‘Sun and Rain’  Parashat Noach 5785

The earth has been utterly destroyed. Mankind has been wiped out by a deluge of biblical proportions. The entire surface of the earth is covered by water[1]. Dry land will be required to reboot the planet. But first, someone has to turn off the water [Bereishit 8:1-2]: “G-d caused a wind to blow across the earth, and the waters subsided[2]. The fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were stopped up, and the rain from the sky was held back.” The floodwaters had come from above, in the form of torrential rain, and from below, in the form of subterranean explosions that ejected water from the earth’s mantle. In the first phase of the rebirth of planet earth, both sources of water dried up.

Rashi[3] compares the commencement of the subterranean ejection of water to its conclusion. When the flood begins, the Torah tells us [Bereishit 7:11] “All the fountains of the great deep burst apart” but when the flood ends, we are told [Bereishit 8:2] “The fountains of the deep… were stopped up”. Not all the fountains of the deep were stopped up, rather, only a subset of them. Rashi explains that “those [fountains] which were essential to the world were left unstopped, such as the Hot Springs of Tiberias and the like”. The Hot Springs of Tiberias are an array of seventeen thermo-mineral springs that flow at a temperature of about sixty degrees Celsius. Their high mineral content is believed to have therapeutic powers[4] and they draw huge crowds: 2021 was a record year that saw more than two million recreational visitors. Rashi seems to be telling us that the deluge that destroyed the world was not completely bad. For one thing, it opened up the Tiberias Hot Springs and there was no compelling reason to shut them down.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, is troubled by Rashi’s explanation. The Rebbe asks why G-d would want to keep open a reminder of a deluge that had brought so much destruction, even if that reminder is admittedly good for eczema? The Rebbe proposes two answers. His first answer is that the Tiberias Hot Springs served as a warning, a constant reminder of what could, Heaven forbid, happen if we forsake G-d and His Torah. This answer is less than satisfying, as a proper warning sign should be ominous, such as the [Bereishit 7:24] “fiery ever-turning sword” that kept visitors out of the Garden of Eden, and not a tourist trap, like the Tiberias Hot Springs have become. In the Rebbe’s second answer, he suggests that the Tiberias Hot Springs serve as an eternal sign that the flood waters that destroyed the world were a “kindness (chessed)”. Because mankind chose to sully the world with his misdeeds, the flood waters were brought in order to purify the world and to return it to its original pristine state. The Tiberias Hot Springs are symbolic of this return to purity as they, themselves, offer purification and healing.

One could be pardoned for asking how Noah’s deluge could ever be considered a “kindness”. The flood destroyed every last living creature on the face of the earth. According to our Sages in the Midrash, the flood waters were highly acidic and boiling hot, just to ensure that nobody tried escaping death in a boat. Was the flood a “necessary evil”? Maybe. “Tough love”? Perhaps. But a “kindness”? Not so much.

I suggest that in order to properly understand the Rebbe’s innovation, we must understand the physics of how a completely waterlogged planet would dry up. The amount of water in the oceans is regulated by a water cycle that has two “forcing processes”. The first forcing process – a below-ground process – is the absorption of ocean water into the earth’s mantle. The earth is covered by tectonic plates that rest on the hot, molten rock of Earth’s mantle and fit snugly against one another. The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. At “subduction zones”, where one plate bends deep beneath another, the sinking plate acts like a conveyor belt, carrying gaseous water into the mantle. The water is recirculated to the surface by convective currents heated by the earth’s core and the water vapor is “outgassed” back into the ocean. The second, and much more familiar, forcing process is the above-ground water cycle in which ocean water is heated by the sun and evaporates into the air. Some of the water condenses and returns to earth in the form of rain, while some of the water molecules are photo-dissociated by the sun and their hydrogen atoms escape through the atmosphere into outer space. It can be mathematically shown that to make a global ocean to disappear, about one quarter of the earth’s water would be subducted into the mantle. The vast majority of the drying up of the surface reservoirs would be due to evaporation from the increase in temperature caused by a sun that is no longer obscured by rainclouds, combined with the escape of hydrogen to outer space[5].

Assuming that these were the mechanisms in play when the waters of Noah’s flood dried up, then the Torah is leaving out an extremely important player, namely, the sun, which is not mentioned even once in the entire episode. This point is noticed by Rabbi Umberto Cassuto[6]. He explains the absence of sun by comparing the story of the flood as it appears in the Torah with the Gilgamesh Epic, an ancient Babylonian flood myth that has much in common with Noah’s flood. When Utnapishtim, the Babylonian version of Noah, first opens the window of his ark after the flood is over, the sunlight shines in and Utnapishtim immediately bows down to it. Rabbi Cassuto concludes that in order to avoid any misconception that the sun is some sort of deity that competes with G-d for control of the earth, the Torah purposely leaves the sun out of the story.

Let’s flesh this out a little more. When the flood begins, we are told [Bereishit 7:12] “The rain was upon the earth for forty days and forty nights”. Only five verses later, scripture seemingly repeats itself [Bereishit 7:17]: “Now the flood was forty days upon the earth”. Notice that first the Torah refers to “rain” and then to a “flood’. Rashi is sensitive to this mismatch and explains that at first, G-d made the rain fall with “mercy” – gently – such that if the people would repent, it might prove to be a rain of blessing. But when the people did not repent, and indeed, according to our Sages in the Midrash, they tried to kill Noah as he entered the ark, the rain became a destructive flood. Rain, unlike the sun, is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Desalination plants and drip irrigation aside, the Land of Israel still needs rainwater in order for crops to grow. Conversely, rain that falls on freshly cut wheat in the month of June will cause it to rot. This is what we mean when, in the Prayer for Rain, we pray for our rain to be “for a blessing and not for a curse”. We ask for the right amount of rain at the right time. Anything else might end up being a curse.

Now we can return to the Rebbe’s second explanation. The Rebbe is not asserting that the flood waters were a kindness, but, rather, that they had the potential to be a kindness, had mankind been up to the task. This is the underlying message of the flood: There is no sun, there is only rain. Everything on planet earth can be either a blessing, a curse, or anything in between. It is our actions, and our actions alone, that determine the outcome.

Ari Sacher, Moreshet, 5785

Please daven for a Refu’a Shelema for Shlomo ben Esther, Sheindel Devorah bat Rina, Esther Sharon bat Chana Raizel, and Meir ben Drora.

[1] Not everyone agrees with this statement. According to some sources in the Midrash, the Land of Israel was not flooded. According Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel, writing in “B’Torato Shel Rav Gedaliah”, the floodwaters affected only the Fertile Crescent. This hypothesis explains how there are animals in Australia, New Zealand and Galapagos. For the purposes of this essay, we assume that to an observer in Noah’s ark, there was water as far as the eye could see.

[2] According to Rabbi Samuel David Luria (Shadal), this happened on the 40^th day after the rain began.

[3] Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, known by his acronym “Rashi,” was the most eminent of the medieval commentators. He lived in northern France in the 11^th century.

[4] The Talmud Yerushalmi in Tractate Shevi’it [9:1] teaches that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai bathed in the Tiberias Hot Springs to cure a debilitating skin disease that came from lying naked in a cave for 13 years.

[5] See https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/5/569/2001/hess-5-569-2001.pdf

[6] Rabbi Cassuto lived in Florence, Italy, in the first half of the previous century.