This was my D’var Torah about Parashat Noach in 5783 (2022). This Torah reading centers on the Flood. This teaching here is about “during the Flood”, and at the end I discourage us from seeing our era as sliding toward the Flood. If we do see it that way, we still might ask the question not addressed here, of what Noach did when he thought perhaps the Flood could be staved off. That might be what I speak about this coming Shabbat in Marcheshvan 5786/October 2025, a couple of days from now. But it’s possible to see ourselves as on the Ark today too. Torah allows us to try either lens, or both.
Here are some questions Noach might have had:
- How did things get this bad?
- Are things going to get like this again?
- When I get off the ark, is there something I and my family should be doing to head this kind of thing off in the future?
The Torah doesn’t tell us really anything about whether Noach had these questions. He got off and planted a vineyard, and our tradition has voices who say he went and got drunk. Elie Wiesel thinks this represents how overwhelmed Noach must have felt, being the sole survivor of the catastrophe, feeling tremendous guilt about why he escaped alive and whether he should have done more to save others.
Other than that, the only reason the Torah says that another Flood won’t happen is that the Divine is taking it off the table. Yah says: even though the nature of the human heart is bad from youth, this isn’t how we’re going to handle it anymore (Genesis 8:21-22). I give them space and maybe I give Myself space to figure out what happens when another generation like this appears, as it probably will.
But Noach and his family, his wife and his kids and their spouses — surely they must have thought about more than: it won’t happen again in my lifetime.
A few years ago, a congregant gave me a heads-up about a program they had seen coming up at the library in Hudson. It was about remembering the Holocaust and dispelling myths, by a presenter neither the congregant nor I had heard of. It raised my antennae — I know of some bad experiences in Hudson around anti-Semitism, and the word “myths” made me suspicious too. I called the library and they put me in touch with the presenter, who I spoke to and it turned out all these concerns were wrong, to say the least.
I ended up sitting with the presenter, a local man named Mick Grzonka. Mick is originally from Germany. He is a chemist by training and active in one of the Lutheran churches, and he is a serious lay historian. His presentation began as something for his church, whom he felt needed to know more about the Shoah, and grew out of reflecting on his own German-ness. The myths he was aiming to dispel are myths that would prevent us from drawing lessons for our time. Mick showed me his presentation, which is more than solid about how fascism took root in Germany.
That was a relief, but what was astonishing was something else Mick brought me. It was an article he had written about a group of Germans who gathered in late 1942 to figure out what to do when they would get out of the ark, to prevent fascism from taking root again in post-war Germany.
Recall that the fall of 1942 and the beginning of that following winter were the peak of the Nazis’ military strength. If the 1930s were like the period when Noach was building his ark, knowing that human society was spiraling downward, the years of the war and the Shoah were the storm and the Flood, the end of millions of lives. We talk about rescuers and partisans, brave people who organized to fight back and to save individuals and groups. But the ark, we don’t usually think about. Who in the very center of the storm, inside it, was preparing for the day when the Flood would end and they would have to do the first things to recreate human society, in the very place where the downward sprial had been?
It turns out there were people. There was Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had stood up a decade before against the Nazification of German churches and helped establish a new branch, the Confessing Church, and was himself active in the resistance. There were the economists of what was known as the Freiburg School, gathered at the university in that city. Many of them had worked in the economic ministries of the Weimar Republic, and they were developing a theory of economics tying the freedom of exchange-based economies with the ethics of human flourishing.
Pastor Bonhoeffer had been in touch with the British government, trying to persuade them to allow Germans time after the war to set up a new government. He saw that the Flood would end, even though no one could say when the forty days and forty nights of this rain were going to subside. As part of the work, Pastor Bonhoeffer approached the others in Freiburg about drafting a program “in which all the main branches of public life are treated from the point of view of Christian social ethics.”
We invited Mick Grzonka here a couple years ago to present this remarkable story of the Bonhoeffer Freiburg Circle, in partnership with some of our closest congregational friends in the Nashua Area Interfaith Council. Mick talked about one section in particular of what is known as the Denkschrift, the memorandum that covered everything from government and law to education and economics. A crucial section was written by three political economists named Constantin von Dietze, Walter Eucken and Adolf Lampe. They said that religious ethics couldn’t on their own tell you how to structure an economy, but the Ten Commandments could actually be a guide to the goals of post-war society and economics. Free exchange among free individuals would be the mechanics of the economy, but other facets of the social and political structure would have to ensure that people were not reduced to materialism and competition. It would have to be possible to profit by ethical means, and not be seduced all the time by greed to break rules and devalue the law. The market couldn’t be so pervasive that people had no time to go to religious services or small groups, to reflect on the higher purposes that might guide their lives generally and in the market. They really thought hard about what turned an average citizen into a fascist collaborator, and what turned an economic striver into a supporter of a murderous regime.
This memorandum, the Denkscrift written within the Ark in Freiburg, actually became part of the initial plans for the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) when the war did end. These Noachs, pastors and theologians and economists, may or may not have saved individuals before or during the Flood, just as Noach himself did not. But they got off the Ark ready to make sure their world would not descend into the generational violence that brought on the Flood, that really was their Flood.
I can’t assess how well their plans went — it’s certainly something that fascism has been kept at bay in Germany at least as well as in most European countries since the war. What is remarkable is that these people were doing this in the Ark, so to speak. They were answering the kinds of questions I wondered if Noach himself had asked.
And we know that it’s not just on the Ark that we have to ask, about the Shoah and other genocides, about slavery and Jim Crow — How did things get that bad? Are things going to get like that again? Is there something we should be doing to head this kind of thing off in the future?
Long after the Flood recedes, we still work on that. That’s why when New Hampshire created the Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education and sought to include a rabbi, I decided to do it. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been looking at how many people we have just in the Nashua area with an interest or something to offer, and coming up with twenty-five names of people I know, in and out of our congregation, was so easy. We’ll gather soon to see what we can do — if I haven’t been in touch with you and you are interested, please let me know. [My note in 2025: I haven’t done this yet.]
I said this past Yom Kippur [5782/2022], essentially, that we should try not to see ourselves as on the Ark already, in a Flood that is going to take down everything important in our society. And we should try not to see ourselves in those final years of descent before the Flood either, not to think of the U.S. today as Weimar Germany. It’s enough that we see ourselves as living in the aftermath of Floods, and thinking hard about why they happened and what it will take for them not to happen here. To live that phase of Noach’s life, and to live as his descendents. Recalling the Flood well, but knowing the difference between before, during and after.
I said before that according to the Torah, all the Divine did was promise not to Flood the entire earth — there was no promise that things wouldn’t get that bad again. But in the rest of the Torah, even God gets to work on this project — looking for a single family, then a people, inviting them into a covenant of mutual pledges, teaching them a Torah of ethics and society and ritual, letting them work out their own challenges of being a group challenged to reach a promised land and build a society of promise. There were generations in the Torah, and there have been in history, that were bad, even evil. But there have been more and more tools for heading that off as well, from Avraham and Sarah right on to our time.
The Freiburg Bonhoeffer Circle is admirable because they synthesized ethics and ecomonics and politics, from scratch, during a Flood, and had the chance to implement their plans on a national scale, right after a Flood. We don’t have to do nearly as much. We stand on shoulders like theirs; we even discover Mick Grzonkas hiding in plain sight. Our land is steady enough, our generations still righteous enough, for us to work on the necessary plans, so no more generations will have to experience Floods again.
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