Parshat Noach

Rebecca L - October 16, 2026

This Torah portion is such a doozy - we've got the story of Noah and the flood, the story of Noah cursing Ham's son Canaan for Ham seeing him naked, and the Tower of Babel, and then ending with the genealogy of Noah's descendants all the way up to Abram and Sarai, who get name dropped at the end in a very "junior Senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy" way. From an informal poll of my coworkers it seems like Ham is the story that people are least familiar with, so I am going to summarize it very briefly because I am not planning on focusing on it much. Essentially after the flood is over, Noah plants a vineyard and gets drunk, and his youngest son Ham comes in and sees him naked and goes to tell his brothers, who walk in backwards and cover Noah's nakedness without being weird about it. For this crime, Noah curses not Ham himself but his son Canaan and all his descendants to always be a slave to his brothers. Two major points about this story:

1. Talmudic commentators have long felt that Canaan's punishment is far harsher than the crime as it appears. Some have tried to suggest that the crime is more intense, or figure out what this means in a metaphorical context, but if you feel like that punishment is overkill you're not alone.
2. While this does not appear in the Torah directly, some commentators throughout the centuries have decided that Ham's curse is to have dark or black skin, and that this passage justifies the enslavement of Africans aka the descendants of Ham to white people aka the descendants of Noah's older siblings. Frankly I don't have a lot other to say about this other than it's obviously evil and racist and I don't know if there's much more to discuss, but it felt important since this is most often the context that you hear people mentioning this passage.

Trying to have an original take on the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel kind of felt like trying to do an original retelling of a Shakespeare play, and since these sections are so iconic a lot of my initial questions had actually been discussed before. So I wanted to take you all through my experience with this text, as questions yielded answers which yielded more questions.

As someone who cares a lot about the environment, and is interested in human conceptions of our relationship with nature, I was surprised how much these ideas came up in the passage about the Flood. Specifically, after the Flood G-d sets out a new series of relations between humans and animals:

The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the animals of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky—everything with which the earth is astir—and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand. Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these.

So this was my first question: why, after the Flood, are humans allowed to eat animals for the very first time? Before then, even though Adam was made Lord of all the animals, it was only the grains of the Earth that were given to us as food. And the idea of the animals fearing us is also new. So what gives? I was going to try and poll the congregation for answers, but it turns out the Talmudic scholars have already come to a strong answer on this one. Rav Hirsch summarizes:

With the altered conditions of life, mankind also received fresh kind of food.....Before the Flood, as has already been remarked, according to the teachings of our sages, and in accordance with geological assumptions, the temperature was much more constant and vegetation more luxurious, so that vegetarian food was always available in sufficient quantity and there was no necessity for a meat diet.

Okay, that makes sense. Except wait, no it doesn't, because are the sages saying that the world before the Flood was actually better, from a natural perspective? That the world we live in now is somehow degraded? Turns out the answer is yes, a lot of Talmudic scholars make this assumption. In fact it is because we now were eating inferior postdiluvian vegetables that the life span of humans is currently so reduced from the eight or nine hundred years of age that people regularly reached in the early Torah. Sforno actually takes it further, stating that before the Flood, the Sun's orbit around the Earth (walk with me here) was a circle, meaning that the Earth was in a perpetual state of spring, and after the Flood G-d changed the shape of the Sun's orbit to an ellipse which is what gave us the seasons. This is honestly closer to reality than I feel like I could have gotten from just kind of figuring. But to me, this raised another, more pressing question. What was the point of doing a Flood at all? How was it supposed to make humankind better if now we lived on a shittier planet?

And wait, did the Flood even make us better? If the antediluvian world could produce a righteous man like Noah, we know righteousness is not necessarily a heritable trait. During the apocalyptic transformation of the physical Earth during the Flood, nothing within the hearts or minds of humans was changed. So why would the humans of after the Flood be any morally better? In fact we know they're not, because one thing we can glean from the Ham story is that lawlessness and sin have not been eliminated from the human population. If you had a dog that was always biting people, you wouldn't try to fix the situation by just bulldozing your apartment and moving back into the new place with the same dog, would you?

G-d's initial justification for the Flood is essentially that humanity has become too lawless - what this means has been debated but most scholars agree it includes at least a certain amount of robbery. But interestingly, when the Flood is over, G-d doesn't necessarily state that this is over. After the Flood, it remarks to itself: (side note, trying it/its pronouns for G-d here)

Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.

So it seems like actually G-d has just gotten more comfortable with the idea of humans being kind of evil, rather than eliminating the trait. What? So you killed almost every living being on Earth just to be like "eh it's okay, I've made my peace with you guys being a little evil." Did having that realization really require killing basically all life on Earth?

In my initial study of the vegetarianism thing, I found myself going back and forth between the Flood story and the original creation story a lot, and noticing some interesting parallels. Turns out I am not the only one: many Torah commentators have noted recurring ideas and images between these two events. There is the opening up of the skies and the seas to let water pour forth, which kind of undoes the third day of creation, the one where G-d makes land. It even, in a way, undoes the second day of creation, where G-d separates the water of the sky from the water of the Earth. After the Flood G-d promises to Noah and his family that the natural rhythm of day and night will never again cease. Most scholars agree this implies that during the Flood, the Earth ceased to have day and night, as in periods of light and darkness, even though the Earth still experienced chunks of measurable time called days, which undoes even the first day when G-d separated the darkness from the light and creates morning and evening. There is also, of course, the parallel of G-d making humans the lord of the animals in Eden, and G-d making all the animals fear humans/giving us the ability to eat them after the Flood. This evidence points to the idea that from G-d's perspective, doing the Flood may have been a literal attempt at a do-over of creation, and this time it would be more prepared for what came after. In the Eden story, G-d seems kind of surprised that humans ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and suggests exiling them from Eden afterwards because it is also afraid they will eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal. It has a very sweaty, just one step ahead of the problem vibe to it. But this time, when the water clears and the natural order of the world is reestablished, G-d already knows that humans have the capacity for evil, and will be more ready to incorporate this into its judgement going forward. An interesting parallel emerges here: after Adam eats the fruit, his relation to his natural environment, aka his fate to be a tiller of the soil, is part of a curse, but after the Flood the gift of omnivory is given to humans as part of a blessing. How does this relate to G-d's getting comfortable with the idea that its children can be kind of nasty? I'm not sure, let me know during the discussion if you have any ideas.

But all this has been a leadup for me to come back to my initial point of interest: human relations with nature in Judaism. Many scholars point to this week's parsha as the end of what they call the "Primeval History" in the Torah. Before the Flood most of the places mentioned in the text have no real-world correspondents, and are not mentioned again. It is a world where angels come down to breed with human women, where there are mythic heroes. The postdiluvian world is the world we live in, in a much more literal sense. As we get the lineage of Noah's sons leading up to Abraham, their descendants come to occupy places readers are familiar with - Babylon, Nineveh, Gaza.

So the idea of there being kind of two creation stories in the Torah really works for me, because one is the creation of the world, and the other is the creation of our world.

But this brings me to my second question: if we take as a given that the Flood isn't real and these stories were written by humans, why is it so popular to imagine ourselves as living in a slightly less fantastical, slightly degraded post-apocalyptic world? Or to think of our world as the "normal" world compared to a mythical before time? Especially when you consider the prevalence of Flood narratives in so many different world religions and cultures. You can feel free to discuss that one too.

In an episode of The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell's TV show that I'm pretty sure I watched in a high school philosophy class, I'm pretty sure that Campbell says that Eve eating the fruit is not, as is often interpreted, the introduction of sin into the world, but the introduction of the idea of duality. If Joseph Campbell didn't say that, then it's my idea and I am very smart. But the fruit is described literally in the text as the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, not just knowledge of evil. It is awareness of opposites, of opposing ideas, that gets Adam and Eve evicted from the Garden. Side note, technically I think this would be a legal eviction because they do violate the no eating apples clause in their lease. But if this duality thing is the case, then I would like to propose the interpretation that the second creation story, aka the Flood, functions like this too - after Noah emerges G-d gives us a new set of dual opposites that now exist in the natural world:

So long as the earth endures, Seedtime and harvest, Cold and heat, Summer and winter, Day and night Shall not cease.

If we agree with Rav Hirsch that "it is certain that our sages did not believe that there was any change of seasons in the period before the Flood," then this is not merely a promise to not interrupt the normal rhythms of the earth with a flood again, but actually the moment where these seasonal rhythms come into being. While living in a perpetual period of spring I'm sure is nice, in the same way that having no knowledge of good or evil is nice, it is these pairs of opposites that create the rhythms of mortal life. This is the closest I feel I've gotten to a direct relationship between Jewish spirituality and nature - G-d is the creator of the Earth but also the creator of the differences in nature that give the passage of time texture and meaning. Just as we (humankind) wouldn't be us without knowledge of good and evil, this wouldn't be our world without the changes in the seasons as we know them. Except if you live in California I guess, honestly I'm not sure how to factor that in here. And much like Adam and Eve leaving the Garden, this development of seasons may be a fall from perfection, but the existence of opposites and change brings more knowledge and more meaning into our lives. So that's something nice to think about as we all watch the leaves change color and fall off the trees in preparation for winter once we leave here. If you, like me, want to look at nature and feel something that has a relationship to the divine, then we can look at the leaves and think to ourselves ah, there goes my beautiful complicated postdiluvian world, in fragile balance of suspension between a series of opposites, just like my weird human soul. I wouldn't have it any other way.

So to recap the questions I've proposed so far:

• How does humans' increasingly hierarchical relationship to the food we eat relate to G-d's acceptance of us as morally flawed beings?
• Why is it so popular for people and civilizations to imagine themselves in a slightly worse post-Flood Earth? What does it do for us physiologically, socially, or however else to imagine our world this way?
• In terms of the "why" of the Flood, while I do find the two creation stories answer satisfactorily both from Hashem's perspective and also that it resolves on a thematic level, that doesn't have much to do with what humans were supposed to take away from experiencing it. Without the divine perspective, which we explicitly do not get - Hashem specifically remarks to itself that humans are evil in their youth and doesn't say it out loud to Noah - how are we as humans supposed to interpret a Flood that happened to end lawlessness on Earth when we are clearly living in a world that still has lawlessness in it?
• And of course, the elephant in the room. How can we incorporate knowledge of climate change into this whole system, where the Earth is in many ways not enduring and there have been major disruptions to our ideas of seasonal rhythm and change? And more literal floods as well?

My concluding thoughts are that I felt a lot of pressure on me to say something smart here, because Parsha Noach was actually the passage I had for my Bat Mitzvah. It feels really cool and full circle to be able to discuss this passage again as the person I am now, with a much more developed sense of self and political consciousness. So thank you to everyone present for your thoughts and thank you to all of the organizers for making TBRS a really special community that I'm so happy to be a part of. That's all!