Creation, Chapter Two: Comapassion

Creation, Chapter Two: Comapassion
D’var Torah for Parashat Noah
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman


Last week’s Torah portion, Breishit—named after the opening Hebrew word—contained the first value of human society: justice. In contrast, this week’s parasha, Noach, contains several more

Justice, we learn in Breishit, isn’t an arbitrary system. There is a higher authority which oversees a higher standard, one to which all must aspire. And the first rule issued by this higher being or intelligence, is not to commit murder. Life itself is sacred. It is God given. Life is a blessing God gives and which only God may retract.

Genesis, the portion which gives the entire first book of the Torah its title, is about Creation. It posits a God that creates, setting laws of time and physics in motion that all must obey. It is a system based on strict justice.

But just as God gives, God sometimes also takes away. As punishment for disobeying God’s sanction and eating of the forbideen fruit, Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden of Eden. In this week’s portion, Noach—Genesis 6:9-11:21—all earth, all living creatures that breathes, walks the earth or flies above it, is taken away, undone. Corruption has reached such new depths that the whole of God’s creation drowns with waters that come flooding from below and with gushes and torrents that pour down from above. All life is completely wiped out.

All save for the slight remnant saved by Noach. Pairs of animals of all kinds, his three sons and their three wives, Noach and his own wife—they are the privileged few deemed worthy of redemption.

Exactly as God had instructed, Noach builds his ark; measure for measure. As though by magic, the summoned animals all appear. As the boarding of the animals begins, ominous clouds appear and gather overhead. With ever increasing alarm and speed, Noach rushes the last of the pairs into the ark. No sooner has he taken the last count and checked the last list, than an enormous thunder announced the storm. The overarching portal doors slam shut and are barred from the outside, and a sudden, shocking, silence descends.

Of course that silence didn’t last long. The thundering rain that suddenly began to fall produced an ongoing roar. The animals responded in kind, each from his and her compartment. Noach clapped his hands to his ears trying to drown out the noise, but to no avail.

Then, through it all, as he got accustomed to each sound and could identify its source, Noach began to perceive yet another sound—the echo of wailing, screaming and weeping. He heard the pawing on the outside the ark as the water began to raise it from the ground. He heard the scratching of nails and talons ripping at the wood, seeking refuge inside from the torrents. He thought he heard voices calling out to one another, to him, calling out names, cursing, praying, crying. But slowly these sounds began to diminish.

Finally all that was left was the sound of the rain as it fell relentlessly on.
On those terrible first nights, Noach learned many things about what being human meant.

Overnight it seems, responsibility bent his shoulders. He suddenly felt old. His once-strong body turned weak; his strong arms, accustomed to chopping wood, raising barns and building homes, were reduced to feeding animals, taking care of newly hatched chicks. And in the process, Noach learned to care for his charges.

It isn’t for naught that the rabbis taught that whoever saves a single human soul, it is as though he had saved a whole world in its entirety. Noach could now only ruminate on how little he did, and how many more worlds he could have saved.

He next learns about reliance. At first he relied only on himself and his own strength. Later, he learned to rely on God to show him the right way to use his abilities. Now, confined to the darkness of the ark, having to share his little world with so much life around him, he learns to listen to his own conscience, to hear the voices of the animals around him.

He learns the pangs of disappointment as he releases the raven and watches it fly away without even a glance back.

And then he learns about hope. He releases a white dove and watches it take wing, gain strength for a moment—only to lose it again and founder in the grey clouds and whipping winds. He takes it back gently, bringing it in through the ark’s only window, shielding it from the cold and wet air. Neither Noach nor his bird despair, however. They will try again, and this time the dove will succeed, it will find land, food, a tree to perch on and nest in.

Compassion and gratitude—those are the feelings of humanity, sparks of the Divine Presence within us, that Noach finally senses in him. And so, having learned his lessons, Noach is released from his captivity. The rainbow in the sky signals an everlasting covenant between humanity and its supreme judge. From now on, justice will forever be tempered with compassion. Those are the ground rules by which we all must coexist from that point on.

As with any covenant, both sides agree to abide by this agreement—God and Noach, and through Noach, all humanity.



© 2011 by Boaz D. Heilman

A Story Begins

A Story Begins
D’var Torah for Parashat B’reishit: Genesis 1:1—6:8
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
Oct. 21, 2011



With the dawn of humanity came wonder.

Cave drawings represent some of the earliest examples of our interaction with divine forces that we saw everywhere. Nature was divine, its machination willed by gods of sun, wind and thunder, gods of oceans and gods of the underworld. Every tree had its spirit; every phenomenon carried a message from beyond.

We had no science, but we already had rational minds that never stopped asking questions. With the advent of the Iron Age, written manuscripts began to keep record of our questions. Each eon added its own mysteries, its own attempts to resolve the disturbing unknown with theories, stories and sagas.

The idea of monotheism wasn’t invented by the Jews. The Egyptian king Ikhnaton introduced a new religion, one based around a single god, Aton.

What the Jews introduced to the world was a belief in one God, but posited that God in a new place. This God would be the Creator of everything. Not a multitude of gods; not one god supreme over others. One God period.

The question of the Beginning was always there. Was there a single moment in which Everything began? Or was “It,” the universe, everything we see and know, there all the time, all infinite, eternal, with no beginning and with no end?

Genesis, the first book of the Torah, proposes in its very first sentence that only God is, was and will be eternally eternal. Everything else came into being at God’s instigation. God created it all, there was indeed one Beginning, and everything else has been flowing ever forward from that one moment on.

The stories of Genesis are not meant to be scientific in the modern sense of the word. They do, however, explain in terms anyone can understand what the ramifications of this Beginning are—what lessons there are for us to learn from it, what objectives for us to reach.

Clever children sometimes try to stump me with questions about the Genesis version of Creation. Where were the dinosaurs? Did God invent baseball?

The truth of Genesis, however, isn’t in the numbers. That’s what makes it hard for us modern, enlightened, scientifically educated people to understand. Genesis looks at the world with a view to the values people hold and the morals they try to live by. It isn’t a system that is based on accurate measurements and increments, but rather on the binary system of right and wrong.

However, Right and Wrong are not seen by the Torah as inflexible and unyielding; a wrong can usually be made right again, but not before consequences set in. The Pharaoh of the Exodus stands in direct contradiction to this compassionate view: his very heart had become as stony and adamant as the storehouses he had the Israelites build for him. But the whole point of the Torah is that for us normal folk, forgiveness is always possible. It’s always possible to make things better. Or at least, almost always. Even Cain gets a second chance after killing Abel. Humanity gets several chances moreover.

It’s a compassionate God that the Torah presents to the world. A loving God who creates out of love, out of need and out of care.

To be sure—God can be fierce. We’re talking a pretty powerful force here, if God is the Creator of the whole Known Universe, of the whole “It” around us. Yet this ineffably overpowering source of energy can be channeled, its flood of energy can be stemmed and redirected. If the stories of Creation show God as an ominous and dark force, a presence that can crush as easily as it can create, it is so because at this part of the story, humanity has not figured out yet what its role is. There is much to learn yet. This is only the Beginning.


© 2011 by Boaz D. Heilman