We do love the idea of a fresh start. New year. New resolutions. Unveiling the new you. As citizens of the 21st century, we are raised to love the notion of cutting ties with the toxicity or stagnation of yesterday. Modern culture encourages us to move into each new day with fresh perspective, to cut ties with mindsets, habits, and even people who are holding us back. In their place, we are encouraged to open ourselves up to new friends, new experiences, new ways of looking at the world. Out with the old! And when you look at all the violence and suffering in humanity’s rearview mirror, can you blame us? Is it any wonder that many of us are ready to assert that we are not going back?
In the Torah, nowhere is the departure from the past as striking as in this week's portion, Noach. In the famous story of Noah, the ark, and the flood, we learn that God, unhappy with how violent and corrupt humanity has become, sends a flood to literally wipe the slate clean, saving only Noah’s family and a skeletal crew of fertile animals. This story is so embedded in our culture that we often think of it in simplified, almost childlike images: cartoon animals, rainbows, and olive branches. With age and experience, you may have wondered about the logistics—how large would the ark have to be to fit all those animals? Eventually, you may have begun to consider the darker questions: What about those left outside the ark? Did they really deserve to die? Is annihilating most of the world’s population really the best solution that God could come up with? Violence and corruption have not been wiped from the planet, so did the flood really accomplish anything?
These days, there are quite a few things I wouldn’t mind wiping from the earth. War. Cancer. Extremist ideologies of any kind. Moreover, there is a handful of individuals that, truth be told, I wouldn’t miss much if they died of natural causes. Fortunately for them, and ultimately for me as well, it is not up to me who makes the cut, who gets to thrive and who will perish. The world that we are living in today is not composed of absolutes, good or bad, black or white, Democrat or Republican, pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. Our world contains a spectrum of identities and beliefs—a resplendent rainbow, if you will—and no human alive has the right to decide who deserves a place here and who does not.
In some ways, the story of Noah’s ark feels like a cautionary tale. Gone are the days of wiping one’s enemies off the face of the earth. Gone are the days of the simple labels, the deserving and the undeserving. God tried that once, the Torah seems to say, and it didn’t work out so well. So, where does that leave us? In a sense, the ark has landed on a mountain top, and we have fruitfully reinhabited the earth, with all its complexities and nuances. Whenever we see a rainbow after the rain, we are to recall God’s promise to “remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings” to never again “destroy all flesh” by flooding the earth. It is up to us to remember that the world will never again be divided between those who deserve to live and those marked for death. As descendants of Noah, we are a family, survivors of the turbulence of history. As much as we might like some divine intervention to remove those responsible for hatred and violence, we will better care for the earth we have inherited if we remember to cultivate our common humanity, to look beyond labels, and to appeal to the light within those around us.
God only knows what this next week has in store for us. I wish we could be promised peace and rainbows! What we can do is to look for opportunities to extend an olive branch without sacrificing our integrity. We can make our voices heard at the polls and in respectful conversations. And we can continue to strive for a better world, not in climbing into an ark to remove ourselves from it, but perhaps in remembering a different boating metaphor, this one popularized by President John F. Kennedy in 1963: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” And, as we help each other rise, may we all see ourselves reflected in the beautiful spectrum of colors in the sky.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rebecca Abbate
