A Unique Election and the Generation of the Flood
What does a rabbi say on the Shabbat before Election Day? What does a rabbi say at a
time when our nation is deeply divided, hardly able to talk to one another, and at the
same time, the current election poses unprecedented historical challenges? What do I say
when I have utmost respect for the people who disagree with me and no respect for their
candidate? What do I say when, on the one hand, there are legal, political, and even moral
constraints on my words, and on the other hand there is an existential challenge to
freedom, democracy, the bedrock of our country? What do I say when I believe that the
rights and freedoms of minorities, including Jews, are threatened?
These are hard questions and I hope that I will look back on my own words and actions
and feel that I did what was right. What I believe is that my words in private conversation
or on my own facebook page, are different than my words from the bima, and that all of
you have made up your minds about who you are voting for and my words will not
influence you. What I believe I might be able to do is shed some light from Torah on our
current climate. So, I’m gonna stick to Torah here; if the shoe fits, wear it.
Today we read parashat Noach and the story of the flood. Dor Hamabul, the generation
of the flood, is considered, in biblical and rabbinic literature, to be the most sinful
generation of all time, the nadir of human behavior. So, what in fact was their sin? The
Torah says that the earth was filled with hamas, violence or lawlessness, and that all flesh
had corrupted the ways of the earth. V’hineh nishatah ki hishchit kal basar et darco al
ha’aretz. These words are somewhat vague: they seem to imply, in the first case, a kind
of anarchy and in the second, some kind of sexual corruption. The rabbis expand on both
these points.
Rashi says that the corruption of all flesh means sexual immorality and idolatry, but
hamas, which he translates as robbery, sealed their doom. Why does Rashi link these two
ideas? According to Zornberg, both sexual sins and idolatry seem to be generous sins –
that is they express expansiveness, an openness to everything, a willful flouting of law.
If we look back a little bit, at the end of the previous parasha, the Torah tells us that some
kind of divine beings, nefilim, saw how beautiful women were, and took them as wives.
Rashi comments that this means that princes seized young brides about to be married, and
had sex with married women, men, even animals. In other words, these sexual crimes are
really not at all about what we might associate with sex – love, curiosity, intimacy.
Instead, they are about rapacious egotism – these are not acts of love, but robbery. Self
swells to fill all worlds. The predator is not curious about the other: rather, he seizes her
to satisfy his own needs. The watchword of this generation, according to Zornberg is
“either me or you.” There’s not room for both of us. This is why Rashi links the two sins
and says that theft was their ultimate downfall. This is sexual sin in the form of using,
stealing if you will, others’ bodies. It is about possession of other people with callous
disregard for their humanity. In Buber’s terms, this is what it means to treat people as
objects – “it” – instead of subjects – “thou.”
1
Another understanding of the sin of the generation of the Flood is found in the Talmud.
The Jerusalem Talmud focuses on lawlessness. What did this mean? The story is told of a
merchant who carries a large tray of cooked lentils into the marketplace to bring them to
his shop to sell. As he walks through the market, people pick individual lentils off his
tray. By the time he arrives at his shop his tray is empty. He has nothing to sell, he has
lost his day’s wage, but he has no claim to file: a single lentil has no monetary worth and
he cannot sue the thieves over individual lentils. In the same way, the Talmud
understands, the norms of civil society disintegrate lentil by lentil, piece by piece. You
don’t have to have a military coup or blow up the seat of government with a bomb: you
can just, little by little, tear the threads that bind us – pick away at civil norms, at civil
discourse, at our mutual obligations to care for one another, to pay taxes, to have freedom
of the press, to speak in a civil manner – until the whole thing is quickly gone, destroyed,
in tatters, and there is no one to blame.
This is what Jonathan Sacks describes when he calls the sin of the generation of the Flood
“identity without universality:” everyone identifies with their own clan or tribe, but there
are no universal rules to govern behavior and keep the peace. It is “either me or you” and
never us.
A third and related understanding of the sin of Dor Hamabul, the generation of the Flood,
concerns language. In this understanding, words stop meaning what they are meant to
mean. Language, meaning systems break down, replaced by a cacophonous babble.
How do we see this? The story begins with so many displacements of words. Noah’s
name is meant to mean comfort – that his birth somehow brought comfort to God. And
yet, a few short verses later, the Torah says, “vayinachem adonai ki asa et haadam” God
regrets that he made humankind – vayinachem is the same root as nachum – comfort,
now subverted to mean God’s profound regret of his creation.
Then there is the question of the whole Adam project. God made man, Adam, from earth,
adama; this was a holistic relationship. But after human sin, God punishes man and
subverts this relationship, cursing the ground because of him, compelling him to work for
his food, and making him mortal, dissolving him to the dust from which he came. But,
now, by the generation of the flood, this dissolving seems to be magnified beyond death
itself. God will flood the earth and blot out – emheh – humankind. He will bring about a
watery destruction through an overapplication, as it were, of water to earth.
In these word plays, we begin to see the breakdown of language: what things seem to
mean, is not what they mean. Finally, we have the silence of Noah. God tells him that he
will destroy the world and Noah, the most righteous of his generation, says nothing. He
does not protest, he does not prophesy to his fellow man and warn them of the coming
destruction, he does not preach tshuva – he just builds an ark. According to midrashic
sources, this is a breakdown of language, an exile of the word. God floods the world,
returning it to speechlessness, because in effect, the world has already stopped speaking.
Zornberg writes, “The rebellion of the generation around the Flood can be understood as
a failure to speak, to communicate with God – or indeed with each other. There is a
2
pathology in the very openness of the Flood generation which converts openness to a
dumbness, of babble rather than of silence.”
Humans have become so open that they are actually closed. Communication has
degenerated into a babble of indiscriminate voices. The shetef, the indiscriminate flood, is
merely an extension of what humans have done to themselves. Speech, language,
boundaries, meaning have all broken down – the flood is the logical extension of the
destruction of civilization itself.
As I said earlier, if the shoe fits wear it. Tradition teaches that the generation of the Flood
was never fully destroyed, that something of it remains in each generation.
What is the Torah’s answer to this problem? After the flood, how did humans respond?
Did they change? Did they find new ways to communicate with one another, to make
space for human individuality and God? The answer is yes and no; they changed but they
merely found new ways to sin. The pendulum swung too far.
The generation after the flood is the Generation of the Tower of Babel. They cooperate –
they build a tower to the heavens. Their sin is usually understood as an act of overreach
and hubris but that is not how the rabbis read it. First, we are struck by the fact that the
Torah tells us they had one language and one word. This does not just describe a state
before humans developed many languages but rather a kind of totalitarianism. Everybody
had one word because no other words are tolerated; it is groupthink. In Zornberg’s words,
if the generation of the Flood was about either me or you, this generation is me and not
you – they build safe houses of human solidarity but this is mere camouflage – there is no
real encounter with the other, God or human. For Sacks, if dor hambul is identity without
universality, then the generation of the Tower is universality without identity – the people
impose a universal order at the expense of liberty. Imperialism is the consequence of
universalism. The imposition of a universal culture, without regard to the diversity of
humankind, leads to totalitarianism.
According to midrash, if a man fell off the tower, while building it, no one paid attention.
But if a brick fell off, they stopped and wept. If the sin of the Tower is the opposite of the
Flood, if it is totalitarianism rather than lawlessness, its effects are similar. Human life
has no worth; objects are treated as people. Speech in one voice is not meaningful speech.
It fails to recognize the humanity and individuality of each person. Such speech is babble,
as the tower is aptly named. “What neither generation can encompass, “ according to
Zornberg, “is a world with God at its center, so that one may dare to imagine a
multiplicity of selves, of worlds, existing together, even interacting with one another in
modes that build and do not destroy.” What we have is a failure of imagination – people
cannot imagine the world nor can they imagine the fullness of another.
What is the Torah’s answer to all this? Abraham. God decides to give up on working with
all of humanity and instead, to cultivate a relationship with a single individual. God
chooses a particular relationship, grounded in love, in the hope that through this
particular relationship God can paradoxically spread His universal message to the world.
3
This, I think, is a useful response to where we find ourselves right now. It may not be in
our power to transform our government or our electoral system or our national
conversation, at least not immediately, by ourselves, overnight. But it is in our power to
rebuild our relationships. In the face of a world that has become crass and cruel, it is
possible to see the face of another human being. It is possible to listen carefully to one
another, to respect one another, even if we disagree, to restore meaningful conversation
among us. It is possible to listen to speakers with whom we disagree without needing to
walk out, yell, or disrupt the gathering. It is possible to learn from others – in fact, it is
the only way we learn anything. It is possible to see one another’s full humanity, to be
curious about one another’s experience, to speak without raising our voices, to listen – in
short, to restore our national conversation one person, one soul at a time. Because each of
us is infinitely precious. Each of us has something to teach and to give. Each of us is here
for a reason, and each of is unique and reflects God’s image uniquely. The soul, writes
Parker Palmer, is shy – it will only come out when it is safe, not when people are yelling,
or jostling for position or talking without listening. Let’s make space for soul.
We cannot transform the world overnight. But we can begin, one person at a time, to
listen, to speak across difference, to respect, even when we disagree, to love. This is what
it means and what it has always meant to be human. This is what it means to live in
relationship to God, as neither the generation of the flood nor that of the tower was able.
Simu lev al haneshama. Pay attention to the soul. Let’s begin.
4