This was my D’var Torah a couple weeks ago, about Parashat Noach and the lead-up to the Flood, on October 25, 2025. I’m late in sharing it.
One way to look at the big arcs of the Torah is as a series of thought experiments. Each big story is a version of the world or of human nature, and we see how that would play out, and how a spiritual person would experience it and what a person’s responsibility would be were the world like this. And these thought experiments are also meant to be mirrors for us now, or potential mirrors. To borrow the language of your eye doctor: Does the world seems more like 1, or 2? This story, or that one?
So Genesis and Exodus in particular have a series of thought experiments about good and evil on a social scale or a global scale. You have Sodom and Gomorrah — what if a city were so evil that it was unfixable, and how would it have gotten that way. Mitzrayim, Egypt — what if a whole society turned against a particular group or a particular class, how would that happen and what would hold that in place, and what would it take to begin to crack that. Then there is the Mabul, the Flood, which seems like the limit case — what if the entire world were so corrupt and violent, and only a single person had any merit?
(There is actually another case in the midrash on Genesis — what if there were not even a single person of any merit? The midrash imagines such a world not even getting off the ground, but God destroying it immediately and not even picking one piece of it to rebuild from like in the case of Noach.)
The Torah spends the most time on the case of Mitzrayim — really the whole Torah is centered on liberation from Mitzrayim, the before and some of the during and a lot of the after. And I too have spent most of my life thinking that for Judaism, the Exodus is the main mirror that helps us see aspects of the world that require tikkun (repair). The Exodus paradigm helps us see most of Jewish history, and things in the modern world from revolutions against monarchs to Soviet-style communism to American slavery and Jim Crow and much more.
Parashat Noach for most of my life has had its most meaning for me in terms of the Shoah. Elie Wiesel has an incredible essay about Noach, drawing these parallels and wondering especially about Noach getting off of the Ark as a survivor, and how he would look at himself and the world in light of what he had just experienced.
But over time Parashat Noach has become harder and harder for me. Partly this is because of being the Torah reader for the congregation, and once every three years having to chant the drowning of humanity as Torah, having to stomach those words being written by prophets or dictated to Moshe Rabbenu. It’s a horror film, even if it’s only a few lines.
What’s really harder is that the Mabul (Flood) thought experiment is becoming more relevant: the worry that one way our world is changing is a kind of submerging of a whole range of values. The Exodus model is surely relevant, because of how specific groups are being targeted, particularly immigrants and queer folks. But there is also a wall-to-wall shaking of values all the way from decency to democracy. I don’t find myself thinking about the Flood as relevant in terms of death and physical destruction on the scale of the world or a country, but I do think about this kind of Flood process affecting everything.
This is how the midrash describes the period leading up to the Flood: People used to go to the market and steal less than a perutah worth of merchandise, which is the Talmudic equivalent of a penny. It was just under the amount actionable in a court of law. But everyone did it, chipping away at the moral concept of stealing and respect for property until it had no meaning, until stealing was normalized and taking couldn’t even be named. In fact it was both of these processes, against the norm itself and the word for it, that was the characteristic of the era.
This is reflected even in Noach himself, who in the Torah does not even utter a word for centuries of his life until after he is off the Ark. Some interpreters look for hints in the Torah that Noach actually tried. Surely for 120 years while he was building the ark, people would have asked: What are you doing? And he would say, “My Master told me to build this because a Flood is coming.” But people would say, mostly to themselves and perhaps to him: If a Flood is coming, it’s for someone else; it’s because of their wrongs and not mine. And so at some point, there was no moral language anymore that he shared with other people; even when he spoke it’s as though he didn’t. And this is the standard Talmudic interpretation of the word that’s usually translated as “violence”(chamas in Hebrew, no relation to the contemporary group) — it wasn’t a terribly violent time, but a time when moral communication was confused, when words dissolved into a flood of inaudible meaninglessness.
Since I don’t believe in a God who ever destroyed life in a literal Flood, it’s this midrashic version of the story that is the most frightening one I have ever seen, probably because it rings so true today when there is an attack on moral language itself. When decency and fairness and sensitivity and kindness and love are all mocked, not to say freedom and discourse and democracy and other higher-order things like them.
So the Torah thought experiment is: What would it be like to try to stand up in the face of that? Would the only choice be not to have enough courage, which is what some commentators say about Noach? Would it be to say: All I can do is turn inward and protect my own integrity, as others commentators say? Would it be to try to speak to those who still might listen, as still others suggest, for as long as possible? Would it be, as some others say, for Noach to retreat at God’s command into an existential Ark long before the Flood, to nurture a small circle of people he could continue to share a moral perspective with, so his own inner light wouldn’t go out and so they would be ready to reconstruct things after the Flood?
All of these are possible ways to play out the thought experiment, and things we are doing now.
I am taking heart right now from some midrashim that describe Noach in more active terms.
One says that Noach actually never stopped talking, not until the day he closed up into the Ark. To those he thought he could criticize, he spoke criticism. To those he thought were just looking at him, not understanding, he was like Yonah, who is in a way his reincarnation — a prophet with a storm and a near-drowning; he would just say if we don’t change then a terrible thing is coming, and hope the combination of his clarity and integrity would land somewhere. And to those he couldn’t speak to, Noach would offer food and help.
Another midrash teaches that Noach was a builder at heart, and that as he was building the Ark, he was also building his vision, fleshing out what would be come the Seven Laws of B’nai Noach (the sons/descendents of Noach), a universal moral code that did more than just restore what had been before Cain murdered Abel and stealing became run of the mill. And building within his family, not just his own kids but the grandkids and the in-laws. A version of what a speaker last week in Princeton at the rally called: “practicing the future we long for; living in extraordinary love, extraordinary connection, building networks of care that cruelty and intimidation cannot touch.”
We don’t need to get to the Flood or be resigned to one, to do these things. We can build such an Ark and be seen building it; it’s what we are doing this moment, in this room with its beautiful windows looking up at the heavens. hoping we won’t have to use it ever.
Last week was so beautiful at the CROP Walk, overflowing from here in the building out back with generosity and joy and music and connection, extending ourselves toward people of beliefs different and even strange, out in the open without fear. I think of our city as a kind of Ark, a place where moral discourse continues even when it is hard, unlike those too-many places where it has been submerged. Throughout our city I see members of this Jewish community present and leading and connecting people, practicing everything from decency to discourse to democracy.
Part of the thought experiment that is Parashat Noach is asking what of it we see today — and part of it is asking what would it take to hold that story at bay, so it concludes more like Yonah’s in Nineveh than Noach’s in the Flood. Because even when we feel the raindrops, we can still refuse them.
Shabbat Shalom.
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