Dvar Torah on Parshat Noach

The current situation in Israel is challenging in a number of ways. The fact that almost any Arab in the street – young, old, male, female – might be carrying an axe or knife which he or she is itching to use on the first Jew they see is certainly disconcerting. We are all also wondering how it all came to this, and where it will all end. In addition, an interesting ethical dilemma has arisen: how are we to relate to the attackers? How are we meant to deal with the society from which they come? With some form of collective punishment, if that seems to be the only way to prevent these horrific attacks? With more violence?

One well-known Rabbi here has said that it is a mitzvah to grab any terrorist, once subdued, and pound his or her head into the ground until they die. Somewhat more rationally, Rav David Stav has made it clear that a terrorist, once captured, must be treated as a prisoner, given medical treatment if necessary, and brought to trial. The question of the way medical treatment should be given to these attackers is being hotly debated. One practical question that has emerged is what to do when the terrorist is in critical condition and his victims are only relatively lightly injured. Normal medical ethics would dictate that he who is critically injured be treated first, but is that what we should do when the other patients, although not in such bad condition, are his victims? Isn’t waiting to treat them supportive of the terrorist’s intent to do them harm, a kind of continuation of his attack, which should first be stopped, before turning to the terrorist’s medical needs?

This week’s parsha, Noah, in which the entire world is destroyed for its sins, contains some issues which, I think, speak to many of these problems.

Parshat Noah is one of the portions of the Torah that has been “cutified” the most.  The furry little animals boarding in pairs as rain clouds gather on the horizon; white-bearded, old man Noah and his lovely little family standing on deck, watching; the ark balanced on the top of Mt. Ararat; the rainbow, it’s all usually depicted visually in ways that would work great as wallpaper in a kid’s room.

But if you stop and think about it for just a nanosecond, this is the most awful story in the entire Torah, by far. All of humanity, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people (who knows how many there were after ten generation of “begat”-ing), men, women, and children, along with all the other living things on earth, killed, drowned, in a horrible flood.  And their crime is not even that clearly explained by the Torah.

When I was growing up, going to day school, although we definitely knew that a horrible catastrophe had befallen the world with the flood, I don’t recall that we ever gave it much thought. Our focus was much more on Noah himself: was he as righteous as Avraham would be? More so? Less so? How did things in the ark actually work? Why does he get drunk after the flood? Was he depressed? The fact that all of humanity was destroyed was barely given a thought, and the obvious moral question, how and why God could do such a thing, go so absolutely ballistic, and just kill everyone, was never really seriously asked.

The simple answer, which I think did sort of float on the edges of our consciousness, was that, yes, they were really that bad. They deserved it. There is a God, a right and wrong, good and evil, and when you are so off the path of goodness and decency, that’s it, it’s all over for you; God will just have to wipe you all out. Although this message seems extraordinarily harsh, and, to use an unpopular word, disproportionate – as it is hard to imagine that really everyone was equally guilty - that was just about the best we could make of the story.

The Rabbis seemed to see it that way, but with a big difference. Rav Simlai, in the Talmud, points out that the sins of the generation of the flood - their sexual transgressions, in particular, an idea which begs for further thought - were so awful that they invited upon themselves the chaotic, total destruction, even of those who were, perhaps, not that culpable. The Rabbi calls this אנדרלמוסיה (androlamusia, derived from the Greek), which indicates a chaotic situation in which the good die together with the bad.

Rav Simlai, on the one hand, accepts the fact of their punishment as an inevitable outcome of the sinful behavior of the generation. He does recognize, however, that there were some victims of the flood who were less guilty (perhaps not guilty at all?) than others. This attitude does show real honesty, as well as a degree of empathy with the more innocent victims, as it at least does recognize their innocence, while accepting the punishment as the inevitable and necessary result of the generation’s depravity.

Similarly, I think we need to recognize that the sins of Palestinian society – their intransigence, embrace of a patently false, poisonous, and racist narrative, and insanely violent response to just about anything and everything Israel does - necessitates an aggressive and often violent response on our part, which will, inevitably, harm some relative innocents. Their sins – random and vicious acts of violence against civilians – lead, inevitably, to defensive acts in which innocents and relative innocents, along with the guilty, are harmed, and in which the guilty are sometimes harmed in ways that may seem disproportionate, had all this been happening in a judicial framework. We must understand, as we do when it comes to the generation of the flood, that this is just, necessary, and unavoidable.

But we also must understand that it is sad, and not always completely fair. As Rav Simlai was able to admit that some innocents were swept away in the flood along with the guilty, we must recognize the same about our Palestinian neighbors. I would argue that we can even go one better, in the spirit of the Rabbis when they exhibited more sensitivity that the Torah itself shows when it comes to capital punishment, and essentially outlawed it, though the Torah seems to encourage it. We can show empathy to this generation of Palestinians, we can do better in our attitude towards them than we do to the victims of the flood, and go beyond a simple shrug of the shoulders and a “well, they really are guilty of some horrible crimes”, and try, in some way, to connect to those who are innocent, or less guilty, and are willing to listen to reason, and are open to real dialogue, change and reconciliation.  This in no way diminishes or questions our right to do what is necessary to defend ourselves. Rather, since we are actually sort of all in this flood together, it simply asks that we be as open as Rav Simlai was to the existence of “innocents” among the guilty, and, perhaps, “innocence” within the guilty, and try to act on that understanding, before we all drown. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix