Why Men Great ‘Till They Gotta Be Great? (Noah)

“Noah was a righteous man; he was wholehearted in his generation.” — Genesis 6:9

Seriously, what does that mean anymore? I ask because this has been a strange time to be thinking about men.

The president of the United States was found liable by a civil jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. Jeffrey Epstein built a world in which extraordinary wealth and access surrounded extraordinary abuse. Pete Hegseth has publicly entertained turning an execution into a spectacle. Shane Gillis can get a laugh by calling women “whores” for what they wear to the gym.

These things are not morally equivalent. A vulgar joke is not sexual violence, and sexual violence is not murder. But taken together, they raise a question about what our culture is willing to accommodate, reward, laugh at, or simply look away from. Then there is the complete breakdown of humanity and morality Cornell University.

A former student alleges that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by members of a fraternity. What happened, what individual men knew, and when they knew it remains a matter of dispute and investigation. But the larger story presents a question that does not depend on resolving every allegation: What is the obligation of the man who realizes something is wrong while the people around him seem perfectly content to let it continue? This is where Noah becomes interesting.

The Torah does not simply call him righteous. It calls him ish tzaddik tamim hayah b’dorotav—”a righteous and wholehearted man in his generations.“

Our teachers famously argued about those last words. Rabbi Yohanan heard them as a qualification: Noah was righteous compared with the people around him, but beside Abraham perhaps he would not have looked so remarkable. Reish Lakish heard the opposite: if Noah could remain righteous in such a corrupt generation, imagine what he might have become among decent people. That argument suddenly feels contemporary: How much credit does a man deserve for being decent in an indecent environment?

The world surrounding Noah is described as filled with hamas—violence, corruption, lawlessness. Ramban understands Noah’s righteousness partly by contrast. He did not participate. He refused to become what his environment had become.

Sometimes righteousness really does begin with refusal. The guy beside you says something degrading about a woman and you don’t laugh. Your friends are about to do something you know is wrong and you make yourself unpopular enough to stop it. Nobody is going to write a biography about either moment. But character is often built in places too small for anyone else to notice. Jewish tradition, though, does not let Noah off that easily.

The Zohar, Kabbalah’s central commentary on the Torah, gives him a devastating critique. God tells Noah destruction is coming, and Noah builds the ark. He saves himself. He saves his family. But he never argues for everyone outside it. Abraham will bargain with God over Sodom. Moses will put himself on the line for Israel. Noah remains personally righteous while the rest of the world drowns. Maybe that is the distinction we need now.

Being a righteous man cannot simply mean: I didn’t do it. That may establish innocence. It does not necessarily establish righteousness.

Additionally, the idea of tamim—wholeheartedness—asks something harder. Is the person I believe myself to be privately the same person I am willing to be when there is a cost? When my friends are watching? When the powerful person in the room is the problem? When silence would be easier?

Which brings to mind one of the more efficient questions Lizzo has given us: “Why men great ’til they gotta be great?” It’s a funny statement because, for the most part, it’s true.

We use the language of greatness constantly. Great leaders. Great businessmen. Great athletes. Great men! But Noah’s story makes greatness sound considerably less glamorous. The righteous man is the one who manages not to surrender his moral judgment to his generation.

And that leaves me wondering: Where are the great men of this generation? Not the famous men. We know where they are. Where are the men whose greatness appears precisely when greatness is required?

We do know some of their names. In 2015, Stanford graduate students Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson saw an unconscious woman being sexually assaulted behind a dumpster. They stopped, confronted Brock Turner, chased him when he ran, and held him until police arrived. Terry Crews did something very different but no less revealing: after being sexually assaulted himself, he publicly challenged the shame surrounding male victims and testified before the Senate about sexual violence and survivors’ rights, despite describing pressure within Hollywood to stay quiet. 

These are very different acts, and greatness should not require a sexual assault or some extraordinary moment of danger. But they tell us something about what it looks like. A great man notices when another person’s dignity or safety is at stake and decides that his own comfort is no longer the most important thing in the room. Perhaps men like that are everywhere, quietly making those choices? I hope so.

But if we have trouble naming them, that itself ought to concern us. Because “in his generation” does not only describe Noah. It implicates the generation around him. A righteous man exists in relation to the moral weather of his time. We do not get to choose that weather. And neither did Noah.

We get this generation from its appetites, and technologies, to its cruelties, and excuses, and all its opportunities for courage in-between. So perhaps the question is not whether men today are worse than men have ever been. History gives us little reason for that kind of nostalgia.

The question is what kind of generation we are creating around them. Are we producing a world in which a man has to be unusually brave simply to say, “This is wrong”? Or one in which decency is expected, supported, and reinforced by the people standing beside him?

And when the room goes quiet, when everyone seems to be waiting for somebody else to act, can a man still be “righteous and wholehearted in his generation”? Noah proves that he can. But Noah’s story leaves us with a harder question: Is it enough to remain righteous yourself if your righteousness never takes you beyond the safety of the ark?

One place to begin is with Shabbat Dinah, observed this year on Shabbat, November 28, during Parashat Vayishlach, when we read Dinah’s story. Jewish Women International is offering a preparatory webinar on Thursday, October 29, from 12:00–1:00 p.m., for communities that want to understand the initiative and consider how to participate. 

If being “righteous and wholehearted” means refusing to remain safely inside the ark while others are harmed, this is exactly the kind of work our communities—and especially our men—should be willing to engage in. Learn more about Shabbat Dinah