Destruction and Regeneration

Thoughts on Surah Noah 2024 (adapted from previous versions)

I imagine gangs of murderous maniacs fighting, spreading destruction wherever they go. Anyone who opposed them was attacked. Eventually, almost everyone joined in on the craze. Something similar to zombie shows, except in this case the zombies win and the hordes of killers aren’t zombies. These are gangs of people, but they’ve gone very, very bad.

We saw terrible, terrible evidence of this maniacal evil in the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7/10/23. The wound is fresh, so terrible, so painful that we can forget that Hamas is just another in a chain of incarnations of evil. We see this deteriorating humanity in the depredations of Nazism and the bloodthirsty reigns of Stalin, Mao, Imperial Japan, Pol Pot, the Kims of North Korea, and Saddam Hussein. We see this in the genocides in Rwanda, Myanmar and the Balkans. We see this in the insane brutality of ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Slavery and the destruction of indigenous peoples. I see this every time I look at world history. Armenian genocide. Mongols. Russia’s plunder in Ukraine. The list is long.

Imagine the background of our Torah portion is that these maniacal tribes have won their war against humanity and are closing in to kill the last remaining tribes and anyone who gets in their way. You could write, as the Bible says, that “the world is corrupt and filled with violence.” If you believe in a God who is influential in history, you can pray that this powerful God will destroy this disgusting humanity and all its cruelty. (If you have trouble imagining this, watch Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah.”)

The Bible imagines this depravity and its consequences in its own way in the story of Noah. The Bible tells us that humanity is a terrible mistake. The solution would be for humans, created from earth and water and animated by spirit, to return to the land from which they came and ultimately to the abyss of water that existed before creation. The soul trapped in a monstrous form would be released back to God. The form would fall apart. The spirit of God would again hover silently over the waters. The cries of brutality would be silenced.

The chilling story of an ancient flood seemed to be on the minds of everyone in the ancient world of the Middle East. The “Black Sea Flood” theory states that the Mediterranean Sea occurred in B.C. He claims that it crossed the Bosphorus around 5600 BC, submerging an ancient coastal civilization within months. Others believe that the Mesopotamian Rivers overflowed and flooded the cradle of civilization over the centuries. Plato taught that the ancient island city of Atlantis fell from favor with the gods and sank into the Atlantic Ocean (of all places). Whatever the source of the ancient Middle Eastern cultural memory of the Flood, the Flood became part of the collective memory of that part of the world. Everyone knew this was happening. The question was why this happened. Ancient mythological systems found various answers; For example, people were very noisy and disturbed the dreams of the gods.

The biblical writer(s) argued that this flood was an act of God to reverse creation. In other words, the Bible rewoven an ancient flood tradition to support its theory that, in reference to human beings, “every kind of thought in the heart is evil at all times” (Genesis 6:5). It took 10 generations from Adam to Noah for such complete human corruption that creation would collapse into a watery silence.

As in other flood stories, there was the “last good man.” In some flood stories, this person was hidden by a renegade god in order to survive the flood, to the displeasure of other gods who wanted to wipe out all humanity.

In the biblical story, it is the only God who seeks the righteous person, the one who walks with God, to recreate humanity from destruction and rubble. The renewal of humanity described in our Torah passage is strange and seems to herald something terrible. The parsha ends with the story of the Tower of Babel, reflecting the tyrannical state.

The God of the Bible has apparently learned a lesson and patiently waits for 10 generations for the election of Abraham and Sarah, the next chapter in humanity’s renewal.

Abraham “was to walk before God and be made whole.” Abraham would teach his descendants, spiritually and biologically, to uphold God’s way and the righteous law. The Bible, as literature and philosophical psychology, sees man as a fallen being but at the same time able to rise again. But to achieve moral standing we need a doctrine; We need a vision and a path so strong and clear that this doctrine will guide us to turn back the flood of destruction.

People would learn to stand against the hordes that wanted to destroy humanity. We will also learn to turn back the destructive flood that rises within and among us. It is in our nature to be destructive, but it is also in our nature to exceed our nature. Chaos can also be reversed. Entropy is not the ultimate law of the universe.

New tribes would emerge, siding against evil, fighting evil regimes, and making room to teach the vision and the way.