Noach | New World Order (1)

     Parashat Bereishit ended on an ominous note with the Torah threatening the destruction of the world for the sins of mankind.  In contrast, the story of Noach concludes in an upbeat manner, with God promising that the deluge is the first and last of its kind.  As the animals creep, crawl and fly out of the ark, their destroyed world lying catastrophically around them, Noach offers a sacrifice of thanks for all of their lives.

"The Lord smelled the pleasing odor, and the Lord said to Himself: 'Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man's mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done. So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease"  (Genesis 8:21-22).

     Whew!  We breathe a sigh of relief!  Noach too, must have been concerned that God would continue to interact with the world in this way.  However, God allays Noach's fears in the next chapter, telling him and his family, "I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth" (Genesis 9:11).  Some see a link between this guarantee and the Lord's command to Noach to "Be fruitful and multiply" of verse 7.  Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchak, 11th century) writes, "I (God) agree with you.  For Noach was worried about engaging in procreation until the Holy One Blessed Be He promised him not to destroy the world again"  (commentary to verse 9).

     This promise has always puzzled me.  Why does God state, first to Himself and then to the surviving people, that He has decided that wiping out the entire planet is just not the way to go?  He didn't seem to have any difficulty doing it the first time.  Has God, seeing all the dead bodies, suddenly become squeamish, declaring, Whoa!  I better not do THAT again!  Surely God could have anticipated the result of the flood; indeed, it was His plan all along to kill all living things on the planet.  Is it not possible that at some point in the future man will descend to a level of evil comparable to the nastiness of Noach's generation and thus warrant a similar fate?  It is hard to believe that the sins perpetrated by the victims of the flood even come close to atrocities committed in our own century.  In short, if God was prepared to impose such a drastic punishment once, why does He not reserve the right to wield such power again?

     Starting my research with the Abarbanel, I was delighted to discover that he validates my questions by posing similar ones.  Needless to say, the 15th century scholar's eye was a little keener than mine, and he points out something that  hadn't occurred to me.  Rabbi Abarbanel's commentary is always prefaced by a series of questions on the section he plans to interpret; here is a translation of his fourth question: "Why does [God] give as an explanation not to curse [the world] the reasoning that 'the devisings of man are evil from his youth' (8:21) - on the contrary, that is the very reason to curse and destroy, which is in fact what the Torah says at the end of Parashat Bereishit 'The Lord saw how great was man's wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time ...  The Lord said: 'I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created' (Genesis 6:5,7).  So we see that there God gives man's sin as the reason for his destruction and here God gives man's sin as the reason to avoid his destruction!  How can the same explanation be used to support two contrary arguments?"

     The Abarbanel and other commentators, medieval and modern, offer a range of solutions to our problem, all of them trying to isolate which factor has changed from the antediluvian to the post-diluvian world.  The elements of the equation are God, man, and nature; we'll begin our investigation with man.

     Umberto Cassuto was a 20th century Bible scholar who lived in Italy and Israel.  He connects the two phrases of verse 8:21 - God smelling Noach's sacrifice and His determination not to repeat the devastation.  Once God saw Noach's display of gratitude, he knew that His original decision to save this righteous man was correct - here was someone with a good heart and noble attributes.  God hoped that Noach would pass on his morals to his children who would become upstanding people.  A new and fine humanity is starting and God feels that there will never again be a need to repeat the punishment.  Similar to this is the theory of the Ralbag (Rabbi Levi ben Gershom, 12th century), who writes that man's moral compass spins wildly, needing a magnet to set it right.  Among his generation, only Noach found direction and he will responsibly teach his descendants about truth and goodness.  There will never again arise an era like the preceding one. 

     The Abarbanel himself presents several ideas about the transformation of man.  His most radical is this: When the Torah says that "the devisings of man's mind are evil from his youth," it is not referring to individual people, but to humanity.  Born at creation, man's early development spanned the ten generations from Adam to Noach.  Childhood is a turbulent time, a chance to experiment with reckless immaturity; adolescence is marked by rebellion and self-assertiveness.  But with adulthood comes sensibility, settling down, stability.  The flood had a sobering effect on mankind, God slapped humanity's face, demanding that they cut out the nonsense and just grow up!  Well, after that, the lesson has been learned.  Future generations will look back on the story with the pain we all feel about certain events of our teen years, and keep themselves in check.  Thus, future catastrophes will be avoided.

     Another point raised by the Abarbanel is that whereas at the first creation, all of mankind descended from one couple, the second creation is started with three couples.  Noach had three sons - Shem, Cham and Yafet, whose descendants spread out and populated the earth.  The different families represent different temperaments so it would never again occur that cousins would all be united in a common desire for sin.  The problem with this theory, of course, is that it is disproved at the end of Parashat Noach.  "Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words.  And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shin'ar and settled there."  The story of the Tower of Babel follows, a tale in which the sin is unclear, but this much is certain: the Lord was displeased with human behavior once again.  So, not only is humanity united in a common challenge to God, but it seems that contrary to the ideas presented above, people have not learned the lesson that the master of the universe is not to be trifled with.  Furthermore, as Rav Yehuda Shaviv argues against the Abarbanel in an article on this topic (see Megadim volume 18), why would God not wait for humanity to grow out of its restlessness instead of cutting mankind down in its youth?

     Two 19^th-century commentators argue that verse 8:22 is a testament to the change of nature following the flood.  Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv) writes in his work Ha'amek Davar that antediluvian idleness was the parent of mischief.  Early man had it too easy: there was food aplenty and longevity was common.  But now, "seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night" were the order of the world.  Man would have to work for a living, he'd have little time or inclination for sin.  The Malbim (Rabbi Meir Leib ben Yechiel Michoel) gives an elaborate description of how the sun and earth interacted differently in the two eras.  He also repeats a rabbinic idea that agriculture did not follow the same patterns that it currently does, but that sowing and harvesting were activities undertaken once every forty years.  Changes in climate and more regular seasons required that man exert more and constant efforts to feed himself.  This left man weak and occupied, with his desires dampened.  A 20^th-century rabbi, Zalman ben Ben-Zion Sorotzkin contributes the notion that by imposing cold and winter on the world God caused man discomfort, and this suffering precluded the need for global response to sin.       While I do not claim to fully understand the purpose behind verse 8:22, I can't help but feel that these theories ignore an earlier discussion of man's relationship to work - the sentence Adam receives following his sin in Genesis chapter 3.  Along with the expulsion from the garden of Eden, God tells man: "Cursed be the ground because of you; by toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.  Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you.  But your food shall be the grasses of the field.  By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground" (Genesis 3:17-19).  Surely this means that the world before the flood was a harsh place, and that a 9 to 5 schedule existed long before Noach.  Lest it be argued that this curse is directed only at the individual Adam and not at his descendants, note that the parallel curses to his wife, Eve, have reverberated throughout history without being reintroduced after the flood: "And to the woman He said, 'I will make most severe your pangs in childbearing; in pain shall you bear children.  Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you" (3:16).