Hi everyone,
Hope you had a great week. This week’s parshah is Noah, the story we all learned as children about the Great Flood, the Ark and the animals who came in twosie-twosies.
The story lends itself to fantastic imagery and grandeur. And while that may speak well to children and their developmental stages of understanding, it is the nuances of the narrative that amaze me.
But before we get there, I think we can all appreciate how animals have enriched our lives. I grew up with a myriad of pets that included many dogs, 1 cat, endless birds and tanks of fish. I rescued wounded birds from our porch and nursed them back to health in shoe boxes in my closet. My parents never knew. A few times the birds disappeared from my closet and I spent days quietly searching the house for where they may have flown…(hi mom).
I had a Mynah bird I named Mozart because I was so excited to hear him sing. Mynah birds imitate sounds and since we had 2 dogs at that time, Mozart learned to bark. I learned never to underestimate the free will of animals.
And so, we arrive at Noah and the ark of animals.
We know he collected animals to save from the impending doomsday flood. We know it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and we know Noah sent a dove out to check on things and the dove brought an olive branch back, to show the earth had dried. Peace was in place between God and humanity so the olive branch has become synonymous with peace.
Ah, if it were only that simple.
The story of Noah and the ark is a birth story. It is an ark surrounded by water that is carrying the seeds of life within it. It will take 40 days and 40 is the number of weeks it takes for a human baby to gestate. And while the image of birth is strong and beautiful, the destructive image of the battle with God is devastating.
The Torah says that God decided to destroy the world because the ways of flesh had corrupted its nature. Many commentaries have been written to explain what that might mean. Murder, mayhem, immorality, the list becomes a litany of horrors. But the plainest of meanings is that life had denied its nature, had become inauthentic.
In essence, it means I don’t know who I am or where is my natural place. Worse, I choose to defy who I am or my natural place. It only gets worse when I add that I am the image of God. Now it means I don’t know, nor do I care about who, or what, God is. That means I have ignored God or, in the worst of cases, I challenge God. If I challenge God, I have thrown down the gauntlet and I have now declared God my enemy.
And so, God picks up a divine weapon and wages a war.
When all is said and done, God puts down the weapon and declares that after every rainfall we will see God’s bow in the sky. The word used is ‘bow’, as in ‘bow and arrow’. The rain from above were the arrows which God had slung to the earth with a divine bow. It becomes the word ‘rainbow’ because it appears after the rain, but the arch in the image is the image of a weapon, the image of a bow. God disarms and places the weapon forever hanging, forever inactive. That is the beauty of it and that is why it should comfort us.
That is the grandeur.
And a beautiful subtle moment is when Noah sends out 2 birds to see if things are dry. The first bird is a raven, it is male. The Torah says it won’t go far from the ark, it keeps circling and coming back. The Sages say it is protecting its mate and will not leave her. So Noah sends out a dove, a female. She returns with a branch. She lets Noah know that she has what she needs to build a nest. That is when he knows all is good.
The Torah says that animals go into the ark but families emerge. The raven, who would not leave his mate and the dove who seeks to secure her babies. The present and the future.
So let’s keep singing the Noah children’s song, ‘it rained and poured for forty daysie-daysies…’ but never allow that to keep us from enjoying the wonder that is above and living with us.
Beautiful Rachael. Thank you.