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Topics in this digest: Noah 5765
by Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Noah was a righteous and just man in his generation, God walked with
Noah...Genesis 6:9
Earlier this week, I asked the kids at the Hebrew Academy, what is it that
makes Noah righteous and just? One of the leading responses was that it
was because Noah had faith in God.
What does it mean to have faith in God?
Do you have to have faith in God to obey God?
Rashi explains that the meaning of “God walked with Noah” is that Noah
needed God’s help and support: God walked alongside him, helping along.
There is a teaching in the Talmud (Kiddushin 30b) which says that man
cannot conquer the evil inclination without God’s help. The Gaon Vilna
explains that a person can reach a level where he is doing everything that
he possibly can—everything that is in his power to do—but to really have
an
internalized love and awe of God is something that depends on God.
This is a very curious teaching—especially considering that there is also
a teaching in the Talmud which says kol b’yadei shamayim, chutz mi yirat
shamayim, everything is in the hands of God except the fear of God. But I
think it’s true that an internalized love and awe of God to some extent
depends on God. You can’t just wake up one morning and decide that you
are going to really love God, and you are really in awe of God. You can
do things to try and develop those feelings and that relationship with
God, but ultimately, some level of it is beyond your control—it’s in the
hands of God.
Madregat HaAdam teaches that this is the level that Noah had reached.
Noah was a man who served God with all of his ability and all of his
strength. He built the ark, which was no mean feat. But what Noah was
lacking a little was the internal love and awe of God—the faith in God—and
that was what Noah needed God’s help with.
The Midrash in Bereshit Rabbah (32:6) says “Noah lacked faith; had the
water not reached his ankles, he would not have entered the ark.” Noah
believed in the work of his hands, and the things he had done, but he was
lacking a little in one area, and in that area he needed God’s help—in his
faith.
So Noah’s shortcoming was that he was a little lacking in faith in God.
His strength was that he had a lot of faith in himself, and he devoted
those efforts to serving God.
Is it possible to have too much faith in God?
If you believe that God takes care of everything, you might feel that
there is nothing that you need to do: that God will do everything.
As strange as it may sound, this is what Madregat HaAdam says was the
problem of the people of Noah’s generation. All those wicked people.
Their problem was NOT that they didn’t have faith in God, which is what we
might naively assume. We generally think of sinners as totally Godless, as
totally lacking any faith in God. But that’s not necessarily the case.
For the sinners of the generation of Noah, their problem was they had TOO
MUCH faith in God, and not enough faith in themselves.
They thought that EVERYTHING is in the hands of God. “In God we trust,
all others pay cash.” So in that sense, their faith in God was more
complete than Noah’s. If everything is pre-ordained, if God decided ahead
of time whether you are going to be righteous or wicked, well, you might
as
well be wicked. You’re not going to be punished for being wicked—whatever
is coming to you is God’s will, and there is nothing you can do about it.
What they were lacking in was faith in themselves: in the belief that
there was something THEY could do. Most especially, they were lacking in
the belief in what Rambam tells us in his laws of teshuva: everyone can be
as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Yerovam—we each have the power to
choose to be righteous or to choose to be wicked.
So too much faith in God can be a bad thing. Rebbe Levy Yitzhak, a.k.a.
the Holy Thief of Berditchev, had a student who was something of a wise
guy. Not unlike some students I have had, which is OK. The student asks
the rabbi, “alright, Rabbi, if everything God made has a purpose, why did
God make atheists? Do atheists serve a purpose?” The rabbi replied,
“Certainly. It’s a good thing that God created atheists. Why? Because
when you go to an atheist with a problem, the atheist cannot say it’s
God’s fault, or that God will help the person and everything will be OK.”
The atheist tells us we can’t just rely on God to feed the hungry and
clothe the poor—we have to do it ourselves.
Life frequently challenges us with difficult situations—or you might say
God tests us. When God tests us, righteous people are elevated to a
higher level, and wicked people are cast down to a lower level. The
midrash says that Noah didn’t enter the ark until the water reached his
ankles…but at that time, he did get into the ark. He passed the test, and
further elevated himself. When the waters came, when the rains started,
the wicked people of the generation didn’t make a last ditch effort to
“get on the ark,” to do repentance, to avert the decree: they simply
accepted it as God’s will and drowned. The very same water that pushed
Noah INTO the ark pushed the wicked people OUT of the ark.
So how righteous WAS Noah? The opening verse in this week’s parsha says
that Noah was a righteous and just man IN HIS GENERATION. What does it
mean that he was righteous in his generation?
Rashi says there are those who interpret this statement to Noah’s credit,
and those who read it to Noah’s discredit. There are those who say that
if Noah lived in a generation that wasn’t so wicked—say he lived in the
generation of Abraham instead of the generation of the flood—he would have
been even more righteous than he was. That to be righteous in a generation
where everyone is wicked is an incredibly amazing and difficult thing to
do.
On the other hand, there are those who look at Noah’s lacking in faith in
God, as attested to by his needing the water to fall before getting into
the ark, who look at Noah’s failure to argue with God on behalf of the
people of his generation, and they say that Noah was only considered
“righteous” because everyone else was wicked. That if Noah lived in
another generation, he would not have been very righteous compared with
Abraham.
In early 1979 I was living in Iran. Right in the middle of the Iranian
Revolution. I had the good fortune to be on the first official evacuation
flight to leave Iran in February of ’79. What many people forget, is that
in the early days of the Iranian Revolution, things actually improved.
The United States had relations with the new government of Ayatollah
Khomeini. So in November of 1979, a colleague of mine was back in Iran,
negotiating with the government of the mullahs for us to go back into Iran
to work on our project. Then the hostages were taken at the US Embassy.
All of a sudden it became a VERY scary place for an American to be. My
colleague got a ticket on the first plane he could get on leaving the
country. He didn’t care where it was going, and he didn’t care if he had
to buy a first class ticket. He knew he needed to get out of there and
fast. He ended up in Bangkok, which was not the usual European route to
the States from Iran.
If you were to look in the first class section of the flight my friend
took, you wouldn’t know whether someone was sitting in first class because
they were rich and always traveled in first class, or if they were sitting
in first class because it was a time of danger and there were no other
seats available—they mortgaged their home to get the heck out of there!
But as Madregat HaAdam points out, in a way it really doesn’t matter why
someone is sitting in first class—the fact is they are in first class.
And so it doesn’t matter with Noah—say what you will about his generation,
he was the only one riding in first class.
The way to ride in first class is to have faith in God, AND faith in
yourself. May we all aspire to achieve the perfect balance of faith in
ourselves—which will lead us to work hard to change and improve ourselves,
and to work hard to make the world a better place through helping others,
as we won’t rely on God to do it—and faith in God which will bring us an
inner peace attainable in no other way.
Amen.
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