Dvar Torah on Parshat Noach

"These are the descendants of Noach - Noach was a righteous man, he was saintly in his generation; Noach walked with God." This is how the Torah begins the well-known story of Noach and the flood. Earlier, towards the end of last week's parsha, Bereshit, we are informed of the birth and naming of Noach with these somewhat enigmatic words: "Lemech lived one hundred and eighty-two years and had a son. And he named him Noach, saying 'this one will comfort us from our actions and the sorrow of our hands, from the earth which God cursed.' We see that both at his birth (or some time after), and later, as the flood story is about to begin, Noach is praised by the Torah, first as a possible comforter for a sorrowful, cursed world, and then as an exceptionally righteous individual.All this stands in contrast with most other biblical heroes. When Abraham is ordered by God to leave the land of his fathers and head for Canaan, we are told absolutely nothing about his character or personality. Moses, too, is a basically unknown quantity to us, until, as a young man, he goes out and kills the Egyptian taskmaster. Noach, almost alone, is given an extensive, glowing introduction.Interestingly, the Rabbis are unsure of the specific message behind these introductions. The first one, which appears ay the news of his birth, is basically understood in Rabbinic tradition in two different ways. One school of thought sees the naming as a prophetic reference to the flood, and the fact that it is Noach who will be the savior of mankind, by surviving. The other approach says that the comfort that Noach will give humanity for the 'sorrow of their hands' and the accursed earth is the invention of farming implements. According to this approach, adopted by, among others, Rashi, Noach assisted his fellow man in wresting a living from the land which God cursed after the sin of Adam and Eve by inventing farm tools. Apparently, until he came along people had been doing all their farming without the advantage of hoes, plows, and the like. It was he who first thought of making them. The Midrash takes this notion to an interesting extreme. According the Midrash, Noach was the first human being born with an opposable thumb (!) which made it possible for him to design and use tools. Either way, this approach is an interesting one. One might ask why these commentators abandon the simple understanding which sees Noach comforting the world after the flood - his obvious and well known role - and posit this weird role of farm-implement inventor for him. A simple answer may well be that this pshat (reading, understanding) makes it unnecessary for us to posit that Lemech, Noach's father, is a prophet, who foresaw the flood and Noach's role in it. Rather, he simply called him Noach (from the word for comfort or respite) when he saw his opposable thumb, or perhaps, if we don't like this evolutionary theme, when he saw him, as a child, inventing little tools. In addition, Noach in the flood did not exactly comfort or help anyone. Yes, he saved humanity, but only by saving himself. His goodness did not help any of his fellows. By referencing the farm implement story, the Rabbis give Noach a chance to actually help others, rather than just save himself. This brings us to the compliments which Noach receives in this week's parsha - "saintly in his generation." The Rabbis disagree with the implication of the phrase "in his generation." Some feel that it diminishes Noach's greatness - in his evil, sinful generation he was righteous. In a better, normal generation, he would have just been average. Others see it in the opposite way. If Noach managed to be saintly in his generation of sinners, he certainly would have been even more righteous in a better generation, with more peers around with whom to interact positively. In discussing the negative take on Noach - that he was only good in comparison to the miserable generation in which he lived, many point out that, in the flood story, Noach was unable to convince a single individual of the error of his ways and thereby save him. He stood alone as the only good person of his generation, unable to reach out to others. This is seen as a weakness, and is often contrasted with Abraham who, in Rabbinic tradition, spread the message of ethical monotheism to others.It seems to me that the various strands discussed above may well be intertwined. The story of Noach and the farm implements serves to turn him from an individualistic, ivory-ark kind of saint into someone who actually helped others. This ability to help others may well have been inborn in him (the opposable thumb), which is one way to understand leadership, or may have been an achievement he reached through hard work, without any special innate abilities, which is a different model of leadership. Either way, Noach is a leader who reaches out, and is concerned with even the mundane needs of his peers. This would make him an exceptional saint by any standard, one who transcended the waywardness of his generation and was even able to reach out to help them. But, according to the understanding that the name of Noach is connected only to the flood story, Noach is, indeed, a minor figure, one unable to reach beyond himself and his immediate surroundings to help those around him. It is this approach which would understand the phrase 'he was saintly in his generation' as diminishing Noach. Compared to an Abraham, who taught the world to believe in God, Noach is not such an impressive figure. He can only help himself. He can only survive. An accomplishment, no doubt, given the selfish, venal world in which he lived, and which he managed to transcend, but definitely a minor one. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix