Parashat No'ach (Genesis 6:9 - 11:9)

by Rabbi Pete Tobias

Summary

This weekly parashah is named after the character who features prominently in its chapters: Noah.  The bulk of the week’s reading deals with the story of Noah and the flood that wiped out all of creation except for the humans and animals who were saved in Noah’ ark.  Once the ark has safely returned to dry land, and its travellers have disembarked to carry out the instruction to ‘be fruitful and multiply’  The rest of the week’s portion is a genealogical list, detailing the generations that link Noah’s sons to Terach, the father of Abraham.  In between the two lists that make up most of chapters 10 and 11 of Genesis we find the intriguing story of the Tower of Babel.

Commentary

There are many options for reflection as we restart the cycle of Torah reading and find ourselves in the midst of the stories of Genesis with their larger than life characters with improbable lifespans (Noah lived to be 950) and incredible escapades.

I use the word ‘incredible’ deliberately, because there is a question as to how believable these Genesis stories are.  The idea that God flooded the entire planet and destroyed all creation save for one man and his family plus pairs of every animal is improbable to say the least.  Yet it finds its place in the opening chapters of a book that Judaism regards (along with other religions) as being a sacred text – in Orthodox terms (Jewish or otherwise), it must have been written by God and must therefore be true.

This is patently absurd, as are the claims of some to have discovered the actual ark on a mountain in Turkey.  As Liberal Jews we need to ask ourselves what this story is doing in our Torah.  In doing so, it is necessary to dismantle the account and look for what might lie at its heart.  Such an exercise may lead to accusations of simply debunking our cherished tradition; so it is necessary then to examine why the story was written and how it came to form part of the Torah.  In so doing, I believe, we will uncover more of what guided and inspired our ancestors and thereby find guidance and inspiration for ourselves.

Archaeology has shown that six thousand years ago, the Black Sea was a low-lying inland lake, separated from the Mediterranean by a land wall.  A sophisticated society had grown up on the shores of this lake. The level of the Mediterranean rose and broke through, instantly flooding the area, wiping out the civilisations that dwelt there.

The impact of this catastrophic event on the survivors and those in neighbouring societies was profound.  How had this flood occurred?  What had the people done to deserve such punishment?  The story was told and retold, the devastating flood found its place in the collective consciousness of the people in that area and formed part of what was to become their folk history.  The Babylonians enshrined the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, making their gods the source of the flood in response to their anger and impatience with human beings but humanity – and the animals – survived thanks to one person, a man called Utnapishtim, building an ark and placing the animals in it. At the conclusion of the Babylonian story, Utnapishtim himself becomes a god.

The ancient Israelite sages picked up the story but gave it a different hero and a different slant.  For them, the flood was divine punishment for wickedness and only one man was sufficiently righteous to deserve to survive.  They also wove in the appearance of rainbows in the sky as part of the account – a further device to demonstrate what, for them, was the connection between human beings and the divine. 

So the story of Noah does indeed have a kernel of truth: there was a flood that wiped out a civilisation.  The genius of our Israelite ancestors was that they took what was a popular tale and adapted it to offer their listeners an explanation of this event which reminded them of the one God of Israel and of the people’s responsibility to that God.  As we, their descendants, listen to that tale almost three thousand years later, our duty is neither to try to accept it as truth nor to dismiss it as nonsense but to recognise and understand the intention of its authors: to give explanation and meaning to the lives of those who heard it.  That was true then and it is true now: this should surely be the Liberal approach to this and all the stories of Genesis we shall be enjoying in the coming weeks.

Rabbi Pete Tobias

The Liberal Synagogue Elstree