Noach: The Fear We Keep Inside the Ark

When a child encounters antisemitism at school, or among peers, how can parents respond in ways that empower the child without placing the burden of educating others or defending Judaism on them?

The moderator read the question out loud and invited us to respond. Although I couldn’t see the participants’ faces, I could feel the weight of that question sitting in the room. Some of us had already lived this question, or were living it right now, and others were bracing for their turn, for their child to sit at the center of it.

Underneath the words of the question, I heard another one: How do I keep my child afloat in a world where the waters keep on rising?

Many of us are parenting inside a flood right now. We watch the news with anxiety gripping our throats, and we worry about what our children hear in school hallways and what they read about being Jewish on social media. Uncertainty hangs over Israel, and over the whole Jewish world, following us into the most mundane moments of our day. We pack lunches and send kids on their way to school while holding our breath. Sometimes we only notice we’ve been holding it when they walk back through the door, and we finally exhale.

We are continuously weighing what it means to be visibly Jewish in the places we move through each day. A routine ride on the subway now includes a conversation about whether to wear a baseball cap over a kippah, and even more intense scanning of the subway car. For women, tucking Jewish jewelry into our shirts adds another layer of safety planning beyond what we already carry.

We make these decisions for ourselves, and we make them with our children. We try to give them enough information to move through the world, enough reassurance to enter it with confidence. At the same time, we are carrying questions that we cannot answer. So much of this work happens in silence, when we are up late at night, and in the raw moments after something happens.

That silence is what stood out to me this week, as I read through Parshat Noach. Read the parsha slowly, and listen for his voice.

God speaks. God tells Noach the world will end and gives him the measurements of an ark.

Vaya’as Noach. Then, Noach does.

God speaks again. God tells Noach to gather the animals.

Vaya’as Noach. Then, Noach does again.

The rain begins, and Noach goes inside, mipnei mei hamabul, because of the waters of the flood. In his reading, Rashi found those words significant enough to pause on. He describes Noach as wavering in his belief that the flood would come, and finally entering the ark only when the waters forced him through the door.

Many of us stand in a doorway like that. We have built what we can, and we hope that the waters will not enter. We have rehearsed the safety conversation over and over, and prayed that we would never need it. On some nights, we might even truly believe that this rain will pass us by. On other nights, we lie awake, listening as it raps on the roof tiles.

In between believing and not believing, we keep on building.

Vayisgor Hashem ba’ado. God closes the door behind him.

The rain falls for forty days, and the ark floats for more than a year. Inside, a family tries to find its breath in the dark, surrounded by animals and the sound of water. The Torah does not record any of their words.

Finally, Noach opens a window and sends out a dove. He waits. He sends her again, and she returns with an olive leaf. He waits. He sees dry ground, and still he waits, until God tells him to go.

He walks out, builds an altar. God blesses him, makes a covenant with him, and sends up the iconic rainbow into the clouds.

Noach still says nothing.

He plants a vineyard. He drinks the wine, collapses, and lies uncovered in his tent.

When Noach finally, finally speaks, for the first time in the entire story, his first words curse his own grandson:

Arur Kena’an!

After all that building, gathering, and waiting, the first words we hear from him land as a burden on the next generation.

The Torah does not tell us what Noach held within him inside that ark. When reading his silence now, I think about what happens to the fear, the sadness, the grief we carry as parents when we have nowhere to speak it.

A parent can try to carry a family through the flood on competence and grit alone, building, gathering, and waiting, sealing the fear away so the children never see it. The fear still stays inside the ark with us. It can filter through the way we speak, in our seemingly unexplained impatience, or the urgency with which we ask our children questions. Our children may feel what we have never found the words for.

In this reading, I stayed with the moment when Noach opens the door to the ark. What does he see? So many of the people and places he knew are gone, destroyed. He has kept his family alive, and now they have to learn how to live here — in the ruin.

As parents, we want to promise our children an after. We tell them that this will pass, that the other side of the storm is waiting, that it won’t be this bad forever. We also whisper those same promises to ourselves, but for us they sound more like prayers. Underneath it all sits a fear we rarely speak about: What if the after looks like wreckage too?

The Torah meets that fear in a startling place: God gives the sign of the covenant while Noach is standing amid the ruin. Zot ot habrit. This is the sign of the covenant. God sends the rainbow into a sky that has just finished drowning the world, and promises never again to destroy the Earth by flood.

In the middle of the wreckage, God says to Noach: have hope.

The first blessing God gives the survivors when they step out of the ark is pru u’rvu, be fruitful and multiply. The call to bring children into the world comes to a family that has just watched everything drown.

There is still a future to enter, and there are still children to love.

So now I look back at that parent’s question: What can we give those children? What will help them move through the world without making them responsible for repairing it?

We can begin by finding somewhere to speak our own fear. A partner, a friend, or someone in our community who can hold the questions that keep us awake. We need those places where we can be uncertain, unmoored, and where we can admit how much we are carrying — and how much we are afraid. Having that support gives us more room to listen when our children come to us.

When they do, we have the capacity to take a breath.

To say to them, “I’m so glad you told me.”

Having a place to release some of our own fear allows us to hold their story. When something happens, we can ask them questions that help them tell the story: What happened? What did you hear? What did you understand from that? We can then have the capacity to wait for their answers, and to let them guide the conversation on their own terms.

We can help them practice phrases to have in their back pockets, to pull out when they find themselves in conversations that no longer feel safe: “That’s not okay.” “I’m going to find my teacher.” “I don’t want to have this conversation.” We can help them find and name the adults they can turn to, and remind them that they are allowed to leave a conversation at any time, especially if they do not feel safe.

Then we can tell them, “You don’t have to handle this alone. I’m here to help with what comes next.”

We can explain what we plan to do, we can keep them involved. A child can have a voice in the response to hate while the adults take responsibility for addressing what happened.

And we can keep giving them a Jewish life they can love.

The safety conversations take up so much room. We also need room for the joy. We need space for the laughter at our Shabbat tables, the songs that uplift and unify us, and the stories that bind us as people. Our children need to see us living Jewishly and joyfully, to catch us living our values with gusto.

When we wrapped up the panel, I offered one sentence that parents could take home to their children:

You belong to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people belong to you.

I wanted the parents listening to have something they could bring home, and something that doesn’t ask anything of a child, but gives them a place to belong. They belong whether they have an answer or not. They belong when they feel proud, and when they feel frightened. They belong even when they are still figuring out what being Jewish means to them.

We are still carrying questions we cannot answer. We are still building, and standing somewhere between believing and not believing. But we are allowed to have words for what we carry, and we are allowed to share them.

When we do, we have more room to hear what our children are carrying. We can keep handing them the promise, the way the rainbow keeps coming back into the sky.

The Torah of Becoming a Parent | An Invitation

What fear have you been keeping inside the ark? Say one piece of it out loud to someone you trust. Then tell your child: You belong to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people belong to you.