“Resting with the Truth”
Parashat Noach seems like a story from a fairy tale. I remember as a child hearing one rendition of this story: One day God decided to send a flood; He would send a strong storm so He ordered Noah to build an ark to save the animals of the planet and humanity. However, the people made fun of him and despite their lack of faith in his “preaching”, they chose not to believe and they mocked his message. When it started to rain, the people realized their mistake, but they could no longer get onto the ark since it had been closed by Noah, and so they all drowned. Meanwhile, Noach and his family were saved, and God created the rainbow as a symbol of future hope.
I have also watched many cartoons about Noah, but they were also filled with half-truths. Do you that half-truths are more dangerous than outright lies and are sheer deception because then we don’t know how to discern the truth from the lie?
In these stories, Noah was always presented as the perfect man – he had a well-groomed beard; he was always happy and full of life, with the perfect family who had no struggles; they were always smiling.
Allow me to dispel these false accounts, these “sacred cows” in our minds and to discuss the events as the Torah tells it, how the events actually unfolded.
The story begins in Bereshit 6: “Eleh toldot Noach; Noach ish tsaddik tamim hayah bedorotav et-ha’Elohim hitchalech Noach.”. אֵלֶּה תּוֹלְדֹת נֹחַ-נֹחַ אִישׁ צַדִּיק תָּמִים הָיָה, בְּדֹרֹתָיו נֹחַ: אֶת-הָאֱלֹהִים הִתְהַלֶּךְ נֹח
“These are the generations of Noah. Noah (was) a righteous man, blameless in his generation; “Noah walked with God”
This verse characterizes Noach as having the virtue of a tzaddik (righteous) and as being a man of integrity. However, this same man about whom we read here as a tzaddik and an ish tam (a man without guile), we later read about in 9:20: “And Noah became master or tiller of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank the wine, became drunk, and uncovered himself in the midst of his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers who were outside.”
How is there any similarity between being a “perfect man” and a drunken one?
One beautiful thing about the Torah is that it does not depict human beings as being perfect; it does not whitewash its people to make them faultless, because fault is inherent in every human being. In fact, Bereshit 8:21 confirms it where it says: “I will not curse the ground anymore because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth;”
This understanding brought me great joy, because it gives hope to all of us who are on the path of Torah, that we can be tzaddikim (righteous) even with our faults. How many people live with the deception that they are too far from God because they are “bad” or do “bad” things? So, they say “I just can’t”, “I’m not capable”, “I’m not good enough”, “I don’t deserve anything”, etc. and so they distance themselves from God?
When God created us, He instilled the breath of life within us, within our Nefesh. The Nefesh can be understood as the breathing, innate, animal soul in every living being. We might say that it is with our natural instinct that we can sense a higher power within the body. Through our Nefesh we experience hunger, the need to sleep, and it controls our innate bodily functions such as the beating of our heart, our breathing, etc. without having to think about it.
For those who read the Kabbala, it teaches that God decided to “improve” man by giving him His Ruach, the Divine breath that breathes into his body, and manifests itself as emotion, inspiration, motive or intention. Then from within man, the Divine spark ignites, and the Neshama appear as a balance manifested by the intellect. Then we discover the soul level of Chaya (life), which can contemplate the transcendence of God, and the soul level of Yichida, which is the essence of the soul – the lifelong goal of achieving oneness with Divinity, being able to think as He thinks.
In Biblical Judaism, those who fulfill and live the Commandments enjoy closeness to the Eternal – they are called Tzaddik. If we read carefully, when Noach walked (hitchalech) with God, he was tzaddik. When Noach decided to distance himself from God, and considered himself “master of the soil,” he planted a vineyard to get drunk and he let himself be carried away by his animal instincts, which resulted in disaster. This is the history of humanity – we think that distancing ourselves from God is the solution to not living a life of guilt. However, when we choose to diminish our Neshama (our soul connection with the Divine), our Nefesh (our animal nature) becomes stronger, to the point of “losing control” of ourselves, of our will, and we become slaves to the desires of the body.
Again, the easiest thing is for us to blame others for the consequences of our decisions and attribute our problems to external factors; I’ve heard some say, “they has been taken over by demons” or “the devil made me do it”, etc. when in reality, we gave our power over to our animal instinct which then controls us and governs our intellect and emotions.
The Torah is silent on whether Noah actually spoke to his fellow citizens about repentance, or whether he even warned them to change their behaviour to avoid catastrophe. There is no record of whether Noah even prayed for his generation. What we do know is that being righteous in his generation was an achievement that required it to be written down and recorded in the Torah. That generation lived in sexual depravity, with violence (in Hebrew the word is hamas), in a state of continuous theft, greed, intolerance, deceit, fraud, and corruption. So, we can eliminate another myth that Noah was a fervent “preacher”. We don’t know if the people then were simply indifferent, that they didn’t care whether an ark was built or not, or if they even wondered how it was possible that animals could be drawn to this refuge. The truth is that the Torah does not mention it.
As I read earlier, the ark was built by a miracle. However, we read the decree of the Eternal in Bereshit 6:3 “and his days would be one hundred and twenty years.” This was not referring to the physical age of man at that time, because we read that Noah lived more than 120 years and so did his sons, but rather it was referring to the time of judgment from the beginning of the construction of the ark to when the floodgates of heaven opened up. That very moment coincided with the name of Methuselah (Bereshit 5:24-27), whose name has a dual meaning: “Man of the Dart” or “his death brings judgment.” God waited for his death for the flood to begin.
So, it was not an easy process, but one of continuous questioning about whether what they heard was true. Would the flood come? Were these wild, crazy ideas; did we hear right? We often despair while we are waiting to see a Divine manifestation, but Noah earned a very high merit by remaining steadfast in his task of building the ark. I can’t imagine how difficult it was to convince his household to follow him on this adventure 120 years later.
The Zohar relates that to some extent, Noah had some involvement in the flood. It says in Isaiah 54:9, “For this is to me like the waters of Noah; as I swore that the waters of Noah would never again pass over the earth, so I have sworn not to be angry with you nor to rebuke you.” By repeating the “waters of Noah twice,” the Zohar is saying that as Abraham prayed for Sodom, by not praying for his generation Noah was responsible for the waters because he didn’t plead as a tzaddik for the mercy of the world.
Again, we see that Noah was not the “perfect man.” His righteousness was limited to not emulating the evil practices of men. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe points out, how is it possible that in 120 years, he did not produce one single repentant? Noah entered the ark alone with his family. So, was it Noah’s inaction or was it the indifference of the people that caused that entire generation to perish? We see how Nineveh was finally saved from God’s decree of destruction, but it took work on both sides, Jonah’s, together with the people of Nineveh and their leaders.
A half-truth is as bad as a complete lie. Regarding the problem with his son after getting drunk, we don’t know if Noah did it to erase from his mind the horror that he had witnessed or was it to ease his guilt of “not having done more for his generation.” The Torah says in 9:20 “And he drank the wine, and became drunk, and he uncovered himself in the midst of his tent.” Yes, Noah uncovered himself; he lost his sanity and exposed himself without modesty. His youngest son, who had obviously lived years within that corrupt generation, was faced with a situation of weakness, so later it says that “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness.” This verse is deeper than we think.
Because Noah exposed himself, Ham in his weakness committed a sin. So, at this point we don’t know if he was already the father of Canaan, but that’s an important fact, since Canaan was not Ham’s only son; according to Bereshit 10:6, it says his sons were: “Cush, Mitzraim, Put and Canaan.” However, the Torah emphasizes that his son Canaan was the one who inherited most of Ham’s character traits. It is interesting that these four sons today have developed into four complicated nations.
The point is that there was a combination of factors – Noah’s carelessness and Ham’s innate weakness. We see how Noah cursed him out of anger, but why didn’t Noah stop to think that he should have protected his son? Let this serve as advice for parents…it is not good for children to see their parents (or other adults) naked; we don’t know what harm this can cause them.
Today, in the same way, we are shown supposed “truths”, acted out on camera, showing IDF atrocities, alleged war crimes, attacks on UN facilities, and we know that they are all half-truths if not staged lies! In the same way, we are presented with a Yeshua as a god, divine, sinless and without error, but this is nothing more than a lie disguised as the truth. Sometimes opening our eyes hurts, but we must do it, because as Yeshua said: “The Truth shall set you free.” I know that a half-truth is often more comfortable, sweeter, more socially acceptable because it appears to not discriminate, but a half-truth is still a half-lie.
Likewise, sin needs to spread. What did Ham do? He ran to tell his brothers about his father’s nakedness… as the Torah says: “and he made it known to his two brothers.” That is what evil does; that is why today, we see our senses bombarded with evil, because evil needs to spread in order to endure.
However, we also read about how we can overcome it, and that is by cutting evil off at the root. In the case of Ham’s brothers, Shem and Yapheth, it was by guarding their eyes since the sin was of a sexual nature. We even read that because they were upright, they did not spread the evil. With integrity, we fight evil in the world.
This Shabbat, my prayer is that the Eternal opens our spiritual senses, that He awakens our Neshama, that it does not hurt us to open our eyes, and even if it is uncomfortable, that we open our minds and hearts to the Truth, that is, to the Eternal GOD. Mishlei 12:19 says: “A truthful word remains forever, a lying tongue only for a moment.”
Shabbat Shalom
Mauricio Quintero