Yesterday I spent the day chasing rainbows and unicorns. And succeeded. Allie Mikyska and I actually saw two rainbows over Busse Woods and just as Ellen suggested then the glorious sun came out. We had lots of opportunity to talk will we were walking. We talked a lot about Noah. Why was he righteous. The text doesn’t really tell us. Perhaps because he obeyed G-d and bult the ark. Why do some people, many Evangelical Christians have problems now with rainbows and unicorns? Perhaps because the gay community has taken both on as symbols to show the diversity of humanity.
Rainbows have often fascinated me. Not growing up in a particularly religious household. You’ve heard the story about how when we joined the temple in Grand Rapids and were asked to light the candles for New Member Shabbat I told the rabbi, “But Al, Jews don’t believe in G-d, only Christians do.” I was afraid he might use that line at my ordination.
Fast forward to Tufts where I became very active in Hillel. My sophomore year I was walking by the Chapel on the weekend of Shabbat Noach and there was a maple tree that was ablaze with fire. I had just left my Pashrat Hashavua class, not unlike our weekly Torah Study here and we had been studying rainbows. I came to the conclusion that rainbows are the proof that G-d exists. Why? Because they are a perfect balance between sun and rain. Too much sun, no rainbow. Too much rain, no rainbow. It has to be just right. Sort of like Goldilocks or even better the poem by Joyce Kilmer that includes the line that “only G-d can make a tree.” I actually wrote a poem about the Chapel Tree.
I like the Noach story for other reasons. We know that this week that Noach is a righteous man in his generation. (Although we don’t really get a definition of righteous). That unquestioningly he builds a ark and rescues his family and all those animals. Next week we will see that Abraham is considered righteous precisely because he does question G-d.
But what is with all this destruction? Why does G-d want to destroy the world that G-d had just created? I’ll dare to ask that question. Some may see the very question as heresy. I do not. Our task is to question G-d and to wrestle with G-d. It doesn’t really help that the midrash teaches that G-d made 974 worlds or maybe 1000 before this one.
Rabbi Judah b. R. Simon said: “Let there be evening” is not written here, but “And there was evening”; hence we know that a time-order existed before this. Rabbi Abahu said: “This proves that the Holy One, blessed be He, went on creating worlds and destroying them until He created this one, and declared, ‘This one pleases Me; those did not please Me.’” (Midrash Rabbah – Genesis III:7)
“In Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Abahu characterizes the creation as an act of creative destruction, a way to dispose of the remnants of the prior worlds whose “formlessness and void” nature, tohu u bohu, is the place where evil can prosper. Whether filled with evil or not, these past worlds turn our universe into a haunting palimpsest.”
Later in the parsha, G-d gives us the rainbow as the sign of the covenant. And promises to never destroy the world again. “Never again will I doom the earth because of humanity, since the devising of their minds are evil from their youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.”
Some have argued that G-d meant destruction by water. There is an Negro Spiritual, “Mary Don’t You Weep.” The line goes, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.” James Baldwin wrote a book using that phrase “The Fire Next TIme” as the title to describe the emerging civil rights movement.
But a covenant is a two-way street. If G-d promises to not destroy the world and the rainbow is the sign of that covenant, what do we need to promise in exchange. Some talk about the seven Noahide laws:
Seven commandments were commanded of the sons of Noah:
- Not to worship idols.
- Not to curse or blaspheme G-d.
- Not to commit murder.
- Not to commit adultery or other sexual immorality.
- Not to steal.
- Not to eat flesh from a living animal.
- To establish courts of justice.
I have looked and looked and am never clear on how these are derived from the simple level of the text. Perhaps some comes from the Talmud. Perhaps it is codified in Tosefta. These “commandments” have been promoted especially by the Chabad movement and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson as an alternative to fully converting to Judaism. Just become a Noahide.
Others have seen this story as the birth of our being caretakers with G-d in creation. G-d is not going to destroy the world but we then have an obligation to not destroy it either.
And then, coming out of nowhere, we have the story of the Tower of Babel. Again G-d is not satisfied. These people are making bricks. Trying to build the tallest tower, reaching to the heavens. Perhaps trying to reach G-d! Horrors. ““If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus the LORD scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.”
Say what? I thought that we are supposed to learn how to cooperate. How to work in teams. How to build bridges between people. I am not comfortable with this story. It seems the antithesis of other verses like “Love your neighbor as yourself” and the root of some of the real problems in this world. Why would G-d do this? Was G-d feeling threatened? Does G-d have a short fuse? How do we justify both these stories, the destruction of the world and the confounding of speech with G-d is slow to anger and full of lovingkindness?
Every so often someone sits in my office and says they don’t believe in G-d. I assure them that my father described himself as a Jewish atheist and that it is OK not to believe in G-d. Many Jews do not, not just my father. But then I ask them to describe the G-d they don’t believe in. Often it is a destructive G-d, or the G-d that sits on a throne making some kind of capricious decisions about who shall live and who shall die Sometimes it is the vindictive G-d who wipes out whole peoples, like the Canaanites so that the Israelites can possess the land. How can we understand the destruction of the Holocaust. Why did G-d not stop it if G-d is all powerful all knowing and all good? I struggle with those notions of G-d too. It is not the G-d I believe in. Many questions this morning. Not so many answers. We will have to wrestle them out together.