Parshah Commentary

Midway through this week’s parshah, God offers Noah a ceasefire. The floodgates of heaven close, the rain stops falling, and the water that has covered the earth begins to dry up. After Noah exits the ark with his family, God declares a pact: “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.” I imagine Noah receiving this divine vow with a mix of relief and despair—comforted that the deluge is over, yet gazing upon a planet rendered desolate and bare; nearly every life extinguished, all that he once knew utterly destroyed. The grand promise of a better future rings hollow amidst the debris of a lost world.

Perhaps Noah is also frustrated by God’s apparent admission that the destruction was all for naught. When God first decides to flood the earth, the reason given is that “every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.” God’s oath not to repeat this punishment includes the very same claim almost verbatim, now deployed to justify the opposite conclusion. The devastation has done nothing to create a world where harm is less likely to occur; the postdiluvian world is fundamentally the same as the antediluvian one—separated only by the horror of mass death. This lack of transformation calls our attention to the contingent, incomplete nature of God’s promise: “Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood” suggests that such immense destruction might still recur by other means. Or in the words of the Black spiritual made famous by James Baldwin: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”

The Rabbis hear the same gaping hole in the biblical text as the slaves who composed the spiritual. One midrash imagines Abraham invoking God’s vow as he argues to save Sodom and Gomorrah: “You took an oath that you would not bring a flood to the world. Are you seeking to evade your oath? [Are you implying that] you would not bring a flood of water, but you would bring a flood of fire? If so, you have not fulfilled your oath.” But Abraham’s argument goes unheeded. As the second-century sage Rabbi Meir, noting that God is described as “raining down” fire upon the two cities, states: “A flood of water there will not be, but a flood of fire and of brimstone there will be.” A later tradition reimagines this divine threat as a warning of human agency. In a powerful 1967 clip from the 2011 documentary Black Power Mixtape, movement leader Stokely Carmichael sits with friends while he lights scraps of paper on fire, singing a song written in response to the Watts Uprising: “If I can’t enjoy the American dream, won’t be water but fire next time, so I said, burn baby burn.” (“This one’s for the FBI!” he announces at the end, with a grin.) In this version, a reminder of God’s inadequate promise becomes an oath of our own: We will bring the fire.

In light of this protest anthem, we might reinterpret Nathaniel Hawthorne’s mournful remark that it’s the propensity of “moderns to build a fire on Ararat with the remnants of the ark”—that everything sacred inevitably becomes mere firewood—as a hopeful declaration of the fate of unjust institutions. Indeed, the ark is a vehicle for terrible injustice, securing Noah and his family while allowing him to abandon the rest of humanity. As the world is subsumed by water, Noah does not pull drowning children onto his raft or throw out a lifeline to those he witnesses being washed away. This is why the Rabbis contrast Noah’s response to being told that everyone else will be wiped out and that he will become the leader of a new order with Moses’s response to the same decrees, after the Israelites sin by worshipping the Golden Calf. While Noah silently accepts this pronouncement, Moses protests—and ultimately succeeds in reversing it. The Zohar seizes upon this difference: “When God said to Moses, ‘Now therefore let me alone . . . and I will make of you a great nation,’ Moses said immediately, ‘Shall I abandon Israel for my own advantage? The world will say that I killed Israel and did to them as Noah did to his generation.’” The text elaborates on the distinction between the prophets with a gloss on a passage from the Book of Isaiah, part of the haftarah for this week’s parshah, that refers to the flood as “the waters of Noah.” We’re told that “the waters of the flood are named after” Noah because “he did not intercede on behalf of his generation, but let them perish, . . . leaving the world to its fate,” whereas “Moses went so far in his intercession as to offer his own life.”

We are all the descendants of Noah—of the man who, when God repeatedly announces a plan to destroy all living things, says nothing at all. We live in a world that is founded upon complacency in the face of annihilation, acquiescence to destruction. But our tradition offers us a path forward. Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16th-century founder of modern Kabbalah, teaches that Noah was actually reincarnated as Moses, who succeeds where his predecessor failed; according to Rabbi Luria, the word Moses uses when asking God to wipe him out along with the people—“mecheini” (“erase me”)—is both “an expression of obliteration” meant to evoke the flood and an anagram of “mei Noach” (“the waters of Noah”), the earlier failing and destruction rejumbled into a statement of solidarity and shared fate. We, children of Noah, cannot undo the immense devastation that has been wrought. But we may yet become like Moses, wholly casting our lot in with those threatened with annihilation. Because next time awaits us; the fire is coming.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.