noah’s word. The verse, then, isn’t only about survival; it’s about speech. It asks what kind of words we build—and whether they have room for air, for uncertainty, for life to move through. It invites us to make our words more like arks: strong enough to hold what matters, yet open enough to breathe. Words that leave space for curiosity and doubt stay connected to the living world, open to what lies beyond our own knowing.
Openings like these take many forms: a question that leans forward instead of closing in, a pause that lets breath return to the conversation, or a story that doesn’t resolve, trusting meaning to keep unfolding. Such openings invite participation. They create space for another voice to enter—for imagination, disagreement, or wonder. They remind us that understanding grows in the fertile gap between what is said and what is still waiting to be spoken.
After commanding Noah to make an opening, God adds a striking detail: the entrance should be placed on the side of the ark—el tzidah. It’s as if to say: openings rarely appear in the center of things. They come from the edges—from the places where inside meets outside, where perspective shifts. That same wisdom applies to speech. The most life-giving words don’t come head-on, but slantwise—through story, metaphor, and humility. Emily Dickinson said it best: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies.” In a culture that prizes sharp takes and fast answers, Torah reminds us that truth is rarely direct. It moves sideways, listens at the edges, and reveals itself only through relationship.
We live in our own age of flood: rising seas, rising fear, rising certainty. Like Noah, we are building vessels—communities, movements, stories, prayers—to carry life through the storm. And in our time, tzohar ta’aseh la-teva still calls to us: Make openings. Openings for conversation, for nuance, for contradiction. Openings for other voices—human and more-than-human—to add their wisdom. Openings in ourselves, our hearts, for what we do not yet understand.
When the rains finally stop, Noah opens the teva once more—through a chalon, a window. Many commentators understand this as the same tzohar he was commanded to make at the beginning: the single opening that once let the world in now becomes the way life moves out. Through that opening he sends the raven, then the dove—testing the air, searching for signs of renewal. What was once a passage for survival becomes a passage for relationship, a way of listening for the world’s response.
The ark’s story ends where it began—with an opening. The tzohar that once drew breath into a sealed world now exhales life back into open air. What sustained creation in isolation becomes the channel through which it rejoins the greater whole. And maybe that’s our work now—to make our words, our communities, and our hearts able to breathe again. To open the sealed places, to let in fresh air, and to listen.
