The Theft of the Story

This past Shabbat we read Parashat Noah, and the eleventh verse stopped me cold.

Va-tishachet ha-aretz lifnei ha-Elohim, va-timalei ha-aretz chamas.

“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness.” (Genesis 6:11)

The Hebrew word for lawlessness is hamas. Since October 2023, no Jew can read it without flinching. The group that slaughtered 1,200 people and took 251 hostages carries the name of the sin that brought the Flood.

I want to be careful here. Hamas is an Arabic acronym, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement. The acronym spells an Arabic word meaning zeal. I know of no evidence that its founders in 1987 were thinking of Genesis. The echo is real. The intent is unproven.

The name of the attack is another matter.

Hamas called October 7th Tufan al-Aqsa, the Al-Aqsa Flood. Tufan is the Qur’an’s word for the deluge of Noah: “The flood seized them while they were wrongdoers” (Qur’an 29:14). Two months after the massacre, Hamas quoted that very verse in a leaflet. The same word appears elsewhere in the Qur’an, as the first of the punishments sent upon Pharaoh’s Egypt, alongside locusts, frogs and blood (7:133).

Sit with that. The men who burned families alive in their safe rooms named their work after the Flood, cast themselves as the instrument of divine judgment, and borrowed for the purpose the imagery of our own Exodus.

Our sages had a precise understanding of hamas. Rashi defines it in a single word: gezel, robbery. The Talmud goes further. Rabbi Yochanan teaches: “Bo u-re’eh kamah gadol ko’ach shel chamas, she-harei dor ha-mabul avru al ha-kol, v’lo nechtam aleihem g’zar dinam ad she-pashtu y’deihem b’gazel.” “Come and see how great is the power of robbery, as the generation of the flood violated every precept, but their sentence to be destroyed was not sealed until they extended their hands and engaged in robbery” (Sanhedrin 108a).

Theft is the word for what our enemies have done with our story for two thousand years.

When Hadrian crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt, he renamed Judea after the Philistines, Israel’s ancient foes. Scholars still debate his motives. The effect has outlasted his empire.

The blood libel took the Torah’s absolute prohibition on consuming blood, attached it to Passover, the festival of our freedom, and turned it into a charge of murder. It began in Norwich in 1144 and has never fully died. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 began on Easter Sunday.

On Purim of 1942, in the Polish town of Zduńska Wola, the Nazis hanged ten Jews in the town square. Ten, for the ten sons of Haman. They forced the Jewish police to carry out the hangings and left the bodies hanging all day. Four years later, on the gallows at Nuremberg, Julius Streicher’s last words were “Purimfest 1946.” He knew exactly which story he was in.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria chose Yom Kippur.

And sometimes the calendar is ours rather than theirs. Ferdinand and Isabella set the deadline for the expulsion from Spain. It was Jewish memory, through Don Isaac Abravanel, that marked the last departures as falling on Tisha B’Av. That is how a people reads its history. We should not confuse it with the enemy’s design.

The distinction matters, because my argument depends on it.

It would be easy, and wrong, to say that the name of Hamas proves anything. Wordplay does not prove intent. Documents do. Yahya Sinwar’s handwritten blueprint for October 7th, recovered in Gaza and published this summer, is dated August 24, 2022. It describes breaching the border at 25 points and seizing more than 220 communities. Captured minutes show years of planning and an effort to draw Iran in. One Israeli journalist reported, from interrogations, that the attack was first meant for the Passover seder. That report has not been verified, and I offer it as such. But it would fit the pattern exactly.

October 7th was premeditated. We know that from the evidence, not from the name. What the name tells us is how the men who planned it understood themselves. In their telling, October 7th was a Flood, they were its righteous agents, and we were the drowned.

That is the oldest move in the antisemite’s book. Take the Jewish story, invert it, and hand it back to us as an indictment. The people who gave the world “do not murder” become murderers of children. The survivors of genocide become its perpetrators. The festival of freedom becomes an occasion for blood.

Hamas is robbery. The answer to robbery is to hold on to what is ours.

So read Noah again, in Hebrew if you can. Teach your children what Zduńska Wola was, and why the date of the Yom Kippur War was no accident. Know the story well enough that no one can steal it from you and sell it back.

Noah was told to build an ark and carry life through the waters. Our tradition, our history, is our ark.

What will you do this year to make sure it stays watertight?