Noah (Torah)

An Essay on Evil

The portion of Noah is, at first glance, one of the most familiar in the entire Bible. Everyone knows the story; practically every children’s book of Bible stories includes a colorful picture of the big boat with two of every conceivable kind of animal and bird and reptile waiting to board the ship, or getting off it, with the rainbow in the background. Many is the children’s nursery that is decorated with a wall poster showing the same vivid scene.

Or else, on a more sophisticated level, there is popular discussion of the comparative origins of the myth of the Great Flood: the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, etc. Or there are those who search for historical confirmation of the Flood story: archeological remnants of a petrified ark somewhere in the Turkish mountains; theories of cosmic catastrophes that upset the global climate, leading to the great flood, such as Emanuel Welikovsky’s Worlds in Collision and other books, etc. And indeed, the existence in a number of different cultures of a legend of a cataclysmic flood strengthens the case for its historicity.

But while all these may be important, it seems to that both the childish stereotypes, and the attempts to confirm the literal truth of the text, ultimately hinder understanding and miss the point. For me the focus here, as in many other passages of the Torah, lies in the perennial question of the Toldot Yaakov Yosef: what does this teach us “for every person, in every place and every time”? In other words, what message does this convey about the nature of the human being and man’s situation in the world?

We are told that God was so angry with humankind that he regretted creating them, and decided to destroy the entire race, kit and caboodle, save one isolated individual (and his family)—Noah, of whom we are told, rather curiously, that he “found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (Gen 6:8). The question that begs for an answer is: what was the nature of the evil for which they were punished so? One finds a progression in the opening chapters of Genesis through four levels of sin: Adam’s avoidance of the Divine call “where are you?”(ayeka); Cain’s unwitting (?) manslaughter; the generation of the flood; and the hubris of the tower of Babylon. What then was the sin of the generation of the flood? What was so uniquely terrible about it to as to deserve total annihilation?

Martin Buber, in his classic essay Good and Evil, speaks of two kinds of evil: the first is that bred of confusion and misdirection, in which the individual, overwhelmed by the myriad options and temptations offered by life, falls into a “whirlpool” of non-focused actions and fulfillment of desires; an evil bred of failure to focus his energies on the good. The second is a kind of radical evil, in which the person “surrenders his soul to evil with his innermost being,” basing his entire life upon the attitude of the lie, upon malice and destruction of other people. Evidently, the generation of the Flood belonged to this second type. The opening verses of the chapter mention two reasons for the Flood: “the world was filled with violence (hamas)” and “all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth” (hishhit… darko al ha-aretz) (6:11-12). Rashi comments that the former phrase refers to rampant theft, while the latter to sexual licentiousness and to idolatry. Genesis 6:1-4 relates that, just before the Flood, “the sons of God” or “the Nefilim” took women “from whomever they choose,” combining sexual greed and lawlessness with violence. Whomever these may have been—more powerful groups of men within human society, descendants of mythic giants, or “fallen angels”—the nature of their sin is clear: the violent seizing of women by the stronger men, leaving the weak— their fathers or rightful husbands—standing helplessly by. More broadly, their sin was the complete rejection of all natural morality: a combination of violence against property with sexual hedonism. Perhaps the Torah is telling us that, unlike today’s hedonists, who present themselves as gentle pleasure-lovers (as in the 60’s slogan, “Make Love not War”), the release of sexual hedone as such is ultimately linked to violence as well.

A close reading of Rashi’s comment here—that hashahat derekh is equated with sexual licentiousness and paganism—implies that there is a derekh, a well-known, proper way, in the areas of both sexuality and in that of the worship of God. We may infer from this a notion of Natural Law; the idea that man, from the Creation, is granted innate intuitive knowledge of right and wrong in these two areas. In Parshat Bereshit I discussed in extenso many issues related to Edenic and post-Edenic sexuality. The path of monogamy is evidently seen as the native, natural condition of the human race—primitive marriage consisting in a man and a woman making a covenant between them. Likewise seen as part of hashahat derekh is homosexuality and the mating of different species—in brief, sexuality of all kinds run riot.

Equally, if not more interesting, is the concept of a “path” in the worship and knowledge of God. Maimonides, in the first chapter of Hilkhot Avodah Zarah, propounds the theory that man is inherently monotheistic. Adam knew God. It was only after Enosh that men began to stray. Interestingly, the “error” described by him has an almost Hegelian dialectic: the good carrying within itself the seeds of its own antithesis. Knowledge of God contains the seeds of its opposite: through their wish to honor God, men accorded honor to his celestial creations; then built idols to represent them; then began to worship them; and ultimately forgot why they did it in the first place.

This idea is significant, because contemporary rationalism, the heir of the Enlightenment culture that has shaped the course of the “high culture” of the latter half of the millenium now ending, assumes man to be naturally atheistic. Religion is seen either as: the product of fears, a projection onto the cosmos of parental figures (Freud); a tool of economic domination (Marx); a reification of society (Durkheim); or primitive attempts at explaining an unknown, mysterious world, long superceded by philosophy and science.

The above mentioned passage, by contrast, suggests the idea of an innate, natural religious and ethical sense within mankind. The relation of this idea to the concept of the seven Noachide commandments is a knotty and difficult question in its own right. It is often held by modern promulgators of Noachide religion, on the basis of Rambam’s remark in Hilkhot Melakhim 8:11, that a Noachide must perform those commandments applicable to him because he believes them to have been commanded by God in the Torah, via Moses. If, however, he performs them as the result of reason—i.e., because he discovers them to be self-evident, innate ethical principles—then he is “neither among the pious of the nations, nor one of their sages.” However, the late lamented Rabbi Joseph Kapah, noted Maimonidean scholar and translator and latter day champion of the Maimonidean tradition of the Yemenite “Dor Deah” movement, in his critical edition of the Yad, alters the reading of that passage. The proper reading, he asserts, is not “and not of their sages” (ve-lo mehakhmeihem) but rather “but one of their sages” (ela me-hakhmeihem). A single letter changes the meaning entirely!

Indeed, Rav Soloveitchik, in his major essay on the nature of the religious experience, “Uvikashtem misham” (“And You Shall Seek from There”), develops a phenomenology of what he describes as the “natural experience” and the “revelational experience.” The former is based upon a combination of innate intuitions within the human soul and man’s reaction to the grandeur and mystery of nature. The latter manifests itself, most outstandingly, in the Jewish encounter with God at Sinai, the revelation of the Torah, and the historical experience of the covenantal community created as a result. The Rav places greater emphasis upon the latter, which he sees, if not as more authentic, as leading man to a higher level of objective encounter with the divine, as well as providing the basis for a stable, more lasting religious commitment.

Speaking personally for a moment, I see the two central influences in my own life, the two teachers between whose approaches I find myself oscillating—Rav Soloveitchik ztz”l, and Arthur Green, sheyibadel lehyyim arukim—as exemplifying these two different approaches. The Rav was not one for “proofs” of the doctrine of Torah min hashamayim, but he certainly saw the focus of Jewish religious expression in the study and observance of the halakhah, as the objective embodiment of the Sinai epiphany, whose fact and the contents of which are known to us via the tradition.

Art Green, throughout his life-work, and most succinctly in his Seek My Face, Speak My Name, teaches what he describes as a heterodox mystical theology of Judaism. For him, both the knowledge of God and the life of mitzvot which are the living symbol of that consciousness, are ultimately rooted, not in the absolute authority of the tradition, but in the personal response to the cosmos, the development of a certain human faculty, a response to Life Itself as pulsing with the Divine.

But the Rav too, when he speaks of “Adam the Second” (in Lonely Man of Faith), likewise speaks of the religious quest, of the asking of existential questions, as based upon an innate aspect of human nature. Indeed, Medieval Jewish theology constantly speaks of Creation as a central theological category. Ramban’s Torah Commentary, Sefer ha-Hinukh, etc., speak of such mitzvot as Shabbat, Pesah, etc., as intended to inculcate the doctrine of Creation; in other words, the truth that this is a created world is one of the basic sources of religious knowledge.

Too often, there is a problem within the Orthodox community of an overemphasis upon the aspect of “revelation”—the call for a faith that transcends reason, the Jewish counterpart of “Credo que absurdum est,” emunat hakhamim, of almost rejoicing in the “oddball” effect of certain halakhot—as if to accentuate the difference between oneself and the non-observant, rather than seeing religious faith as first and foremost a natural faculty of the human being as such. (Readers of these pages will note my consistent attempt to lay the basis for a more “naturalistic,” non-doctrinaire and non-dogmatic type of “Orthodoxy.”)

Who Was Noah?

The last verse of Parshat Bereshit, “and Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord,” is strange, and cries out for commentary. Who was this Ish Tzaddik Tamim, this man who was simple in his righteousness, or perhaps righteous in his simplicity? (To add to the difficulty: tamim may be variously translated as “simple,” “whole,” “perfect,” or “innocent.”) Was he like Adam and Eve before they ate of the fruit? The midrash sees in this title both praise and a certain criticism: he was righteous by the standards of his own generation, but he couldn’t hold a candle to Abraham. He walked “with” God, but not “before” or “ahead of” Him. There was a certain innocence, straightness, doubtless an almost simple-minded honesty to him—but he was also without the “fire in his belly,” the intensely focused will to serve God and to spread the word with his every breath, with very act of his life, that is the hallmark of the true tzaddik.

The only other biblical figure described in such a manner is Job, who is introduced in the first verse of the book in his name as ish tam ve-yashar ve-yerei elohim ve-sar me-ra: “innocent/whole/simple, straight, fearing God and turning away from evil.” Job was filled with natural piety and decency; it may be that there was initially an element of bourgeois self-satisfaction, which may have been what caught Satan’s eye in the first place (that, and what he no doubt found to be God’s rather tedious boasting about him), but during the course of the book he emerges as scrupulously honest and courageous in his relentless pursuit of the truth of God’s ways.

I see Noah, by contrast, as a good-hearted soul, who executes God’s orders to the letter, but does not show any great initiative of his own. It is difficult to imagine him as understanding the motivations of the evil doers of his generation. In the end, he offers sacrifices to God in childlike, innocent gratitude—and then promptly proceeds to return to his worldly preoccupations (ish adama), drinks too much wine, and gets obscenely and embarrassingly drunk, to his children’s deep shame.

“All the Thoughts of Their Hearts Were Only Evil all the Day”

The story of Noah and the Flood is framed by two nearly identical verses. Prior to the Flood, after seeing the violence and disregard of elementary morality that seemed to characterize human action (the logical development of their discovery of the possibilities offered by life after eating the Tree of Knowledge?), God concluded that mankind was utterly perverse, degenerate and generally no good: kol yetzer mahshevot libo rak ra kol hayom—“all the impulses of the thoughts of his heart are only evil all the day” (Gen 6:5). He regretted having created mankind, and decided to destroy it, together with all other life on the world of which he was master. But yet—and here comes the mystery of God’s strange, arbitrary choice—there was one man in this big bad world that God liked. Thus, notwithstanding His plan for utter, cataclysmic destruction, He assured the survival of this ambiguous species by means of the ark, together with the future of all the other animal species by the careful preservation of one male and female—enough to reproduce.

When Noah offered the sacrifices after the Flood, God somehow further relented. Something tender inside Him, so-to-speak, was moved. Perhaps he then saw that man is also capable of good, that the Evil Urge is a necessary part of the natural order, and not stark evil. The offering of sacrifice betrayed an almost childlike wish to pacify God, to make peace, to show gratitude—like a child, or an errant spouse trying to pacify his/her spouse after having an affair. (Question: What is the relationship between Cain’s sacrifice, and this sacrifice?) He came to see people as frail, weak, almost child-like: ki yetzer lev ha-adam ra min’urav—“for the impulse of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (8:21). Note the subtle changes in wording: not “all his impulses,” but “his impulses”; not “only evil,” but “evil”; not “all the day” but “from his youth.” Perhaps, to return to Buber’s terminology, God realized that men weren’t “radically evil,” after all, but merely confused, lacking in backbone, suffering from indigenous problems of weak character. Hence, He concluded, it is pointless to destroy him; rather, he must find another way for dealing with the weakness and flaws in humankind’s character—the path of teaching, of instruction, of what we call Torah.

On the Tower of Babylon

This past summer I noticed that the order of the text in the latter half of this week’s portion is rather anomalous. Genesis 10 gives a kind of anthropological genealogy of the descendants of Noah, who are depicted as being dispersed all over the world (or at least all over the Eastern Mediterranean basin and Asia Minor); while 11:1-9, the story of the Tower of Babel, has them all still in the plain of Shinar, not far from where Noah and his family disembarked from the ark. This is then followed by a second genealogical table, this one of the descendants of Shem, in a line down to Abram (11:10-32). Even granted the principle that “there is no chronological order [lit., “earlier and later”] in the Torah,” there must be some logic to this sequence.

In a search through half a dozen or so major medieval commentators, I found no one who addressed this problem, so I was forced to rely upon my own wits. It seems to me that the genealogy in Chapter 10 follows more or less naturally upon the end of the Noah story, and his death in 9:29. The phrase, repeated with slight variations after listing the tribes of each of the major ethnic groups—the Japhites, the Hammites, and the Semites—“these are the children of… by their families and their languages, in their lands according to their nations” (vv. 5, 20, 31)—fairly invites the question: Where does language come from? The story of the Tower of Babel provides an answer to that question. Moreover, this event clearly took place a number of generations after Noah, when there was already a substantial population, and not just an intimate family group of half a dozen people or so.

Two brief comments about this incident. First, several commentators see the opening verse, “Now all the land was one tongue and single words (devarim ahadim)” as hinting that it was the very oneness of the people that somehow led to the rebellion. Rashi offers no less than three different comments in this direction: e.g., that they rebelled “against the One of the world.” It would seem that there is an ambivalent feeling here about the nature of cultural uniformity; uniting humanity can also lead to a unified effort at evil and destruction, and not only for utopian harmony. The prophet Zephaniah envisions a day when “I will turn all the nations to a clear language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord to serve Him as one” [Zeph 3:9]. The messianic vision envisions a return to Eden, to the primordial golden age—only this time, so to speak, getting it right. But in history, it may be filled with ambiguities and faults.

Ramban, on 11:2, discusses the difference between the sin of the generation of the Flood and that of the “Generation of the Division” (dor ha-haflagah). The sin of the former was moral, violation of the natural law: sexual lewdness, corruption, theft, violence. Hence it consistently uses the Divine name Elohim, signifying lawfulness and morality. The sin of those who made the Tower of Babel, by contrast, was theological, rebellion against God: “they uprooted the shoots.” Hence they were punished by the “unique name,” i.e., HWYH, the Name signifying, so to speak, the Divine personality. God Himself was somehow threatened (“this they have begun to do; now nothing they propose to do shall be impossible for them”—v. 6); hence their punishment was also a kind of preemptive action, confusing their language and scattering them all over the earth. This is perhaps reminiscent of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Garden of Eden, “lest they eat of the Tree of Life and live forever” (Gen 3:22).

This story thus concludes a kind of catalogue of human sins, spread over the first two parshiyot of the Torah: two involving individuals, two involving groups; two of a moral nature, two theological: the eating of the fruit, the murder of Abel, the general evil of the generation of the flood, and the hubris that led to the making of the Tower—if you will, a kind of Hebrew equivalent to the Prometheus legend, expressing a sad recognition of the human desire to somehow try to transcend the human condition, to storm heaven, to unseat God Himself.

* * * * *

Rereading what I wrote this week and last [in October 2000], I feel too much pessimism. My words seem lacking in joy, in love, in excitement at the beauty and grandeur of Creation. Genesis is also the beginning of the human potentiality to do great things: to achieve holiness; to approach God; as well as the simple joy of creation of new life, of children, of families, not to speak of man’s sublime creative powers in the cultural realms (symbolized already by the fathers, respectively, of urban civilization, of the fine arts represented by music, and of technology represented by metallurgy: Yaval, Yuval, and Tuval-Kayin: 4:20-22). Perhaps these aspects are overlooked, somehow taken for granted. Then, too, the tales of the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, naturally turn ones mind towards the negative side of the balance sheet. Moreover, writing in Israel under the present situation, one sees how fragile is the positive aspect within man’s heart, and how easily masses of people can be whipped into a frenzy—by pain and frustration and suffering, played upon by all-too-willing demagogues. At the moment, it is mostly the Arab Palestinians—but at other times Jews, too, have been roused into unthinking mob violence.