PARSHAT NOACH
Parshat Noach (6:9 to 11:31) contains the famous stories of the flood and the tower of Babel. There is also a highly detailed set of lineages of Noah’s sonsin Chapters 10 and 11 surrounding the story of the tower of Babel. The lineage of Chapters 10 and 11 bring us to Abram, later Abraham.
The story of the flood is a third creation story. The divine has had it with humans. “The end of all flesh has come before me, because the earth is filled with violence because of them. And here: I’m destroying them with the earth.” (6:13). “And He wiped out all the substance that was on the face of the earth, from human to animal to creeping thing to birds of the skies, and they were wiped out from the earth, and just Noah and those who were with him in the ark were left.” (7:23). After the flood is over and the waters have receded, the divine says “I won’t curse the ground on account of humankind again, because the inclination of the human heart is bad from their youth, and I won’t strike all the living again as I have done.” (8:22). This is the powerful myth of starting anew, something that is both impossible and highly appealing in theory at least. If you at least sometimes wish you couldn’t go back in time and rectify your mistakes, you’re either in denial or more reconciled with your past than I am.
As we know, Noah does as the divine commands him and builds the ark. It rains for forty days and forty nights (7:12). This is the first appearance of the number forty that indicates a spiritual quest. We will see reference to this number in Moses’ vision quest on Mount Sinai and then again with Elijah and with Jesus. The divine remembers Noah and all the animals on the ark (8:1), just as he will later remember the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and His covenant with them. The waters recede and eventually everyone is able to leave the ark and Noah builds an altar and makes a sacrifice to YHVH, (8:20) which we will discuss more below. Chapter 9 features a reiteration of the commandment to be fruitful and multiply and dominate the earth and the reestablishment of the covenant with human beings that there will be no more destruction of the earth through a flood. Then we get the lineage of Noah’s sons in Chapter 10 and 11, interrupted by the short story of the Tower of Babel in Chapter 11, vv. 1-9
My discussion will focus on four themes.
The importance of lineage
The efficacy of prayer
The animistic covenant with all beings
The diversity brought about by the destruction of the tower of Babel
We are first introduced to lineages in Chapter five which bridge us from Adam to Noah. Then the opening verse gives us Noah’s sons (the patriarchal dominance of the narrative is already overwhelmingly present) in 6:9. Chapter 10 then gives us a more extended lineage of Noah. After the tower of Babel, we get the extended lineage of Shem which gives us a bridge to Terah, the father of Abram/Abraham. The parsha ends with Terah’s death in Haran, a way station between Ur of Chaldees and Canaan, towards which they were headed. Haran, confusingly, is both a place name and a brother of Abram. Abram’s marriage to Sarai also happens in this parsha.
Lineages are important in indigenous societies because they position the person both in the human community and often in the more than human world. To say I am Deborah, daughter of Miriam and granddaughter of Tali of the tribe of Naphtali, clan of the gazelle, situates a person, grounds a person in a way that is alien to us. We live in a world where very few adults can talk to childhood friends of the influence that the friend’s grandparents had on them. Yet elder influence on kids is one of the hallmarks of indigenous life. This lack of connection to elders is one of the signs of the brokenness of our society.
One of our challenges for those of us interested in reclaiming our connection with the earth is to situate ourselves. We need to be able to say, meaningfully, I am so and so, living in this or that watershed, on unceded land of whichever Native American group it was stolen from, and have that be meaningful, both to ourselves and to those listening.
Lineages can be of blood, but we can also talk of lineages of teachers or practice. The Chabad Rabbis with whom we are familiar are part of the lineage of Chabad, for instance. I did vision fasts with people trained by the School of Lost Borders, so they were part of the lineage of that school. There are lineages within Jewish Mussar, the Jewish practice of self improvement that harkens back to Ben Franklin of all people. There are lots of lineages within Buddhism, to give another example.
When I worked on this question in 5783, I realized that I am an heir of a philosophical lineage of Continental philosophers culminating in Gadamer. But what I utterly lack is a sense of lineage when I come to practice. In some sense Jews who pray are all heirs to the lineage of Rabbinic Judaism which developed and legitimized many of the prayers we pray. But there is no extant Jewish lineage for worshipping the Goddess, for instance. I just attended Sukkot on the Farm with Wilderness Torah, and they are starting to develop a practice for pleading for rain on Sukkot, and maybe, someday, there will be a Wilderness Torah lineage for performing certain rituals.
Where do I have a sense of my lineage, and where do I feel that my lineage is lacking? Do I have a position in the human world that has anything to do with my ancestors? How well, if at all, am I grounded in the more than human world?
Noah offers an amazingly efficacious prayer. He builds an altar, offers up a sacrifice to the divine and because the smell of the burnt meat is pleasing to the divine, the divine promises to never destroy the world again. “YHVH smelled the pleasing odor, and YHVH said to himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devising’s of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being as I have done.” (8:21). As an aside, like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the diversification of languages and people in the myth of the Tower of Babel, this is an acceptance of human beings as they are, though I would rather see a statement that humans can be evil, rather than they are necessarily so.
This prayer to the divine is a highly sensual prayer, something that we lose if we think of prayer only as something we do while we sit on our butts in a building and we focus on the words that we say. This prayer works because it smells good, a theme that is omnipresent in Leviticus. The text tells us that embodied sensual prayer mythically predates any kind of fixed prayer using words, or any words at all.
I find the efficacy of this prayer remarkable. I pray every day, but I would never, ever think it could be as efficacious to make the divine promise not to destroy the world. Imagine if all we had to do to stop climate disruption was offer a heartfelt sacrifice with a pleasing odor.
How to interact with the divine was a complex topic for our ancestors, as it is for us. There was sacrifice of course. There was spontaneous prayer for something specific, as in Hannah’s request for a son that leads to the birth of Samuel. There’s the fixed prayers of the psalms sung by the Levites in the Temple, a different prayer for each day. There’s a debate in the Talmud about whether there should be fixed prayer times. Maimonides said that prior to the Babylonian exile all Jews made up their own prayers. There’s Isaiah’s famous diatribe against superficial prayer and a demand for what might be called a prayer of action (1:10-17). All these forms are available to us, but the efficacy of it seems, at least to me, something that is out of reach. I have a daily prayer practice that grounds me and I envy our ancestors. Prayer is at the heart of who we are as spiritual/religious people.
Do you have some kind of a prayer practice? How can you make your prayer more embodied? More sensual?
The Covenant with Noah and all other beings is an expression of an indigenous Animism. This is a covenant with all beings; not just with humans. “God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “I now establish My covenant with you and your offspring to come, and with every living thing that is with you—birds, cattle, and every wild beast as well—all that have come out of the Ark, every living thing on earth…to [not] destroy the earth” (9:8-11) The fact that the covenant is with all beings, and not just with humans, implies that these other beings have agency and standing. It affirms an animistic view of the world that the whole world is alive.
Animistic views of the world (as I’m using the term here) are characteristic of indigenous people. In a righteous court of law, a human being could file suit on behalf of any or all of these living beings against the destruction of their habitats because they have a covenant with the divine that they not be destroyed.
And yet, “The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky—everything with which the earth is astir—and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand.”(9:2) As an empirical statement, sure, almost all other beings should fear humanity and our pernicious influence on the ecosystems of the earth with the exception of certain species who have benefitted enormously from their partnership with humans, as outlined by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Squirrels, cows, corn, white tailed deer, cats and doges are examples of species where it can be said that they have domesticated us.
But is the Torah giving us an empirical claim or a moral claim when it says that other beings will fear and dread us? Is it a simple statement that all other earthly beings should be afraid of we humans, or a moral claim that we have the right to do whatever we want to them? There’s an obvious long and vile history of reading this as a moral claim. But what if we read it as a simple empirical claim about the way things are? Then perhaps we as humans need to become aware of our ability to dominate other species, just as we need to become aware of our possibility for evil.
Wendell Berry insists that right relationship with the more than human world has to involve an economic relationship. He criticizes Romantic Poets for viewing nature as just a place to retreat to and a balm for the soul from the hubbub of civilization. He advocates for a productive relationship with the more than human world, whether that is gardening, wild foraging, working with wood in some way or raising animals. He is a compelling and lonely voice with the only sort of parallel in Jewish tradition being found in A.D. Gordon to the best of my knowledge.
How do you view the rightful place of other beings and their relationship with humans? To what extent are you living what you imagine as right relationship?
BBabel and diversification. Chapter 11 begins with all humans living in the same place and speaking the same language. As with the Garden of Eden, the divine is afraid that they will become like him (and it is a male ego being challenged). “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.” (11:6-7) So the divine disperses the humans all over the world.
As with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, what looks like punishment is actually the process of becoming human. We think of humans as a non rooted species, but that’s now how our ancestors viewed humans. For them, there was something qualitatively different about different groups of humans based on the landscapes in which they dwelled and which dwelled in them. David Abram explores this brilliantly in his wonderful book The Spell of the Sensuous. The story of Babel is a statement in support of diversity and connectedness to place.
How do you think about the connections amongst language, place and human community? How connected are you to where you live? What can you do to increase that connection?
QUESTIONS
Where do I have a sense of my lineage, and where do I feel that my lineage is lacking? Do I have a position in the human world that has anything to do with my ancestors? How well, if at all, am I grounded in the more than human world?
Do you have some kind of a prayer practice? How can you make your prayer more embodied? More sensual?
How do you view the rightful place of other beings and their relationship with humans? To what extent are you living what you imagine as right relationship?
How do you think about the connections amongst language, place and human community? How connected are you to where you live? What can you do to increase that connection?
