The World We've Got

Noah found favor with God.
He was blameless.
He walked with God. 

Humanity, by the way, had flourished. We were following the commandment to be fruitful and multiply by letter and spirit. And not just us! In a rather strange and wonderful verse, Genesis 6:4, we learn it was “then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth—when divine beings cohabited with the human women, who bore them offspring. Such were the heroes of old, the men of renown.” Human women gave birth to heroes of old conceived with divine beings. 

Want to know how I know the Torah isn’t trying to tell the stories of science or history?

The earth, though, was another story altogether.
Or it was the same story. Or in the same story at least, but maybe it was the setting.
The landscape.
The earth, you see, had become corrupt for all that lived had corrupted their ways.

“God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth.” (Genesis 6:13)

Hold. The. Phone.

In the beginning, just last week, there was chaos. Then God brought the not-nothing chaos into order. God had a whole plan. God made distinctions and gave tasks and created a partner for God in the very image of God. Us. In the universe God designed, there is nothing that isn’t God except for God’s creations.

From where then did all of this lawlessness originate? Where did the corruption come from? It sure seems like the balance between civilization and anarchy is rather unsteady, doesn’t it?

Maybe the most potent lessons of Jewish horror fiction started here in parshat Noah. 

Typically, we point to Iyov when we think of Jewish horror fiction.
Iyov who most of us know as Job.
Handed over as a plaything to the Adversary by God for no particular reason.

At least, not a good one.

And Job’s friends! Among the most callous monsters in literature.
What’s more, Job insists, and in the end is affirmed by God, that there is nothing in the universe that is not God. 

Rabbi David Forman teaches that both the Torah and Job share a genre, and this genre is about the human management of our relationship with God in all that God may be. It’s us trying to make sense of the world and our place in it. The Talmud teaches that the Torah and Job have something else in common, too. Both, it says, were scribed by Moses. 

Let’s think about that. Within the world of this story, Job new Noah’s story. 
Noah, though, he doesn’t even know what’s coming.
Sure, God said, “I’ve decided,” but destruction on this scale, or any scale, has never happened before.
Noah doesn’t have the Torah as a guide, and while, sure, his friends aren’t monsters that’s only because he doesn’t have any friends.
What does he have?
An unnamed wife. Children. Animals. And some time.
Time enough to build an ark. 

I wonder what Noah thought about during all of that time he was building.
Did he watch his neighbors’ children playing in the fields with the goats?
Did he notice the young lovers who casually struck up a conversation, albeit an awkward one, at the well?
Did he laugh when the old man told the same joke again for the hundredth time?

Or was there only the children bullying the youngest? 
The drunken man beating his wife?
The lies and the deceit? 
“All flesh had corrupted its ways.” (Genesis 6:12)

Maybe there was nothing sweet and kind and compassionate left in the world.
That just doesn’t seem right, though.
If all is really all, what of Noah? What of his wife? What of their children?
Does a being need to be all innocence to be worth our time?
To be worth God’s time?

Still, “Make an ark,” said God, and so Noah did.
“Go into the ark with your household, for you alone have I found righteous before Me in this generation.” 
Righteous.
A high bar.

“For in seven days’ time I will make it rain upon the earth, forty days and forty nights, and I will blot out from the earth all existence that I created.” (Genesis 7:4)
Noah brings his family into the ark. He brings in the animals. 
And then here is the verse that gets me everytime:
“And God shut him in.” (Genesis 7:16)

I have no trouble believing in a corrupt world. Violent. Full of humans who treat each other with intentional cruelty, who disregard the well-being of one another, who abuse their own children, who torture other people’s children, who lynch and maim, who stand idly by. 

What is harder for me to believe is that Noah didn’t care about a lot of those people anyway. At least in the abstract, and maybe in the specific. Maybe loved some of them. Maybe wanted to see if the child who loved to whistle would grow into a musician who could get everyone dancing. What would make him righteous if not a desire and a hope that the corruption could be made honest and whole? That there might be a way forward that could look different than the moment they were all in?

He did what God said.
And then he stood at that open door of the ark and looked out.
The rain was already falling.
The fountains and the floodgates had already burst open.
Now he knew.
In his bones he knew.
Maybe in his marrow.
“I am about to destroy them all,” took shape and form.
God spoke and a world - worlds - ceased to be.
Noah couldn’t close them out. He couldn’t close the door.
So God did.
Was it compassion for Noah? God shutting him in?
Or was it something else?
I don’t know anymore.

And later, what did Noah think of God’s promise never to destroy because of humanity again, but only “because the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth?” (Genesis 8:21) Was Noah comforted? I am not comforted. I’m not comforted anymore than Job was when he called God to a trial and was affirmed in his assertion that all comes from God - the evil and the good - even as he was chastised for making the challenge in the first place. How did it feel to be blessed and charged again to be fertile and increase and fill the earth? Did Noah think for a moment that anything would be different this time around? Did God? How could they when God’s next words created the fear and dread of humanity “in all of the animals of the earth and all of the birds of the sky and everything with which the earth is astir.” (9:2) Not only that, Noah, says God, you can eat it all. Consume it.

But no one may murder a human. Why not?
“For in the image of God was humankind made.” (9:6)

Job is a pious believer. He’s struck by misfortune so great that it cannot be explained as prompting repentance, as a warning, let alone a punishment. At first, he accepts without rebelling, “Should we accept only good from God and not accept evil?” He’s learned the Shema. He knows God is One. God alone is God, and everything is God. However, he is unable to find a reasonable relationship between the suffering and the moral state of its victims - himself and his children. He becomes aware that in the world the same lack of relation persists. (Job 9:22, 12:6-9, 21:7-34) Because of the prologue, we know that Job’s suffering truly does make no sense. His friends’ insistence that misfortune indicates sin might be plausible. Job might seem not righteous, but self-righteous. And arrogant. From the outset, though, we know of Job’s integrity. Therefore we will never side with his friends.

A talmudic rabbi in Baba Batra 15a tells us Job is a parable. He is every good person who when confronted with an absurd disaster refuses to lie in order to justify God, and who also continues to be in relationship with God . . . with whatever God is or will be. Job’s view of moral disorder in God’s management of the world is warranted. The phenomena of the world is pervaded by the presence of God, yes, but the plane on which God and humanity interact isn’t always reasonable. Through nature, God reveals God’s self to Job as both purposive and nonpurposive - much like the monsters God created. 

It seems, perhaps, within God’s supposed order there is yet a great deal of chaos.

Maybe like me you want a resolving note here.
Our minds want a solution to this puzzle.
I don’t have one.

In his trauma, Noah plants a vineyard and becomes drunk.
Some later author, uncomfortable with the ending of Job wrote a new one and gave him new sons and new daughters and twice what he had before God and the Adversary began to toy with him. What could it possibly mean that Job was content in the end? I think only that the author of the addendum so badly needed an “at least” or a silver lining that he insisted on aligning himself with Job’s callous friends. We all know better. Our loved ones are not replaceable. 

What do I have then?

Well, I agree with Rabbi Forman that the Torah and Book of Job share a genre that seeks to make sense of what is often a nonsensicle world and to manage a relationship with God with maturity and honesty about the pervasiveness of our experience of moral disorder. In the end, I don’t think Job is content in the sense that he’s decided the moral order is acceptable, but rather that he accepts that this is the way it is. This is the world we’ve got. 

Perhaps one of the reasons we are here is so that God, the One, is not God alone - but God in companionship with us. Taking us seriously.

As partners in creation created in God’s image, we also speak the world into being. That means we have a lot of power and a responsibility to use it well. May we do our best to speak into being and fashion into form a world with more hope, compassion, kindness, and peace.