Noah vs. Jihad

By LAWRENCE BUSH and JEFFREY DEKRO

Parashat Noah (Genesis 6:9-11:32)

Wholesale destruction: that’s what this week’s Torah portion is all about. The biblical God (of the ancient and terrifying Yahwist tradition within the biblical text) has determined to “blot out from the earth” all living beings, “for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth...” Only one human being, Noah, is deemed “blameless in his age” and selected to shepherd to survival each species of animal and bird.

What is the nature of the “corruption,” the “lawlessness” that warrants this death sentence for nearly all of Creation? The talmudic rabbis name such sins as “lewd idolatry” and cross-species fornication, but emphasize the arrogance of Noah’s generation, bred of their wealth and ease of life. The people could raise crops, says one midrash, that would supply forty years of food from a single planting. They could bear children who walked and talked from birth, and could “walk from world’s end to world’s end in no time at all”. (Genesis Rabbah 36: 1)

These legends express a classic religious distrust of humanism and human accomplishment—of the yetzer hara (evil or lustful urge) unleashed and the human race become “full of itself”— that disturbingly resembles the anti-Western “Great Satan” preachments of radical Islamic fundamentalists. Progressive religious activists might especially stand warned about the contempt for humankind that sometimes lurks beneath concepts of sin and redemption.

Humanism seems to be the critical dividing line. Religious humanists applaud human enterprise and inventiveness if undertaken in the spirit of the concept of tselem Elohim, “the image of God,” which adds holiness, justice, and dignity to the world and its inhabitants. Religious fundamentalists, on the other hand, tend to view Creation as a completed paradise bespoiled by human sin, and to distrust human endeavor outside of very narrowly defined strictures. Since the capacity for harsh judgment and intolerance resides in nearly all of us, the use of theology and scripture to boost this capacity to the level of jihad, religious crusade, Inquisition, and the like has been the worst flaw of religious systems through the ages.

And in response to “God-sanctioned” violence, what qualities of leadership does Parashat Noah deem necessary? In most ways, Noah himself seems mostly to serve as a counter-example, an anti-leader. Although he fulfills the difficult administrative and grunt work needed to build the ark and assemble its passengers, he never exercises his conscience or considers alternatives to the violence that his God proposes. The Zohar portrays him protesting only after the flood waters have subsided, to which God responds: “You built the ark and saved yourself. Now that the world has been destroyed, you open your mouth to utter questions and pleas?” (translation by Daniel Matt )

For this reason the rabbis deemed Noah less worthy a leader than Abraham, progenitor of the Jewish people. To Abraham, “whose strength was great, God said ... walk before Me” (Genesis 17:1). But to Noah, whose strength was feeble, Scripture says, “Noah walked with God.” “The Torah, for its part, portrays this savior ending up drunk, naked, ashamed, and cursing his son.

There is one moment in the flood story, however, in which Noah’s action becomes a paradigm for leadership in our own post-September 11 era. It happens at the moment of emergence from the ark, after 150 days of flooding and death:

Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking of every clean animal and of every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar. The Lord smelled the pleasing odor, and the Lord said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.”

(Genesis 8: 20-21).

To the modern reader, the notion of killing more animals and birds (presumably the offspring of his mating pairs) after such a mass extinction may seem a blood-chilling way to worship God. In biblical terms, however, the sacrifice of animals represents a surrender of wealth, in acknowledgment of the fundamental biblical belief that wealth is a blessing bestowed, a tool for creating justice rather than self-aggrandizement. This is the very essence of religious humanism at its best: Standing amidst the wreckage of his drowned world, and at the very height of vulnerability, Noah has the wisdom to acknowledge his faith in blessing, justice, and the tselem Elohim, and thereby move the heart of the Destroyer to repentance.

So must we — standing amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center and at the height of our newly discovered vulnerability — find the wisdom to realize that sharing our wealth in the name of global economic justice is the truly critical element of deterrence, and the truly righteous response to fanatical religious violence.