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(continued)
The embattled old men of the Marina Roscha synagogue in the north of Moscow understood the message of Noah and the Flood better than most. At least after the visit of the illustrious Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. The larger synagogue on Archipova Street was a well-known landmark, even to the Muscovite cabbies. The Communist regime allowed it to stand as "proof" of their tolerance of religion. The few Jews who still cared about synagogue use after seven decades of repression did not, for the most part, trust the big place, where government informants were rumored to roam.
In the turmoil after the Revolution, another synagogue, much more modest in size, had been erected in Moscow's north. For reasons no one quite understood, it had never been destroyed by the Soviets, as all the other synagogues of Moscow had. When the group of high school seniors from Los Angeles visited Moscow in 1988, we found the Minyan [prayer quorum] composed of men in their eighties, who had remained faithful to the Judaism they knew as children, despite the best efforts of the Soviets to purge their society of any religious practice. While they had succeeded, they knew that their children and grandchildren, denied the most basic Jewish education in their youth, had succumbed to the prevailing philosophies offered up by their regime.
After services, the men would gather at a rickety table in the rear, to study some Torah under the tutelage of one of their group who had attended a Yeshivah in his youth.
After services, the men would gather at a rickety table in the rear, to study some Torah under the tutelage of one of their group who had attended a Yeshivah in his youth. When he finished, Rabbi Steinsaltz began.
If you have to reduce the the narrative to a single point, he asked them, what would it be? Without waiting for an answer, he offered one himself. Imagine, he said, waking up and realizing that the entire world had gone mad. That you were surrounded by evil, and that you were the last person left who valued all that is correct and proper.
The men did not have to imagine too much. They had been there and back, in the madness of Stalin's purges and the decades of repression thereafter.
How would you regard life, or its meaning, or your own personal significance? Would you give up? Would you regard your own life as a crumbling monument to futility?
Again, without waiting for the affirmative response he didn't want to hear, Rabbi Steinsaltz continued. Noah was in that situation. His compatriots had benefited from generation after generation of warnings to mend their ways. They had turned a deaf ear to the righteous Methusaleh, who had pleaded with them. Decades before, a merciful G-d had asked Noah to publicly build a large ark, a project that would take him over a hundred years, in order to draw attention to His plans, and afford people another chance to repent.
None of this had done any good. Noah was mocked and derided by all, without exception. A lesser person would have doubted his sanity, or at least given up trying to swim against such a powerful current.
One man against the entire world. How important is a single man, and his loyalty to Truth? When G-d destroyed the entire world, finding nothing worthwhile to save, He did not forget that single isolated speck of humanity called Noah. One man's quiet determination was not unimportant to Almighty G-d. And so he was miraculously rescued. And from that single man, all of humanity was started anew, so that all we know today derives from him.
The old men of Marina Roscha, each of whom had a story of valiant and lonely struggle against all odds, were reduced to tears.
Part II
The beginning of the end of the generation of the Flood had come long before. Genesis 6:2 shows that as society developed the notions of power and leadership, the leaders did not use their strength to benefit others, but to force themselves on the objects of their desires. The corruption of the leaders spread to the common people, to the point that (6:5) people's minds became completely preoccupied and fascinated with evil. (Even more important than their degraded life style, once the mind of Man was closed off from any good or any change, G-d knew that Man could not repair the damage.) G-d had created the world to assist Man, but with Man so completely missing the point of the gift of life, he essentially made his own existence irrelevant. (This is what the Torah means by G-d regretting that He had created Man (6:6). A perfect G-d cannot "regret" anything. But the Torah speaks the language of Man. G-d began to behave in a manner that a human onlooker would attribute to ruing His previous plans, as He prepared for the destruction of the world, so that He could start all over.) Eventually, things got so bad that the world was filled with corruption (6:11). Because Man is the ultimate custodian of the world, and all depends on him, when Man's behavior became outrageous, laws of nature itself became unhinged. Everything became corrupted, including the behavior of the animals! (6:12)
... it took one sin (6:13) to seal the fate of the generation. It was not idolatry, nor theft, nor murder ...
How could this possibly be more serious an offense than any of the wholesale corruption of the generation? A great rabbi of the 19th century, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsh of Frankfurt, sheds a bit of light.
Society can live with evil. It can protect itself from its worst consequences by building more courts and more prisons. It cannot survive universal rejection of the morality that underlies a stable society. When people act immorally within the letter of the law, when they use cunning and ingenuity to subvert the law itself because they have no respect for it (but only fear the consequences of getting caught) - then society has no hope. There can be no stable society when people lose the need to subscribe to a common code of decency.
Part III
So G-d did not really destroy the world as much as Man did. All except Noah, who was saved in a rather elaborate and unusual manner. Building the ark made much sense, as stated above. It provided the world with one more dramatic wake-up call. In the end, though, why didn't G-d merely take Noah and his family and offer them protection while He destroyed the world in an instant? Their survival, along with so many animals, on a small ark was only possible through a miracle. As long as G-d was in the miracle mode, why keep one going for a whole year, when a single instant would have been more economical?
One answer, claims a contemporary teacher, Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian, has to do with the prerequisites for a new world that would have a better chance of surviving than the last one.
... the prerequisites for a new world that would have a better chance of surviving than the last one.
Now, Noah may have been righteous, but he must have been lacking in one area. He could not have had too much to do with his neighbors, for fear of their evil rubbing off on him. He had to keep a polite distance.
While there may be nothing wrong with choosing your friends carefully and avoiding negative influences, Noah lost out in a crucial area. G-d's trademark is chesed [acts of lovingkindness and altruistic giving]. Of all of G-d's attributes, the one that brings us closest to the essence of G-d is imitating His unstinting giving. Noah might have liked to become a more giving person, but he lacked the opportunity.
Beginning a world all over again required more than a remembrance of things past. It required a teacher who could instruct the world in the most powerful tools we have to relate to G-d. In the most crucial of areas, Noah was lacking. G-d therefore provided him with a full year, during which he was charged with the care of all the animals on the ark.
He didn't get too much rest, tending to the unorchestrated schedules of too many creatures. Essentially, he spent an entire year giving his energies to something outside of himself. This practicum in chesed (acts of kindness) gave the world he would build a fighting chance at survival.
Reprinted with permission from torah.org.
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