• Table For Five

What did the flood accomplish?

Table for Five: Noach

In partnership with the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

Edited by Nina Litvak & Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist

And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth has become full of robbery because of them, and behold I am destroying them from the earth. – Genesis 6:13

Benjamin Elterman
Essayist, Speechwriter at MitzvahSpeeches.com

To this day, it has bothered me that Hashem ended virtually all life on the planet. What behavior could be so irredeemably awful that Hashem wouldn’t manifest His infinite mercy and steer them towards redemption? I also find it striking that the Hebrew word for robbery in this verse is chet-mem-samach, pronounced hamas. Hamas can mean violence, to act brutally, to wrong or mistreat someone, to violate or corrupt. One might think the terrorist organization co-opted this biblical term as an irony or a statement of opposition to the Jewish people. But their name comes from an acronym for Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah, meaning Islamic Resistance Movement. The word in Arabic also means zeal, enthusiasm, courage, or bravery. So the use of Hamas is strictly coincidental. But in Judaism we don’t believe in coincidences. What’s the connection? The Talmud says that hamas had become systemic. People regularly stole small amounts, deliberately keeping the theft below the threshold for a legal claim. When everyone steals a few grapes, it’s death by a thousand cuts for the shop owner. So the culture had learned how to exploit one another and get away with it. The Hamas of today is a military organization operating among civilian infrastructure. Enmeshing itself within the population is its strongest defense. Israel’s options are to retaliate and risk innocent lives or tolerate it until it unleashes untold destruction. There’s no good answer. Perhaps that’s why the Flood is still so troubling to us today.

Nili Isenberg
Judaics Faculty, Pressman Academy

Recently, during the liturgy of the High Holidays, we called out to God with the words of the U’Netana Tokef prayer: “Who will live and who will die?  Who at their end-time (kitzo), and who not at their end-time (lo bekitzo)?”  In contrast, also in the liturgy of the High Holidays, we used this same word to describe God as having no end (ein ketz le’orekh yameikha).  

God uses this word for end (ketz) in our verse, observing that “the end (ketz) of all flesh has come before me.”  But was it really the end of all flesh?  No, God saved Noah, his family, and all the animals on the ark.  There was an opportunity to change and rebuild.  As Israeli musician Gidi Gov sang, “Take it slow, there is time to change, from one end to the other end (min hakatzeh el hakatzeh).”  This word has also been used to refer to the end of days (ketz hayamin), when we look for the coming of the Messiah and a final redemption.

Will our generation meet a tragic end as we face violence, war, climate change, the threat of technology and more in our days?  In modern Hebrew, you might exclaim, “There is no end to the matter!” (Ein ketz la’davar!) when encountering a difficult question like this.  In the end, however, I’m not so sure we would really want to know the answer to the request of Psalm 39, “Tell me, God, what is my end (Hodi’eini HaShem Kitzi).”

Mitchell Keiter
Certified Appellate Law Specialist

Yeshiva curricula rarely include The Epic of Gilgamesh, but perhaps they should. One might best appreciate the wisdom of Torah by considering the alternatives.

Other Mideast cultures also developed a narrative to explain the cataclysm they suffered—with similar details: A great deluge; a ship preserving human and animal survivors; a dove and raven sent to find dry land; and a post-flood sacrifice. The Epic generally accords with Torah about *what* happened, but diverges greatly as to *why*.

It taught that humanity was extinguished for either the trivial reason that their noise disturbed the “gods’” sleep, or no reason at all, echoing King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.” The survivor is selected due to a special friendship with a one of these gods.

How different is Torah! God sent the flood as deserved punishment for rampant violence and bloodshed, and Noah was saved for his righteousness, not connections. The flood reflected moral judgment, not petulance.

But there is one similarity; both accounts see the flood accomplished nothing. When Noah resumes shedding blood just one verse after disembarking, God realizes bloodlust is the human condition, so another flood would be futile. Punishment is not the answer; the path to better behavior is education: the Noahide commandments, and then Torah itself. As Leon Kass observed, the inclinations of the human heart will not foster harmony, so “The way of nature must be replaced by the way of law.”

Gilla Nissan
Author, Teacher, SeekAleph.com

In Judaism, as I see it, the purpose of human existence is to seek an understanding of the Creator and His will, and to live in harmony with the laws of life embedded in Creation. When we lose that connection, we stop seeing one another and cease to recognize the boundaries placed upon us. Then life itself becomes filled with corruption.

Of the generation of the Flood, the Torah says: “The earth was filled with violence.” Not only had human beings become corrupt; the earth herself was affected. To me, the earth is more than the ground beneath our feet. She is a witness to Creation and a measure of the life unfolding upon it. When human behavior violates the deeper order of Creation, the damage spreads beyond human relationships into the world itself.

The Flood Generation is a world in which no one truly sees the other. Even Noah, though righteous, is seen by the Zohar as limited: He recognizes the evil and hears that destruction is coming, yet he does not carry his generation in prayer. Abraham reaches another level. He argues for Sodom. Moses goes further still, willing to be erased from God’s book for the sake of his people.

Noah is the righteous man saved from the world. Abraham struggles for the world. Moses is prepared to sacrifice himself for his people. Yet sometimes a flood cannot be stopped: water, noise, information, electronics. Then perhaps our task is simply to enter an ark, protect the inner spark, and wait until the waters recede and purification is complete.

Eilon Presman
Director, Actor, Producer

There is something chilling about the simplicity of this verse. God looks at the world and says it has become full of robbery. Not that everyone is a murderer. Not that everyone is evil. The world is simply full of people taking from one another.

I think about how easily we can become accustomed to things that should bother us. We see someone treated unfairly, hear someone lie, watch someone take advantage of another person, and move on. Sometimes we even participate, telling ourselves that what we are doing is insignificant.

But maybe that is how a world becomes “full of robbery.” Not through one enormous act of evil, but through millions of small acts that eventually become normal.

In storytelling, every story has a moment when something goes wrong, but the most interesting stories are usually about the choices people make afterward. Do they recognize what is happening? Do they change? Do they keep going? The story of Noah is, in some ways, a story about a world that kept going in the wrong direction for too long. Maybe the challenge for us is simply to notice sooner.

With thanks to Benjamin Elterman, Nili Isenberg, Mitchell Keiter, Gilla Nissan, and Eilon Presman.

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