Noach: Righteous Choices

This is the story of Noah: Noah was a man of tzadik; he was blameless in his generations; Noah walked with God. (Genesis/Bereishit 6:9)

tzadik (צַדִּיק) = right conduct, lawfulness, innocence; a righteous person.

In the Talmud, a man is called a tzadik if he devotes his life to Torah study and prayer. For the Chassidim in Eastern Europe, a tzadik was a holy man so esteemed by God that he could work miracles. Some commentary reads these meanings of the word tzadik back into Noah’s story, but the Torah never shows Noah studying, praying, or acting like a holy miracle-worker. So I think Noah is merely innocent and lawful, avoiding violence even though everyone around him is doing it.

At the end of last week’s Torah portion, God regrets creating humankind, because of

… the abundant badness of the human on earth, that the shape of every idea of his heart was only bad all the time. (Genesis 6:5)

(See my post last week, Bereishit: Inner Voices.) Since Noah is the best human being available, God speaks to him at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Noach (“Noah” or “resting”).

And God said to Noah: “The end of all flesh is coming before me, because violence has filled the earth on account of them, and here I am, their destroyer of the earth. Make for yourself an ark …” (Genesis 6:13-14)

God gives Noah explicit instructions on how to build the ark, and explains that the problem of human violence will be solved when God wipes out everything else on earth with a vast flood. Then God tells Noah to collect what will go inside the ark: a pair of every kind of animal; Noah and his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law; and food for everybody.

And Noah did so; everything that God commanded him, thus he did. Then God said to Noah: Enter, you and all your household, into the tevah, because in you I have seen tzadik before Me in this generation. (Genesis 6:22-7:1)

It sounds as if God approves of Noah’s passive obedience. Yet commentators through the ages have wondered why Noah does not try to talk God out of the Flood, the way Abraham tries to talk God out of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah by saying perhaps there are some innocent people among the wicked.

Most of the commentary I have read falls into two camps. One camp considers Noah either a failed prophet (because he did not warn anyone to repent) or a failed tzadik in the Chassidic sense (because he did not ask God to decree a different fate for the world). The other camp argues that God must have asked Noah to prophesy in an unrecorded conversation, and Noah must have done his best, while building the ark, to warn people about the flood and urge them to repent before it was too late.

But the commentary that alarms me the most comes from the 19^th-century Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Hirsch wrote that performing God’s will is what matters; acting on the basis of your own judgment is of secondary and uncertain importance. So although Noah could have done other things, he was correct in doing exactly what God commanded, and no more.

I would say that if God only wants humans to do as they are told, God had no reason to plant the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden in the first place. Yet God not only places the Tree, but points it out to Adam by warning him not to eat from it. Then when Adam obediently avoids it, God creates Eve and the talking snake, so the humans finally eat. The taste of knowledge of good and bad gives humans have the ability to form opinions, and choose between them. Though we usually act out of habit and instinct, we have the ability to make new and creative choices.

Some rabbis have argued that the most desirable outcome is when a human deliberately chooses to do exactly what God wants. But sometimes there is a difference in the Torah between what God says and what God wants. On several occasions God “tests” (nasah) people to see what they will choose to do. For example, God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac as a burnt offering—but when Abraham binds his son on an altar and raises his knife, God intervenes to save Isaac’s life. It was only a test, and in a real test you do not tell the subject everything you want.

So when God tells Noah to build and supply the ark before the flood wipes out the earth, is that really all God wants Noah to do? Or is God testing him, to see whether Noah will warn people to repent, or even propose a different solution to God?

Suppose Hirsch is right, and God only wants us to choose to follow explicit directions. That not only makes the relationship between humans and God uninteresting, it also leaves us stranded when we have to make independent decisions that are not explicitly covered by the 613 rules in the Torah. The tradition of Jewish oral law tries to fill the gap, but it still cannot cover everything. Human beings often find themselves in situations where they need to figure out the best course of action for themselves.

Thank God! I believe we humans shine when we discover, or invent, good ideas that nobody considered before. Choosing to follow God’s orders is a virtue of sorts. But we are blessed with the ability to rise above Noah’s level of virtue, and improve the world in ways the Torah never envisioned. Depending on how you define “God”, this might be what God really wants.

In my own lifetime, I have seen great progress in granting status, rights, and respect to people in groups that were subjugated for millennia, including women, people outside the traditional heterosexual model, and outsiders from different ethnic groups and countries. We still have farther to go, and some parts of the world lag far behind, but we have created a good path. The Torah merely assumes these groups will always be inferior, and offers a few paltry laws to protect the members of some groups within their inferior status. Thanks to our God-given abilities, humans are now working on a better vision.

The Torah also promotes war, while alluding to a distant future when war will disappear because everyone will worship the same god. But we can do better than that, thanks to our taste for knowing good from bad, our ability to transcend our habits and instincts and make choices, our creative minds, and our power to rise above ourselves to speak as prophets or tzaddikim. Someday humans may achieve an era of peace better than the one imagined in the Bible!

May it be God’s will … but most of all, may it become our will.

Bereishit: Divine Inner Voices

The first Torah portion in the first book of the Torah (both called Bereishit, “In a beginning”) opens with God’s creation of the world. It closes with God’s decision to destroy the world and start over again.

Just before God makes this decision, the Torah gives us a curious story fragment:

And beney ha-elohim saw the daughters of the human, how tov they were, and they took themselves wives from whomever they chose. (Genesis 6:2)

The Nefilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, for beney ha-elohim came into the daughters of the human, and they bore children to them. They were the mighty ones from long ago, men of renown. (Genesis 6:4)

beney ha-elohim = the sons of God.

tov = good, attractive.

What does “the sons of God” mean? Some traditional commentary claims the phrase refers to superior human men, who make the mistake of marrying an inferior class of women. Other commentators say the “sons of God” are angels, angels of a lower grade than the malachim (“messengers”) that appear in the Torah in human form in order to speak as mouthpieces for God.

What strikes me is that the phrase beney ha-elohim appears only four times in the whole Hebrew Bible: twice in the passage above, and twice in the book of Job. The book of Job begins by describing how upright, good, and God-fearing Job is. Then the scene shifts to the court of God:

One day beney ha-elohim came to present themselves in front of God, and ha-satan came too, in the middle of them. And God said to ha-satan: Where do you come from? And ha-satan answered God, and said: From roving about on the earth and from going back and forth on it. (Job 1:6-7)

ha-satan = the adversary, the obstacle

God pays attention to ha-satan, and does not question any of the other “sons of God”. The Adversary doubts whether Job is genuinely good and God-fearing, and persuades God to test Job’s faithfulness. God assigns the Adversary to strike all Job’s possessions. Ha-satan eliminates Job’s wealth and all his children—for no good reason—but Job still blesses God.

Then one day beney ha-elohim came to present themselves in front of God, and ha-satan came too, in the middle of them, to present itself in front of God. And God said to ha-satan: Where do you come from this? And ha-satan answered God, and said: From roving about on the earth and from going back and forth on it. (Job 2:1-2)

Once again God only converses with ha-satan. The Adversary persuades God to test Job again, this time by afflicting his body, and God authorizes another injustice in order to find out what Job will do.

The book of Job is a theological conversation in the guise of a story about a man who lived long ago and far away. In order to set up the question of whether God is just, the story uses an allegory of God in His court, receiving His sons, the lesser gods (a scene obviously borrowed from one of the pantheistic religions in the region).

But on another level, I see both stories about beney ha-elohim as allegories for the human mind.

In the book of Job, I think God’s court represents the human mind. The decision-making ego is visited by various sub-personalities, including one that takes an adversarial role and obstructs the ego by planting doubt, then tempting the ego to abandon morality in order to find out for sure.

In the book of Genesis, the interaction between “the sons of God” and the “daughters of the human” can also represent the human mind. Like ha-satan in Job, beney ha-elohim in Genesis visit the earth. The purpose of the visit in Job is to observe the human beings from a different perspective than God’s, and bring that perspective into the heavenly court that I think represents the human mind.

The purpose of the visit in Genesis is to marry and “come into” human women. When the book of Genesis says “for beney ha-elohim came into the daughters of the human, and they bore children to them”, we can read it as simply a description of the sons of God having sex with their wives, who then give birth to mighty and famous men. But we can also read it as a representation of subconscious aspects of the mind coming into the consciousness of human women, and inspiring them to give birth to new ideas and notions.

In the Bible divine inspiration, ruach elohim, can be good or bad; good when a prophet is moved to speak out and warn people they are doing wrong, but bad when King Saul is seized by divinely-induced madness. What if divine inspiration comes from different aspects of God, different “sons”? One aspect might give us an impulse to speak out against injustice. Another aspect (such as ha-satan in Job) might give us an impulse to commit any injustice in order to prove a point.

The “sons of God” in Genesis are apparently bad impulses, leading to bad thoughts and actions.

And God saw the abundant badness of the human on the earth, that the shape of every idea of his heart was only bad all the time. And God nicham that It had made the human on the earth, and It was heartbroken. (Genesis/Bereishit 6:5-6)

nicham = had a change of heart, reconsidered. (This verb covers at least two kinds of change of heart: regret, and consolation.)

Before the beney ha-elohim show up, the humans on earth seem like a mixed lot, more good than bad. Cain is a murderer, and his great-great-great grandson Lemekh boasts to his wives about vengeance, but the other people the Torah mentions seem innocent enough. When Enosh is born, people start invoking the four-letter name of God. One of Enosh’s descendants, Enoch (Chanokh), “walked with God”.

Only after the beney ha-elohim influence the human race does God consider the ideas of the human heart “only bad all the time”. Perhaps these “sons of God” are like ha-satan in Job. The Adversary in Job corrupts the ruling god with feelings of doubt. The sons of God in Genesis apparently introduce urges that corrupt the conscious mind of the human “daughter”, and become obstacles to good behavior.

And God said: I will wipe away the human that I created from the face of the earth, from human to beast to creeper to flyer in the sky, because I have nicham that I made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of God. (Genesis/Bereishit 6:7-8)

In next week’s Torah portion, God decides to start the world over again with Noah and his family (as well as pairs of all the animals). This is like deciding to eliminate all those awkward feelings of beney ha-elohim, and reduce the mind to a single virtuous ego. Yet when the flood ends, God reaches the more mature conclusion that the human mind is always subject to evil, and decides to put up with it.

Today, we all hear the mental voices of divine inspiration inside our own minds. Sometimes they are Adversaries, trying to push us off the right path and make us act out of doubt or resentment or another negative urge. Sometimes they enter with enlightenment, and impregnate us with ideas that lead to good actions.

May we all learn to put up with the many shapes of our ideas, as the god in Genesis did. And may we all become more discriminating about our inner promptings than the god in Job.

Chukkat: Passing Through

Kings are often synonymous with their countries in the Bible. For example, in this week’s Torah portion, Chukkat (“Decree”), the king of Edom is simply called “Edom”, and when he refuses to give the Israelite permission to pass through his country, he says: “You shall not pass through me.” (Numbers/Bemidbar 20:18)

We all have rules about other people entering our personal space. Whether our personal space is an inch or an arm’s-length away from our bodies, we only want people we are intimate with to enter that zone. When anyone else, however benign, comes too close, it feels like an invasion.

In the Torah, the king of Edom acts as though his personal space covers his entire country. After all, he is Edom. He gives no reason for refusing permission for the Israelites to pass through him, and there is no obvious political reason. Although the Israelites have 601,730 fighting men, they are planning to conquer Canaan, not Edom.

Moses sent messengers from Kadeish to the king of Edom: Thus says your brother Israel: “You know all the hardships that have found us. Our forefathers went down to Egypt, and we dwelled in Egypt many years, and the Egyptians were bad to us and to our forefathers. And we cried out for help to God, and God listened to our voice, and sent a messenger and brought us out from Egypt. And hey! We are in Kadeish, a town at the edge of your territory. Please let us pass through your land. We will not pass through a field nor a vineyard, nor will we drink water from a well. On the king’s road we will go; we will not turn aside to the right or the left, until we have passed through beyond your territory.” (Numbers 20:14-17)

Kadeish = making holy.

Edom = a large Semitic kingdom south of the Dead Sea, including the mountain range of Seir; a variant of the word adom = red.

According to Genesis/Bereishit, Edom was Esau’s nickname, and became the name of the country he founded. Esau was the brother of Jacob, who became known as Israel. When Moses calls Edom and Israel brothers, he reminds the king that the Israelites are not only fellow Semites, but family. Edom should treat Israel like a brother, feeling empathy for its abuse at the hands of Egypt, and recognizing that God is on the Israelites’ side. By sending his message from Kadeish, rather than any other town on the border, Moses might even be hinting that Israel and Edom are both holy.

His request could hardly be more polite and humble. He does not want to disturb Edom; his goal is to get the Israelites into Canaan, the land God promised them.

The first time the Israelites reached the border of Canaan, 38 years before, they refused to cross it, because they did not trust God to help them take the land. (See my blog post Shelach-Lekha: Too Late.) God sentenced them to spend a total of 40 years in the wilderness, while the mistrustful generation died off. In this week’s Torah portion, the people have served their time, and the 120-year-old Moses takes responsibility for getting the next generation to Canaan, even though he knows he will die before they cross over.

This time, God does not tell Moses where the Israelites should cross. Nor does Moses ask God. On his own, Moses decides to avoid the southern border and lead his people around the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, so they can enter Canaan from the northeast, across the Jordan River. The first part of this route crosses the kingdom of Edom, which lies south of the Dead Sea.

But Edom said to him: You shall not pass through me, lest I go out with the sword to oppose you. (Numbers 20:18)

Then the children of Israel said to him: We will go up on the high path, and if we drink your water, I myself or my livestock, then I will give their price. Only nothing will happen. On foot I will pass through it. (Numbers 20:19)

The change from plural to singular in Moses’s second request implies that he identifies with the children of Israel in the way a king identifies with his country. Moses gives up on the convenient road through the farmland of Edom, and asks permission to take the high path over the Seir mountains. Perhaps he thinks the king would find this road less threatening because it does not pass near the Edom’s capitol. Moses also gives the king of Edom a financial incentive by offering to pay for water. But Edom still feels as if his personal space is threatened.

And he said: “You shall not pass through! And Edom went out to oppose him, with a serious fighting-people and a strong hand. And Edom refused to let Israel pass through his territory, and Israel turned away from him.” (Numbers 20:20-21)

Moses accepts that the king of Edom does not consider the children of Israel close enough relatives to welcome them into his personal space. Instead of fighting about it, he makes his disgruntled people march over a much longer route. They circle all the way around Edom, going south almost as far as the Gulf of Aqaba, before finally heading north again toward the Jordan River and Canaan.

When do you let someone “pass through” your personal space, coming uncomfortably close before leaving again? When do you insist on passing through someone else’s personal space?

These questions are easy in some settings, such as a medical office, or an elevator in which all the passengers come from the same culture. It can be harder to decide whether to let someone in through your front door. And I often find myself puzzled by the question of whether to hug someone when we say hello or goodbye. I watch my friends and acquaintances to see if they are stepping forward with their hands rising, or keeping their distance. To be polite, I need to match them—and they need to match me.

I feel invaded when I get a greeting-hug from a stranger, or an acquaintance I don’t like. I don’t want to let them pass through my personal space. Unfortunately, a few of the people I want to keep at arm’s length are my relatives, and American culture assumes that relatives are intimate.

I can empathize with the king of Edom refusing passage to Israel, even though the Israelites and Edomites have the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. To Edom, these people from Egypt are strangers.

And I admire Moses for respecting the king of Edom, and turning away after the king rejects his second polite request. Civilized life requires good boundaries for everyone.

Yet the Israelites are on their way to Canaan, which they conquer by the sword in the book of Joshua. If the old generation had trusted God and crossed the southern border of Canaan when God told them to, 38 years before, would God have arranged for the Canaanites to surrender without bloodshed? Maybe when the Israelites try again, they have to invade Canaan with battles and sieges because they no longer have God’s full support. Yet they do not give up on the land God promised them, 40 years before. After all, if 601,730 of them are men over 20, the whole population must number at least two million. Two million people need a land. And God promised their parents the land of Canaan.

So in the book of Joshua, the Israelites cross into the personal space of the Canaanite peoples, and insist on staying. Their desperation for a homeland leads to war.

In a just world, every family would have its own home, and every people would have its own country, uncontested. In a just world, every border would be clear, and it would be easy for people to respect each other’s boundaries. But we do not live in a just world. God is not fixing the world for us, so our responsibility is to fix the world for each other. I know I can have only a small effect on the world, but it does make a difference if I treat other humans with respect.

May we all learn to respect boundaries, to compromise without giving up our journey, and to seek peace, like Moses.