Tornness – After the Flood
“וַיִּזְכֹּר אֱלֹהִים אֶת־נֹחַ” — “And God remembered Noah.”
Ons leef in die tyd van verskeur (We live in the time of tornness)
Men obsik yufik vol püki! — (Volapük: “Man again speaks many tongues.”)
The flood is never only a story of water. It is a mirror of moral collapse, a moment when the distinctions that hold the world together – between good and evil, human and beast, sacred and profane – dissolve into chaos. In the time of Noah, everything that breathed was swept away except those enclosed in a teyvah/תיבה, a box that floated on the surface of annihilation. Inside that dark container, life was not free but preserved. The ark was both coffin and cradle, grave and womb. It was the first human experience of containment for survival, an image we still inhabit in our sealed apartments, bunkers, and digital boxes.
When the waters subsided and Noah stepped onto dry land, he faced not triumph but silence. There was no applause, only the smell of mud and death. Out of that silence came the first universal covenant – the Noahide commandments – seven simple rules meant for every human being, Jew and non-Jew alike and these did not exist at that time. They forbid murder, theft, sexual corruption, idolatry, blasphemy, cruelty to living creatures, and they command the establishment of courts of justice. These are the minimal conditions for civilization: proof that coexistence must rest on moral order, not ethnic identity.
We still live in such a context. Wars flare and freeze like electrical storms. Ceasefires begin and collapse as swiftly as moral reasoning. The waters are not literal this time, but political, ideological, psychological – a flood of untruth, of algorithmic hatred, of exhaustion. Everywhere, people seek an ark, a small space where meaning still breathes.
The Missing Commandments
When the first followers of Jesus debated how non-Jews could enter the faith, the Apostles recalled these Noahide laws. In the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 15), they affirmed that Gentiles need only abstain from blood, idolatry, and sexual immorality. Yet two commandments were left out: the prohibition against tearing a limb from a living animal and the obligation to establish courts of justice.
These omissions are not minor. The first – not wounding a living creature for one’s appetite – concerns empathy and restraint, the ability to recognize life as sacred. The second – the duty to found a court – affirms that justice must be human, communal, visible. When Jesus became both Lamb and Judge, the Church’s later institutions often forgot that justice could not be postponed to heaven. The result was centuries of christened cruelty.
Even in the twentieth century, under apartheid South Africa, the Catholic Church formally accepted the racial laws of the state. Parishes and schools were divided by color; black priests were supervised by white bishops; seminaries followed separate curricula. This was not an isolated failure but a human one. For all faiths – Christian, Jewish, Muslim – have at times surrendered the Noahide covenant’s universality to the comfort of tribal or political order.
In Hebrew, the word קֶרַע (qera) means a tear — the garment rent in mourning. In Aramaic, קרעא/ ܩܪܥܐ (qera’a) carries the same sound; in Arabic, قَرْح (qarh) or شَقّ (shaqq) mean wound, split. Across the Semitic tongues, the root endures: to tear, to rend, to divide. The human covenant is one, yet our histories are all verskeur — torn in different directions, in Afrikaans, speaking different names for the same wound.
Sacred and Perverse Separation
In Genesis, separation is not sin but creation. God divides light from darkness, day from night, water from water. Without separation, there is no life. The Hebrew word havdalah (הבדלה) – distinction — also names the ritual that ends the Sabbath, marking the boundary between sacred and ordinary time. To separate rightly is to discern; to discern rightly is to preserve holiness.
But every sacred act has its parody. Apartheid was the parody of an attempt to freeze difference into hierarchy. Its walls were not about holiness but about fear, possession, and control. It was a blasphemy against sacred separation, an inversion of divine order. What had been meant to protect life became a machinery of humiliation and death.
The Afrikaans word trek – from the Khoisan triki, “journey” – captures this paradox: movement as survival and as conquest. The ark is a trek across water; the Great Trek was a flight that produced new chains. In South Africa, the frontier turned into theology and “selection”, and theology into bureaucracy.
Discernment, Not Segregation
Today, some apply the word apartheid to Israel. The intention may be political, but linguistically and theologically it is false. Israel’s structure is tribal, yes, but in the biblical sense: a network of tribes bound by covenant, not by race. Boundaries exist – ritual, linguistic, legal – but their purpose is discernment, not segregation.
To live within covenant is to distinguish without dehumanizing. The Laws of Israel are about holiness, not privilege. To label this apartheid is to confuse sacred separation with profane division. It flattens a spiritual grammar into a slogan. The charge is not only false; it reveals the world’s growing inability to distinguish between difference and hatred, between identity and idolatry.
The New Condition: “Verskeur”
And yet, even as apartheid has ended, the spirit of tearing continues in new forms. The word apartheid belongs to the last century; it names a visible system, now abolished. What we live in today has no name. The walls are interior, invisible, often voluntary. Families, nations, and minds fracture not by color but by conscience.
We scroll through wars, we denounce and embrace in the same gesture. Nations bomb each other while declaring brotherhood. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is a fraternal rupture, a war of linguistic intimacy – the true face of post-apartheid. The aggressor and the victim share ancestors, saints, and presupposed primacy. The horror lies in the closeness.
In Afrikaans, one word still throbs with this double meaning: skeur, to tear. Its longer form, verskeur, means being torn. It carries the sound of cloth ripped open, but also of hearts breaking.
Perhaps this is our new word: Verskeur — the age of tornness.
In Russian one might say Разрыв/razryv; in German Zerrissenheit; in Dutch verscheurdheid. All name the same wound: proximity without peace, connection without communion.
Apartheid divided bodies; Verskeur divides souls.
It is the rupture of trust, of shared time.
We are no longer apart; we are together, torn.
Afrikaans and the Burden of Words
Afrikaans turns a hundred years old at a time when words themselves seem tired. It was born at the Cape out of mixture – Dutch, Malay, Arabic, Portuguese, Khoisan – a Creole of exiles and slaves that grew into a tongue of poets and priests, oppressors and dreamers alike. It carries guilt, yes, but also a strange gentleness: a capacity to name pain plainly.
To speak of verskeur in Afrikaans is not to invent a slogan. It is to let a wounded language breathe, to offer the world a term that replaces apartheid – the word of separation and shame – with one that admits fragility, tornness, and conscience. Verskeur says: we have been torn, but we are still together; we can name the wound without repeating it.
The moral poison of apartheid did not begin in 1948. It was seeded earlier, in the genocides of the Nama and Herero in what is now Namibia – the first racial extermination of the modern era. That violence flowed downward through time and soil, shaping borders and hearts. To remember it is not to accuse, but to discern: to see how Europe’s colonial experiment – from Berlin to the Cape – built walls that the twentieth century merely perfected.
Verskeur stands against that inheritance. It says that languages, like peoples, can repent; that Afrikaans, born in mixture, can again become a vessel for moral discernment instead of division.
The Rainbow’s Thin Light
After the flood, God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign that He would not destroy the earth again. It was a promise, but also a question: would humanity destroy itself instead? The rainbow is a fragile covenant – seven colors, seven laws, seven possibilities of peace.
The rainbow does not erase difference; it arranges it. Each color keeps its own light, yet none exists without the others. This is the image of havdalah fulfilled – distinction without hatred, variety without chaos.
When we call every boundary apartheid, we destroy the rainbow’s grammar. When we deny difference, we invite new floods. The challenge is not to live without separation, but to live within right separation, within moral proportion.
After the Flood
We stand again after a flood – not of water but of words. The towers of Babel rise in every feed; the ark is now a screen. We are connected, informed, divided, and exhausted. We talk of peace while living in verskeur. It seems virtualized, pre-digitalized, outside societal reach.
Yet the promise still holds. Every human being, by virtue of breath, is bound by the same covenant. Every language, by virtue of sound, carries the memory of creation. The ark floats again – not to separate us from others, but to preserve the possibility of moral speech.
The flood has ended, but the waters remain inside us. The choice before us is the same as Noah’s: to build or to drown. To discern or to segregate. To live in covenant or in chaos.
