Noach
Bereishit 6:9-11:32
The Potency of Language
By Aryeh Bernstein, 5763
Parashat Noah is about language--its destructive uses and the possibilities for using it redemptively.
The opening of the parashah is awash with plays on words. The origin of Noah's name--the justification of his life's purpose--is shrouded in ambiguity. The first explanation of his name comes in the prelude to the parashah, where Noah's father, Lemekh, names him (Bereishit 5:29):
| And he called his name Noah, saying, "this one will comfort us (yeNAHamenu) from our work and from the toil of our hands, from the earth which Hashem cursed." | וַיִּקְרָא אֶת שְׁמוֹ נֹחַ לֵאמֹר, "זֶה יְנַחֲמֵנוּ מִמַּעֲשֵׂנוּ וּמֵעִצְּבוֹן יָדֵינוּ מִן הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר אֵרְרָהּ יְהֹוָה." |
Lemekh sees in his infant son the spark of greatness that can change the fate of the world. However, the very last verse before the parashah (6:8) suggests a different origin for Noah's name. There, the reason he was spared from the flood was that "וְנֹחַ מָצָא חֵן בְּעֵינֵי יְהֹוָה"-"Noah found favor ("hen") in the eyes of Hashem". According to this verse, Noah is spared simply because God takes a liking to him, for whatever reason. Noah's name is embedded here, too. "חֵן" is the mirror image of "נֹחַ"-"het-nun", and not "nun-het". According to this, Noah is saved by virtue of God grasping onto his reflection, onto the reverse of what he is now. Here, Noah is saved in spite of his inherent unworthiness.
The first explanation for his name is strange, because it is linguistically incorrect. "נח" ("Noah") means "rest" and is a completely different root than the word "נחם" ("nahem"), meaning comfort. If Lemekh wanted to grant his son a name that invoked "comfort", he should have named him "Menahem". For this reason, Rashi tries to explain that the word does come from "נח", meaning, "this one will allow us rest from the work of our hands", explaining that Noah invented farming tools. However, this seems to miss the point of the word-play, which is to encompass both roots, to say that "this one will comfort us by giving us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands, from the earth which God cursed." The discomfort from which Lemekh suffers is back-breaking toil. He seeks comfort, consolation, nehamah, through Noah bringing them rest. Lemekh uses this word-play between Noah/נח and nehamah/נחמה in order to undo another fate-encoded name, in the relationship between humanity ("Adam") and the earth ("adamah") that was cursed upon Adam in Bereishit 3:17: "...cursed is the earth because of you; in grief you shall eat from it all the days of your life" (".אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ בְּעִצָּבוֹן תֹּאכֲלֶנָּה כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ").
Lemekh's hope for a reversal of relief is itself reversed by God (6:5-7):
| "And Hashem saw that the evil of humanity ("ha-adam") was massive in the land and that the whole impulse of their inner thoughts was only evil continually. And Hashem regretted ("vayiNAHEM") having made humanity ("adam") in the land and it grieved Him in His heart. And Hashem said, I will wipe out ("emheh") humankind ("ha-adam") that I created from the face of the land ("ha-adamah"), from humankind to beasts, to creeping things, and birds of the heavens, for I regret ("nihamti") having made them". | וַיַּרְא יְהֹוָה כִּי רַבָּה רָעַת הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וְכָל יֵצֶר מַחְשְׁבֹת לִבּוֹ רַק רַע כָּל הַיּוֹם: וַיִּנָּחֶם יְהֹוָה כִּי עָשָׂה אֶת הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וַיִּתְעַצֵּב אֶל לִבּוֹ: וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה אֶמְחֶה אֶת הָאָדָם אֲשֶׁר בָּרָאתִי מֵעַל פְּנֵי הָאֲדָמָה מֵאָדָם עַד בְּהֵמָה עַד רֶמֶשׂ וְעַד עוֹף הַשָּׁמָיִם כִּי נִחַמְתִּי כִּי עֲשִׂיתִם. |
The word-play with "נחם/nahem" is devastating in its subversiveness. The word, in its most basic form, refers to consolation or comfort, such that when it is inwardly-directed, it refers to regret--consoling oneself for having done something that turned out badly. Lemekh does not like the prevailing relationship between humankind and the land and hopes for his son to put an end to it and console them. God doesn't like it either, but upends Lemekh's hope, seeking consolation through eliminating the whole project. Only the possible mirror-image of Noah brings God to let him be the remnant of this consolation. Words are powerful things: through words God created the world and through the most subtle variations in words, the hope for an easier life is reversed into the curse of destruction. The difference between life and destruction can be merely the different conjugations of "nahem" or whether the "nun" comes before the "het" or vice versa.
Who is Noah? What is so wrong with the world? Why is the story of the Flood introduced through the theme of the treachery of language?
The first thing to notice about Noah is his muteness. Noah never speaks throughout the entire ordeal of saving the world. In contrast to Avraham, who, in next week's parashah, will talk feverishly out of concern for one, condemned, wicked city, Noah silently does what he is told, as if completely isolated and withdrawn from the human community.
The Torah brings two versions of the state of the world before the flood. The first is described with opaque language that suggests incessant lusting after sexual appetites (Bereishit 6:1-4). The second version describes the problem as "חָמָס/hamas" (6:13). This word, meaning "violence", is understood to signify robbery and other forms of aggressive service of the self (e.g., Rashi, ibid). How do we understand the relationship between these two factors? Which one caused God to destroy the world? Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg suggests that the reading of violence/robbery interprets the reading of sexual sin, telling us what kind of sexual sins were going on. "[S]exual sins...often seem to be 'generous' sins. In them, human beings often experience and express a yearning to transcend self, to relate to the other" (The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 51). Had we only heard about the sexual degeneracy, we might have interpreted the problem to be this unbounded out-reaching, a lustful world of orgy. Not so, says the Torah. It was about robbery, a sexuality about possessing, conquering, grabbing for oneself. Its focus was imposing one's own mastery on others, not sharing and listening. Sexuality is, of course, the most intimate and expressive mode of communication, so what we find pre-flood, is a deafening roar of people shouting each other down, totally open, with no boundaries or secrets, no privacy or intimacy, only active release of their unedited, aggressive articulations out there into the world, fall where they may.
The world was totally devoid of real communication and caring, the kind of investment in the other person that emerges from really being curious about who she is and what he has to offer. Most people violently imposed themselves on everyone else; Noah, in reaction, completely withdrew to his one, self-constructed, little, personal universe. He was even hesitant to establish a family. The Torah tells us that not until he was 500 years old were his sons born (5:32), while his forefathers were 182, 187, 65, 162, 70, 90, 105, and 130 years old, respectively, when theirs were born. Hazal interpret that he even totally refrained from sexual activity until it was time to prepare for the flood. (See Rashi 5:32, based on Bereishit Rabbah 26:2.) The punishment for the rest of the world, who acted violently and respected no boundaries, was to be swallowed up by a raging, violent flood. Water, which has no beginning or end, is the ultimate manifestation of what it means to eliminate boundaries. As Zornberg puts it, "God is, in a sense, merely registering what human beings have made of themselves" (p. 50). By contrast, Noah, the withdrawn, selfish, social mute, is closed inside a physical box, from which he has to witness the destruction of the world that he never tried to save.
In the end, Noah is a tragic character, but one who offers us a glimmer of hope. The shock therapy of the ark does not quite teach Noah how to communicate, how to speak redemptively. When the waters have abated, God tells Noah, "Leave the ark, you and your wife, your sons and their wives, with you" (8:16)-family style, spouses reunited, in contrast to the way God commanded them to enter the ark at the beginning, "you and your sons, your wife and your sons' wives with you" (6:18). Noah fails this first test of redemptive communication, leaving "mehitzah style"(8:18), the same way they entered, instead of resuming familial relations. (I first heard this insight from my teacher, Rav Menachem Schrader.) As soon as Noah is off the ark, he plants a vineyard and gets drunk by himself and passes out naked (9:20-21), a thorough withdrawal from the potential to be a new, creative Noah in a new world. When he finally speaks for the first time, it is to curse the seed of his son Ham (9:25), who violated him when he was passed out (9:22). Even when he continues to bless his other two sons, who treated him with dignity, he makes half of each one's blessing to be that the cursed brother will be a slave to them. Noah never finds the way to speak with full productive potential. At the end of the day, though, he does manage to utter words of berakhah and that, itself, offers the possibility for something better to emerge.
The epilogue to the parashah is the story of the Tower of Bavel (11:1-9), where God punishes humankind with the curse of misunderstanding (through having many languages), in response to their arrogant and improper use of their great ability to communicate. However, their punishment is certainly not as harsh as the flood and, indeed, their society was a much-improved one over the generation of the flood. They did speak to each other and seek understanding. Without real curiosity and value for each other, they never could have built their tower and city. If we return to Zornberg's reading from before, it is as though they again live in the kind of mode that generated sexual sins, or, here, idolatry, but in the generous, yearning, relational way, without the violence. (Perhaps this is the enormous difference between "free love" and rape or between polytheism and anarchy. In each case, the latter is the much worse of two evils.)
Learning to speak is among the most treacherous and difficult tasks. Noah's brief moment of berakhah sits unrealized, waiting to be unpacked.