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Noah 5766
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation B’nai Israel
Toledo, OH
What does it take to deserve to be called a tzadik, a righteous person?
Rambam says that all it takes to be a tzadik is that your good deeds
outweigh your sins. But does that really make a person righteous? Are we
really all tzaddikim because we avoid murdering other people and we manage
to give a little charity?
I think most of us would reserve the term tzadik, righteous person, for
someone who raises the bar a little bit higher than that. To be a tzadik you
need to be an exemplar, someone whose behavior provides a model that other
people will aspire to.
If a tzadik is someone that the people of that generation will look up to
and try and emulate, it is clear that to be a tzadik is something that can
only be understood in context of the time and place in which someone lives.
We can learn this from this week’s Torah portion. At the beginning of
parshat Noach we are told Noach haya ish tzadik v’tamim b’dorotav, Noah was
a righteous and pure man in his generation. Rashi’s commentary on this verse
asks what does it mean that he was righteous ‘in his generation?’ He tells
us there are those who read “in his generation to Noah’s praise, and those
who read it to Noah’s disgrace.” Some would say “wow, look at that
generation Noah lived in—with all those bad influences around, think of how
righteous he could have been in another generation!”
And others say “what made Noah so righteous? He was only righteous compared
with the terrible people in his generation. If he lived in another time, say
the days of Abraham, he wouldn’t have been considered a righteous person at
all.”
If we compare Abraham to Noah, Noah does not come off very well. When God
tells Noah He is going to destroy the world, Noah says “OK God,” and goes
and builds his boat. When God tells Abraham that He is going to destroy
Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham makes one of the most amazing speeches in the
Torah, taking God to task, saying “God, would you destroy the righteous
along with the wicked?! Far be it from you to do such a thing, to treat the
righteous like the wicked? Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?!
What if there are fifty righteous people in Sodom, will you kill them along
with the wicked?!” God relents, and even then Abraham doesn’t give up—with
all humility, “I am nothing but dust and ashes, etc.” he keeps going back to
God and bargains God all the way down to agreeing to spare the city if he
can find ten righteous people there.
But Noah? When God says the flood is coming, Noah just says “how big do you
want me to build the boat, God?” The Midrash says that it took Noah 120
years to build the ark so that the people of that generation would have a
chance to ask Noah what he was doing—if they asked, he would tell them about
God’s plans, giving the people an opportunity to repent. But even in the
Midrash, it doesn’t say that Noah used the time to try and convince people
to repent. There is no record that Noah was concerned about what would
happen to anyone else. Yet Noah still gets called a tzadik, a righteous
person. Why? Because compared to everyone ELSE in that generation, Noah was
way ahead. If the other people were like Noah, God would not have needed to
bring the flood to clean things up. Noah was righteous in his generation.
You can’t really compare Noah to Abraham. They lived in different times and
places. If you live in a time when everyone is a corrupt sinner, and you sin
less, you are a tzadik. If you live in a time when people are basically
good, to merit being called a tzadik takes a lot more. The world in
Abraham’s time was not as corrupt as the world in Noah’s time, so in an
absolute sense Abraham had to do more to merit being called a tzadik.
Every generation has its own tzaddikim. In every generation there are some
people we can look up to and say “there goes a righteous person who has the
courage of his or her convictions.”
Who gets considered a tzaddik is a function not ONLY of the person, but also
of the generation. The same thing is true for great leaders. In his
fascinating book “Leaders,” Richard Nixon reminisced about the great world
leaders of the post WW II era that he had the privilege of knowing and
working with. He points out that for someone to be remembered as a great
leader requires a combination of a person who is a great person with demands
of the time. Until WWII came along Winston Churchill was considered a has
been, washed up. The demands of the time—that generation—is what propelled
Churchill into the ranks of great leaders.
Similarly, to be a tzaddik requires the intersection of a person’s qualities
with the situation and needs of the time.
Last week one of the tzaddikim of our generation passed away. Rosa Parks was
one of the righteous people of our generation. She stood up to injustice in
the face of what would be great personal difficulty.
When I read about Rosa Parks’ story, I find it hard to believe that all this
happened right here in American only 50 years ago. But fifty years ago it
was illegal for a black person to ride in the front of a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama. Illegal. Not just against local customs, but against the law. And
rules about riding on buses were just the tip of the iceberg. Blacks
suffered a lot of indignities like not being allowed to use water fountains
reserved for whites, or to belong to country clubs that discriminated in
their membership. But in that time many whites also tried to disenfranchise
blacks, to find ways to deny them the ability to vote in elections. All of
those laws and those actions are against the values we learn from the Torah.
The Torah commands us mishpat echad yiyeh l’ger u’lezrach, you shall have
one manner of law, for the stranger and for the citizen. The Bible commands
to treat people equally.
In Montgomery fifty years ago they weren’t paying much attention to that
part of the Bible. In Montgomery, as in most of the American South at that
time, there were three sections on city buses: the back for blacks, the
front for whites, and a middle section where blacks could sit if there
weren’t any whites who wanted the seats. On December 1, 1955, during a
typical evening rush hour, 42 year-old Rosa Parks took a seat in that middle
section, on her way home from her job as a seamstress. When the white
section filled up and a white man wanted her seat, Rosa refused to get up.
Yes, Rosa was tired, but not that tired—no more tired than most of us at the
end of a long day. What she was tired of was being treated like a second
class citizen. She had already been active in the NAACP, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She decided not to move
when the bus driver ordered her to give her seat to the white man—in keeping
with the local laws and ordinances. Rosa decided to break the law. To stay
in her seat. The bus driver called the police and they arrested her. The
African-American community of Montgomery organized a boycott of the buses in
protest of the discriminating treatment they had endured for years. The
boycott, under the leadership of 26-year-old minister Martin Luther King,
Jr., was a peaceful, coordinated protest that lasted 381 days and captured
world attention.
We remember Rosa Parks as a tzadeket, a righteous woman, because she stood
her ground and protested the unfair treatment. Her action, and the ensuing
boycott and lawsuit, resulted in her being called the "Mother of the Civil
Rights Movement."
She wasn’t the first person to stand up to the Jim Crow laws. In 1890,
Louisiana passed a law that required blacks to ride in separate railroad
cars. Blacks protested and challenged the law. Homer Plessy, a carpenter in
Louisiana who was seven-eighths Caucasian, was chosen to test the
constitutionality of the law. On June 7, 1892, Plessy boarded a train and
sat in a car reserved for whites. He refused to move and was arrested. A
local judge ruled against Plessy and in 1896 the Supreme Court upheld the
lower courts ruling. It held that "separate but equal" accommodations did
not violate Plessy's rights and that the law did not stamp the "colored race
with a badge of inferiority."
Everyone remembers Rosa Parks but no one remembers Homer Plessy. What’s the
difference? The difference is “the generation,” the time. Mr. Plessy was
before his time. The country wasn’t ready to move in the direction of ending
discrimination. He was righteous, but his righteousness didn’t lead to
change.
Rosa’s greatness comes about because she had the same measure of
righteousness as Homer Plessy – a willingness to challenge an unjust law –
but the times were different. The times were ready for those laws to change.
Six months before Rosa Parks decided to stay seated, the Supreme Court of
the United States issued the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education
ruling which said that “separate but equal” in the schools did not cut it.
The schools were ordered to desegregate. A year before Rosa decided to stay
seated, the state of California changed the law to ban segregation in public
accommodation, like buses.
The time was ripe for a Rosa Parks to come along and do what she did.
Just as Noah was righteous in his generation, Rosa was righteous in her
generation.
The bar for us is raised higher than it was in Noah’s generation. We have
examples of many people in living memory who, like Abraham, stood up to
injustice. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel went to Selma to march with Martin
Luther King, Jr., exposing himself to great personal danger. The Hollywood
Ten refused to say whether or not they had ever been members of the
Communist Party because they didn’t believe it was any of the government’s
business—defying Joe McCarthy and trashing their careers as screenwriters in
the process. And Rosa Parks stood up to injustice by staying in her seat.
There is still a lot of injustice in the world. The rich are getting richer
and the poor are getting poorer. The Jim Crow laws are gone but as Hurricane
Katrina showed, a lot of blacks have not yet been able to find their way out
of a life of poverty and disadvantage.
You may say, “what can I do? I’m not a tzadik, I’m struggling to just be
decent.” Rambam tells us the choice is ours. Rambam teaches that we each
have the ability to choose to be as righteous as Moses or as wicked as
Yerevam. That’s what it means to have free will.
Moses was the exemplar of his generation, Noah was the exemplar of his
generation, Abraham in his, and Rosa Parks was one of the exemplars we can
celebrate in our generation. May the memory of the righteous be a blessing,
and may they inspire us all to be tzadikim ourselves.