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From the Rabbi:
The story of Noah's Ark is one of the most beloved and well-known Bible stories. It's one we often introduce to our children with colorful and fun images of animals, a big boat, and a rainbow. It's also a rather gruesome and dark story of societal degredation, mass extinction, drunkenness, and sexual violence. It either gets a G rating for kids or a parental warning; there's not much room in between.
This familiar story also has long served as one of the primary metaphors for Jewish spiritual life throughout our exile. See, the word for "ark," teivah, also means "word." So just as God summons Noah and his family to "come into the ark" to ride out the storm and flood and later re-emerge into a cleansed, although desolate world, so too have our sages understood that in order to ride out the long and bitter exile, we Jews would need to "come into the Word" and immerse ourselves entirely within Torah study and prayer in order to ride out the exile to one day return to our homeland when the world had been cleansed.
For nearly twenty centuries, it has been our "coming into the word" that has sustained the national life of the Jewish People. The great achievements of our society have not been marked in architectural, technological or agricultural endeavors, although we certainly have engaged in those pursuits. No, the real astounding and enduring achievements of Jewish society have come in literature. The Talmud, Midrash, Halachic codes, philosophy, Kabbalah, Chassisdut, ethics, liturgy, poetry, and more. That has been our life whilst we have endured the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune in exile. As King David said, (PS 119:92) "Had not your Law been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction."
Prayer too has been interpreted through the lens of Noah's story. The Baal Shem Tov's entire treatise on mystical prayer appears in Parashat Noach. There he interprets the three floors of the ark/word as three layers of kavvanah, the simple or physical meaning, the emotional movement and intellectual intention, all illuminated by the Tzohar, or light-emitting-gem or perhaps window at the top of the ark, the four layers thus corresponding to the four letters of the Divine Name. And we are to "come into the word" by investing all of our energies on all four levels into the words of the prayer.
But of course, coming into the ark isn't the entire story. After the flood Noah and family are instructed to (8:16) "exit the ark" and resettle the Earth. This proves to be not so easy, as Rashi points out. While God told Noach to "Come out of the ark, together with your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives," meaning you and your wife together, your sons and their wives together. However, when it came to actually doing it, (8:18) "Noah came out together with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives." This simple mistake led to Noah being alone in his tent rather than with his wife, and the terrible unpleasantness which followed scars Noah's legacy.
Similarly, in the last several generations with the return to Zion and resettling of Eretz Yisrael, the challenge facing our People has been to come out of the ark/word in which we survived exile. We spoke on Shmini Atzeret about the challenge of renewing the earthbound shamanic practices of the Temple rituals and compared it to reconstituting powdered soup. The exilic Judaism which enabled us to survive persecution isn't exactly the same as what's needed to thrive and flourish in the Land. Like Noah, herein lies our great challenge and our most challenging work in these times. Doing what our fathers taught us isn't gonna cut it anymore. We need to do a teshuvah unlike anything we've ever had modeled for us. 'To go where no one has gone before.' We need to unpack the time capsule, re-plant the vineyard, re-constitute the freeze-dried Oral Torah. To re-indiginize ourselves, and re-discover what it means - and how it feels - to live with God in the Garden.
It can't be done all at once. Noah was found naked in such an attempt to return all-at-once to the Edenic state before the world was ready. But we mustn't be reticent in facing this challenge. As Rebbi Tarfon says (Avot 2:16) "The work is not upon you to finish, but neither are you free to neglect it."
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Shlomo
Classes This Week
NOTE: The Thursday evening class is paused until further notice.
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