Noach: The Man Who Stood Still
According to Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tzl, the key to understanding Noach (Noah), the hero of our sedra (weekly Torah portion) is actually found at the end of last week’s sedra. There, his father Lemekh declares “This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands, out of the very soil which HaShem placed under a curse.”[1] This seems to be a classic case where a biblical character’s name relates to his nature. Except, it doesn’t. The word relief, perhaps better translated as comfort, is made of the root letters n-ch-m. Noach, however, is just made of n-ch. Noach lacks the letter mem, a letter which, historically, was derived from the sign for water. Noach, the most famous flood survivor, is missing water!
What he has, is grace, in the sense of favour, in this case, from God. Grace is ch-n, the reversal of Noach. Noach brings grace, but not the overflowing blessing of comfort, as seen in Yishayahu (Isaiah) 40 “Comfort, comfort, my people”.
Noach is a reset to Adam. Rabbi Zvi Grumet, in his book Genesis: From Creation to Covenant, sees the flood as an un-creation of the world, winding time back to the second day by wiping out all life and removing the boundary between the waters of Heaven and those of earth. Noach and his family inherit a pristine new world.
Yet Noach does not advance. Rabbi Natan Slifkin has noted that while conventional representations of the ark in art and children’s toys show it as a boat, the ark described in the Torah is essentially a box, not a boat, just a big oblong. It doesn’t have a prow because it’s not built to move like a boat, just to float and bob with the waves. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan z”tzl notes that Mount Ararat, where the ark lands, is near to the Murat River, one of the headwaters of the Euphrates, so Noach may not have moved far at all. This is perhaps appropriate during the flood, but not after.
When the ark lands on Mount Ararat, there is a passage with imagery of birds moving back and forth: first the raven goes back and forth from the ark, then the dove goes out and back twice, then the dove goes out and does not return. Noach doesn’t learn from the dove to move forward.
Rabbi Grumet sees Noach’s later drunkenness and nudity as an attempt to recreate Eden, a lost world that can now only be reached by using intoxicants. Rabbi Sacks sees Noach as a survivor with survivor’s guilt. He can’t move forward, only backward. The n-ch-m root can also relate to changing thoughts with new intentions, but Noach’s thoughts are stuck in the trauma of the recent past, perhaps reaching back to an idealised distant past instead of moving forward.
Noach does represent a new stage in the development of mankind, namely covenant, which will shape Tanakh’s (Hebrew Bible’s) understanding of the relationship between God and man from now on. Even before the flood, God promises to make a covenant with Noach.
Unlike the covenant at Sinai, this is a unilateral covenant: God imposes it on Noach. It creates a relationship between God and man, unlike the antediluvian (pre-flood) world, where relationship with God was left to personal initiative and most people were apparently not interested, but it is lacking compared to Sinai. The prohibition on murder is the only explicit commandment, but the rabbis identify seven commandments binding on all human beings. However, there are no individual positive commandments. There is a communal command to establish a system of justice, but otherwise it is a list of what not to do. It prohibits idolatry and blasphemy, but doesn’t establish a positive way for people to worship God. The other commands are ethical, prohibiting murder, theft, sexual immorality and eating the flesh of a live animal (animal cruelty). God seems reluctant to impose more on Noach and ultimately mankind regresses again.
The sign of the covenant, the rainbow, is performed by God, for God. This contrasts with the later covenant with Avraham (Abraham). There, the sign of the covenant, circumcision, is performed by Avraham and for Avraham. God doesn’t need to see a rainbow to remember that He promised not to destroy the world by flood, but He seems reluctant to impose on Noach. Indeed, He tells Noach of the covenant (9.9-16), then adds a reiterating statement (9.17). A general rule in biblical interpretation is that when we’re told “Character A said to character B…” and then the text says “Character A said…” again with no interruption, we are to infer a pause, a wait for some response that was not forthcoming from Character B. Noach literally does not know what to say about the covenant.
The only hope comes at the end of the sedra with the introduction of Avraham. There are a number of things that are special about Avraham, but perhaps the biggest is his willingness to move forward. He does this in response to the divine command to “Go for [or to] yourself” next week, but even before then, at the end of this week’s sedra, he is already on the move towards Canaan, for reasons that are unclear – is the prophecy at the start of next week’s sedra out of place i.e. it had already happened at the end of our sedra? Or is there some other motive prompting Avraham? It is not clear, but the idea of the journey as the metaphor for religious life was something that would become integral to Jewish experience over the millennia.
[1] Translations from Sefaria, sometimes amended slightly.