Parashat Noah

Summary

The primordial history of the world, of which we read last week, continues this week with the history, and in particular the moral history of early humanity.  Humans are blessed with the ability to exercise their free will, which they seem prone to abuse; over the course of 10 generations humanity rapidly descends into moral depravity, to such an appalling extent that God decides to destroy creation, safe for the one human being and his family who was able to show some capacity for righteousness, Noah. God appoints him as His partner in the conservation of the animal world as well, however, soon after the flood humanity proofs still to be morally weak. Noah becomes a drunkard and one of his sons sexually abuses his father while his lies in a drunken stupor. The new humanity grows magnanimous and eager to commit collective hybris in aspiring to build a tower that will elevate them to a godlike status.  This generation is punished by being broken up and dispersed into several different nations each with their own language, unable to ever cooperate as a single humanity again.  Nevertheless humanity remains a moral disappointment, until, generations afterwards another righteous person appears in the genealogy of humankind; a rare moral champion, whom God chooses to become His covenantal partner in bringing about a world of higher and more stable morality.

Commentary  by Rabbi Kathleen de Magtige-Middleton of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue

The development of human morality and the human ability to exercise free will is, as we only know too well from history, not a static progression, but a bumpy road of many noble aspirations and innumerable atrocities.  The beginning of the story of Noah seems to hint to the complexity of human moral or ethical development and how to measure it.  It poses the question whether there is an abstract ideal of morality, or whether morality only dependents on the always limited moral perception of society at large.  Is it possible that we are only unable to see certain morally flaws, because at the time society condones such behaviour as morally acceptable, or does some immoral behaviour only become immoral at the time we realise it?

The Torah seems to raise this very point, when at the beginning of the portion we are told that ‘Noah was a righteous man, he was blameless in his age’.  The rabbis were divided as to the meaning of this statement; is this an absolute statement, or merely relative to the time in which he lived, i.e. is it a true compliment, or qualified praise?  According to Rabbi Yochanan Noah’s righteousness was only relative to the general moral level of the society he lived in, i.e. in comparison to the low morality of the people around him, he was a righteous man, but would he had lived in another society, with better moral codes, he would not have been deemed righteous.

Resh Lakish on the other hand, maintained that someone who has the moral strength to stand up in an immoral society would have had even more moral strength would he have lived in a morally upright society.  Indeed it is hard to scrutinise our common perception of the world, challenge society’s behaviour when this behaviour goes against our own moral perception of the world.

The story of Noah assumes that there is such a thing as abstract, absolute morality, yet, although we have the free will to make our choices, we are not always capable of recognising the morally right from the morally wrong. Ultimately that level of moral understanding lies with the Eternal One, who is and remains the ethical imperative in our lives.

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