Noach: Silent Obedience

This week’s Torah portion, Noach (Genesis 6:9-11:31), begins:

These are the histories of Noach: Noach was a tzadik man; he was tamim in his generations; Noach hithalekh God. (Genesis/Bereishit 6:9)

Noach (נֺחַ) = rest, resting-place; “Noah” in English.

tzadik (צַדִּיק) = in the right, just, God-fearing, innocent.

tamim (תָּמִים) = whole, intact, unblemished, perfect, unobjectionable.

hithalekh (הִתְהַלֶּךְ) = walked around with, went around with, followed around.

Is Noach being praised as a morally and religiously superior person?

Tzadik could mean righteous, or merely innocent. Tamim could mean perfect, or merely unobjectionable relative to others. The verb hithalekh could mean that Noach followed direct instructions from God, but did not take initiative to follow the spirit of God’s directives like Abraham and Hezekiah, who “walked around in God’s presence”.¹

As the story of the flood unfolds, Noach does everything God tells him to. But does this make him virtuous? Or is he merely resting, like his name, because it is easier not to think for himself?

Not too awful

Just before the Torah portion begins, the text sets the scene:

Then God saw that great was the evil-doing of the human on the earth, and every shape of its conscious planning was only evil all the time. And God had a change of heart about making the human on the earth, and [God] felt mental anguish. And God said: “I will wipe out humankind, which I created, from the face of the earth, from human to beast to crawling thing to flying thing of the sky, because I have had a change of heart about making them.” But Noach found favor in the eyes of God. (Genesis 6:5-8)

(See my post Noach: Spoiled on why God wipes out all the other land animals, as well as human beings, except those on Noach’s ark.)

In the context of massive evil-doing by nearly all human beings, it need not take much for the God character to view Noach favorably. At least Noach is innocent and unobjectionable, and takes orders.

According to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, “So, here, God chooses Noah, not because he has achieved significant wisdom or virtue, but because He seeks to convey to some one the knowledge of Himself.”²

I find it hard to believe that out of the entire human population, Noach is the only family head who is innocent, unobjectionable, and obedient (and has some carpentry skills). Surely there must be a few other meek and non-violent men. So why does God choose Noach?

According to Daniel Feldman, God chooses Noach because he is calm. “… the prized attribute he possessed is hinted at in his name, Noach, which suggested calmness. In other words, he was in control of his temperament, and did not give himself to anger … On the other hand, a failure to anger can sometimes reflect a failure to respond to, or even to notice, injustice and immoral behavior in one’s orbit. Accordingly, the source of Noach’s chein [favor] may equally have been the source of his criticized passivity.”³

Noach’s silence

Noah is minding his own business when God suddenly speaks to him.

And God said to Noah: “The end of all flesh is coming before Me, because the earth is filled with violence because of them. So here I am, ruining them along with the land. Make for yourself an ark of gofer wood …” (Genesis 6:12-6:14)

Noah listens silently to the instructions of the voice in his head, and follows them to the letter.

And Noah did everything God commanded him; that is what he did. (Genesis 6:22)

Another person might ask why God plans to drown all the animals on earth except for those in the ark: eight humans (Noah, his wife, their three sons, and the sons’ wives) and one pair of each of other species.⁴ Even if almost all adult humans are violent and do evil, some of them might repent if they were warned. Some children might learn better behavior. And what about all the non-human animals God has doomed?

But Noah only does what he is told.

Then God said to Noah: “Come into the ark, you and your whole household, for I have seen you are a tzadik before me in this generation.” (Genesis 7:1)

The “you” in this sentence is singular, not plural; it does not seem to matter whether Noah’s wife, sons, and daughters-in-law are innocent.

After giving some additional instructions about animals, God says:

“For in another seven days, I will be sending rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe out everything that exists, that I made, from the surface of the land.” (Genesis 7:4)

Apparently this explicit warning still does not inspire Noach to speak—either to question God, or to tell any humans outside his immediate family what is about to happen.⁵ The text only repeats:

And Noach did everything that God had commanded him. (Genesis 7:5)

Failure to question or pray

According to one 18^th-century commentary, Or HaChayim, “Noach became convinced from what God told him that any prayer of his would be futile, that the fate of these people had been sealed beyond reprieve. All of this is contained in the words: ‘the end of all flesh has come before Me, here I am about to destroy them.’”⁶

Another 18^th-century commentary, Kedushat Levi, attributed Noach’s decision to remain silent to his own self-evaluation: “Now even though Noah was a great and blameless tsaddik, he was very small in his own eyes and did not have faith that he was a powerful tsaddik with the ability to annul the decree of the flood. In fact, he thought of himself as being equal to the rest of his generation. …Therefore, he did not pray to save the people of his generation.”⁷

But this is a poor excuse, wrote Arthur Green. “The question is whether we choose to stand up and act for the good, even while knowing that we may not succeed and that our actions will be imperfect.”⁸

Modern commentator Norman Cohen, on the other hand, wrote that Noach is passive because he is self-centered.  “Noah saw the world through the narrow prism of his own life and his own needs. He was concerned only with himself—a trait evident in most young children. He seemed to show a lack of compassion for all the rest of humanity, which was about to be destroyed. All that mattered to him was that the ark would guarantee his survival and that of his household.”⁹

Failure to warn

The same explanations for why Noach fails to speak up to God also apply to the question of why Noach fails to warn other human beings.

Irreversible fate. Just as God seems adamant about wiping out all humans and land animals except for those on the ark, Noach’s neighbors might seem unyielding in their determination to do wholesale violence. He might believe that warning them about their fate would be useless, since they would never reform. (He might also think that even if a few people did repent, God would not let him smuggle them on the ark, or let them build their own boats.)

Low self-esteem. Just as Noach does not believe God would listen to him, Noach would not believe that other people would listen to him. A low self-opinion makes everyone else look more powerful. Feldman wrote: “In order to react proactively to injustice, one must first have faith in their own ability to make a difference. A lack of such faith can result in the perception that all reaction is futile, and not worth the effort.”¹⁰

Egocentrism. If the problem is that Noach is so self-centered that he lacks compassion, he has no motivation to go to the trouble of warning people about the coming flood. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg wrote: “It is not surprising that he is not effective in swaying his contemporaries. … Noah’s silence, I suggest, is essentially a metastasis of the sickness of his time. He is incurious, he does not know and does not care what happens to others. He suffers from the incapacity to speak meaningfully to God or to his fellow human beings.”¹¹ Zornberg added that Noach’s time in the ark teaches him about compassion, since he and his family must spend all their time feeding the various animals. “… there is feeding, the acute awareness of timing and taste in nurturing the other. I suggest that feeding animals becomes a year-long workshop in … kindness.”¹²

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Noach’s name means “rest”. When he is born, his father, Lemekh, gives him that name as an expression of hope, saying:

“May this one give us a change of heart from our labor and from the toil of our hands, from the ground that God cursed.” (Genesis 5:29)

Eight long generations after God cursed the ground so that Adam would have to work hard to farm it,¹³ Lemekh is fed up with the endless labor and wants some rest.

We all want rest from hard labor, time off to do the things that please us. Over the millennia, humans have found ways to reduce the hardship—through inventing technologies, yes, but mostly through cooperating and helping each other. When we engage in too much violence, the system falls apart and people starve. The cure for a world of violence, as the God character realizes at the end of the story of the flood,¹⁴ is not to make an ark to rescue a select few and start a new world. The cure is the mutual aid that can only happen if we are not like Noach—only if we care about our fellow creatures, and do not rest silently in the belief that our efforts would be futile.

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1. Noach and Enoch (Genesis 5:24) “walked around with God” (et ha-Elohim hithalekh, אֶת הָאֱלֺהִים הִתְהַלֶּךְ). The Hebrew Bible also refers three times to walking around in God’s presence (lehithaleikh lifnei Elohim, לְהִתְהַלֵּךְ לִפְנֵי אֱלֺהִים), by Abraham in Genesis 24:40, Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20:3 and Isaiah 38:3, and the psalmist in Psalm 56:14. The injunction to “walk humbly with your God” in Micah 6:8 uses the infinitive kal form of the verb halakh (lekhet, לֶכֶת = “to walk”), rather than the infinitive hitpael form of the verb (hithaleikh, הִתְְהַלֵּךְ = to walk around).
2. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, Doubleday, New York, 1995, p. 41.
3. Daniel Z. Feldman, “Noach: Of Rage, Rainbows, and Redemption”, Mitokh Ha-Ohel: Essages on the Weekly Parashah from the Rabbis and Professors of Yeshiva University, Yeshiva University, New York, 2010.
4. Genesis 6:19-20.
5. See my 2013 post Noach: Righteous Choices.
6. Chayim ben Moshe ibn Attar (c.1718 – c.1742), Or HaChayim, on 6:13, translated in www.sefaria.org.
7. Levi Yitzchak of Berdyczow (1740-1809), Kedushat Levi, translated by Arthur Green in Speaking Torah: Vol. 1, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2013, p. 90.
8. Arthur Green, Speaking Torah Vol. 1, commentary on Kedushat Levi, p. 90.
9. Norman J. Cohen, Voices from Genesis, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2001, p. 52.
10. Feldman, ibid.
11. Zornberg,p. 58.
12. Ibid, p. 61.
13. Genesis 3:17.
14. Genesis 8:21.