Torah Portion Noah – Destruction and Regeneration

Noah – Destruction and Regeneration

I imagine warring bands of murderous maniacs, spreading ruination everywhere they went. Anyone who stood up to them was hacked down. Just about everyone eventually joined the frenzy. Something like the zombie shows, except in this case, the zombies win, and the murderous hordes are not zombies.  These mobs are human beings like us, but have gone very, very bad.

I see this humanity gone bad when I study the depredations of Nazism and the bloodlust reigns of Stalin, Mao, Imperial Japan, the Kims of North Korea and Saddam. I see this in the genocide in Rwanda, Myanmar, and the Balkans. I see it in the crazed viciousness of ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Every time I dig into world history, I see it. Armenia, Cambodia, Bangladesh. The Mongols. The list is long.

Imagine each of these maniacal tribes has won its war against humanity and is closing in to murder the other tribes and everyone in its path. You might write, as the Bible does, that “the world had become corrupt and was filled with violence.” If you believed in a God that acted in history, you might pray that this powerful God would wipe out this heinous humanity and all its cruelty. (If you have trouble imagining this, go watch Darren Aronofky’s movie “Noah”.)

The Bible imagines this in its own way. Human beings, made from earth and water and animated by spirit, would be dissolved back into water and earth. The spirit, trapped in this form that became monstrous, would be released back to God. The spirit of God would hover again over the face of the waters. Cries of savagery would be stilled.

The bone chilling story of an ancient flood seemed to inhabit the minds in the ancient world of the Middle East. The “Black Sea Deluge” theory holds that the Mediterranean Sea broke through the Bosporus around 5600 BCE, flooding an ancient littoral civilization within months. This Deluge became part of the collective memory of that part of the world. Everyone knew it happened. But why?

The biblical author(s) held that this flood was an act of God to reverse creation. In other words, the Bible wove in an ancient tradition of a flood to support its theory that, referring to the human being, “every form of the thoughts of his heart are all bad, all the time.” It took 10 generations from Adam to Noah for such a complete human degeneration that creation would be reversed to a watery silence.

And it took 10 generations from Noah to Abraham for the generation of one who could “walk before God and be whole.”  Abraham would teach his descendants, spiritual and biological, to keep God’s way and righteous law. The Bible, as literature and philosophic psychology, sees the human being as fallen but also able to stand up again.  To achieve moral standing, however, we would need a teaching – a vision and a path so strong and clear that it would turn back the flood of destructiveness that rises within each of us and among us. It is in our nature to be destructive, but it is also within our nature to transcend our nature. Chaos, too, can be reversed. Entropy is not the ultimate law of the universe.

A new tribe would come into being, teaching the vision and the way.