What the Flood Did for the World
by R. Gidon Rothstein
Parshat Noach, Top Five
The Internally Expansive Ark
When Hashem tells Noach to take two of all the living species in the ark, 6;19, Ramban is aware of how impossible it would have been to fit all of them into even this very large structure. Chullin 63b tells us, for example, there are 120 subspecies of ayah, a nonkosher bird, in the east, let alone all the other types of birds. There are also huge animals, like elephants, and numerous varieties of vermin. Ten arks, even of that size, wouldn’t be enough, Ramban is sure.
It was a miracle, he says, the ark expanded (internally; he implies it was a sort of science fiction kind of space, where it looked a certain size from the outside, but had much more room inside).
If so, why not let Noach build a smaller ark? Two reasons: first, the point was to draw attention, with the hope people would be stimulated to repent as they watched this very long process. It also reduced the level of miracle in the events (since it was huge), and that’s how miracles work—people do as much as they can, Hashem takes the rest.
That’s neither rationalist, which seeks natural explanations to the extent possible, nor supernaturalist, which emphasizes the miraculous (Ramban does think everything is a miracle, in the sense that Hashem always infuses the world with His support and energy, as it were, is always “running” the world; with that said, there’s an ordinary pattern to the world, and what violates it we call miraculous). It’s our world, to do our best; when our best doesn’t get us where Hashem wants, miracles happen.
The Educational Flood
When the inhabitants exit the Ark, 8;19 says the romeis, the crawling bugs, left le-mishpehoteihem, in their families. R. Yohanan, Sanhedrin 108b, says “and not them.” To explain, Meshech Chochmah starts with the idea Gd could have flooded existence in much less than twelve months. The experience was unnatural anyway, including inside the Ark, where Gd kept Noah and the animals alive, despite air usually becoming unbreathable after so long, he says. Freed of the need to work within ordinary nature, Gd could have done it instantly.
Hashem instead took twelve months, to retrain the people and animals on the Ark. Before the Flood, animals as well as people had become accustomed to chamas and sexual perversion; to change their outlook took a year, where they learned to be satisfied with their lot, rather than grab from others. The animals relearned their need to submit to humans, who run the world, and people reabsorbed the prohibition of arayot, sexual improprieties (as Bereshit Rabbah Va-Yishlach 80;6 says).
To ingrain the momentary, convert it to second nature takes time (Meshech Chochmah writes teva sheni, literally second nature, a phrase that comes from secundum naturam, which actually means “according to nature.” Who knew?). Le-mishpehoteihem, their families, signals how they had changed, means they now knew to mate only with their own kind, were no longer their original selves.
He closes with an important idea, living creatures are defined by their nature and character. Having changed their ways, they were no longer themselves.
The Flood punished, destroyed, and also educated, according to Meshech Chochmah. People and animals, turned them into other than they were when they entered, more ready for success.
Our Saving Weakness
After the Flood, Noach builds an altar and offers sacrifices, from each of the kinds of kosher animals on the Ark. Hashem smells the sweet aroma, we learn in 8;21, decides to no longer curse the earth or punish all life because of humans.
The justification catches Or HaChayim’s attention. Hashem says man’s inclinations are evil from his childhood, reminding Or Hachayim of Bava Kamma 39a, an ox trained to attack a human in the arena is not liable if it gores a person elsewhere (it’s not the ox’s fault, he was taught to do that). Here, too, people are born with the urge to run amok before they learn to choose right and reject evil. The urges they must conquer thus have a prior place in their training, and therefore they cannot be fully blamed for their misdeeds, like the stadium ox.
He hastens to add that Hashem only removed the threat of global destruction, Hashem will still punish disobedience, an aspect not found in the ox. Humans have the ability to choose well; our childhood proclivities mitigate the evil we commit, not excuse it.
An elegant presentation of the challenge of being human: we are born ready to do wrong, have to learn how to do right, and therefore gravitate towards what feels more natural. We are equipped to overcome ourselves in the name of right, especially when God commanded us, an awareness that should help tip the scales to observance.
When we fail, Hashem puts it into the entire proper context, the headstart our evil inclination got over our leaning to good.
Justice, Not Vigilantism
After the Flood, Hashem makes rules for the emerging humans as they recreate society. A prominent one prescribes capital punishment for murder, verse 9;6 saying anyone who spills a human’s blood, ba-adam damo yishafech, his blood shall be spilled by humans. Onkelos adds (I think because the verse says ba-adam, by people, although it doesn’t obviously mean what he is about to say) be-sahadin al memar dayanaya, with witnesses, according to the word of judges.
He seems to have worried readers would take it to allow vigilante justice. In correcting the possible error, he does not clarify whether courts are necessary to be sure the culprit did it or because only courts represent society in punishing murderers. I suspect the latter. If the Torah tells us we can kill murderers, we would know on our own we have to be sure they were actually murderers. To me, Onkelos is saying Hashem granted only courts, with proper procedure, the right to represent society and punish murderers.
Abraham Leaving His Father, Alive or Not
Bereshit 11;32 tells us Terach died in Charan. Rashi points out this doesn’t belong where it is said, since Avraham (then known as Avram) had left sixty years before. Without reviewing his proof of the chronology, the question is why Scripture moved Terach’s death forward. He says it is to blur this sequence of events, to avoid people saying Avram did not honor his father, abandoned the old man. Nor was it a lie, Rashi says, the verse could accurately say he was dead, given the Talmudic idea that evildoers are called dead during their lifetimes, while the righteous are called alive even after death.
[Note how Rashi wants to find a way this isn’t a lie written here, even though he is also comfortable, in other places, saying the Torah writes out of order.]
In his view, Scripture sometimes hides truths people will not accept. Justifying Avraham’s apparently neglectful treatment of his father was too complicated or likely to fail; instead the Torah misled readers about the timing of Terach’s death.
Second, he throws in the idea that being “alive” doesn’t always refer to a physical state. We focus on breath and a heartbeat, but life encompasses more than the physical.
Five comments about the Flood and what came after, the world it created. Through an ark that managed to contain more than it physically could, where the year of the Flood reset the natures of all living creatures, with a continued understanding of human weakness, weakness that might need a court response. With an outlier Rashi on a different topic, how the Torah doesn’t want cynics to be able to claim Avraham left his aged father to his own devices.
The rest of what we have seen:
Onkelos, Bereshit, 6;9
Ramban, Bereshit 6;9
Meshech Chochmah Bereshit 6;9
Kli Yakar Bereshit 6;9-12
Rashi, Bereshit, 6;11
Onkelos, Bereshit, 6;12 and 13
Chatam Sofer, Bereshit 6;20
Ramban, Bereshit 7;7
Rashi, Bereshit, 7;12
Ha’amek Davar 8;7
Ramban, Bereshit 8;11
Onkelos, Bereshit, 8;20 and 21
R. David Zvi Hoffmann, Bereshit, 8;20
by R. Gidon Rothstein
Parshat Noach, Top Five
The Internally Expansive Ark
When Hashem tells Noach to take two of all the living species in the ark, 6;19, Ramban is aware of how impossible it would have been to fit all of them into even this very large structure. Chullin 63b tells us, for example, there are 120 subspecies of ayah, a nonkosher bird, in the east, let alone all the other types of birds. There are also huge animals, like elephants, and numerous varieties of vermin. Ten arks, even of that size, wouldn’t be enough, Ramban is sure.
It was a miracle, he says, the ark expanded (internally; he implies it was a sort of science fiction kind of space, where it looked a certain size from the outside, but had much more room inside).
If so, why not let Noach build a smaller ark? Two reasons: first, the point was to draw attention, with the hope people would be stimulated to repent as they watched this very long process. It also reduced the level of miracle in the events (since it was huge), and that’s how miracles work—people do as much as they can, Hashem takes the rest.
That’s neither rationalist, which seeks natural explanations to the extent possible, nor supernaturalist, which emphasizes the miraculous (Ramban does think everything is a miracle, in the sense that Hashem always infuses the world with His support and energy, as it were, is always “running” the world; with that said, there’s an ordinary pattern to the world, and what violates it we call miraculous). It’s our world, to do our best; when our best doesn’t get us where Hashem wants, miracles happen.
The Educational Flood
When the inhabitants exit the Ark, 8;19 says the romeis, the crawling bugs, left le-mishpehoteihem, in their families. R. Yohanan, Sanhedrin 108b, says “and not them.” To explain, Meshech Chochmah starts with the idea Gd could have flooded existence in much less than twelve months. The experience was unnatural anyway, including inside the Ark, where Gd kept Noah and the animals alive, despite air usually becoming unbreathable after so long, he says. Freed of the need to work within ordinary nature, Gd could have done it instantly.
Hashem instead took twelve months, to retrain the people and animals on the Ark. Before the Flood, animals as well as people had become accustomed to chamas and sexual perversion; to change their outlook took a year, where they learned to be satisfied with their lot, rather than grab from others. The animals relearned their need to submit to humans, who run the world, and people reabsorbed the prohibition of arayot, sexual improprieties (as Bereshit Rabbah Va-Yishlach 80;6 says).
To ingrain the momentary, convert it to second nature takes time (Meshech Chochmah writes teva sheni, literally second nature, a phrase that comes from secundum naturam, which actually means “according to nature.” Who knew?). Le-mishpehoteihem, their families, signals how they had changed, means they now knew to mate only with their own kind, were no longer their original selves.
He closes with an important idea, living creatures are defined by their nature and character. Having changed their ways, they were no longer themselves.
The Flood punished, destroyed, and also educated, according to Meshech Chochmah. People and animals, turned them into other than they were when they entered, more ready for success.
Our Saving Weakness
After the Flood, Noach builds an altar and offers sacrifices, from each of the kinds of kosher animals on the Ark. Hashem smells the sweet aroma, we learn in 8;21, decides to no longer curse the earth or punish all life because of humans.
The justification catches Or HaChayim’s attention. Hashem says man’s inclinations are evil from his childhood, reminding Or Hachayim of Bava Kamma 39a, an ox trained to attack a human in the arena is not liable if it gores a person elsewhere (it’s not the ox’s fault, he was taught to do that). Here, too, people are born with the urge to run amok before they learn to choose right and reject evil. The urges they must conquer thus have a prior place in their training, and therefore they cannot be fully blamed for their misdeeds, like the stadium ox.
He hastens to add that Hashem only removed the threat of global destruction, Hashem will still punish disobedience, an aspect not found in the ox. Humans have the ability to choose well; our childhood proclivities mitigate the evil we commit, not excuse it.
An elegant presentation of the challenge of being human: we are born ready to do wrong, have to learn how to do right, and therefore gravitate towards what feels more natural. We are equipped to overcome ourselves in the name of right, especially when God commanded us, an awareness that should help tip the scales to observance.
When we fail, Hashem puts it into the entire proper context, the headstart our evil inclination got over our leaning to good.
Justice, Not Vigilantism
After the Flood, Hashem makes rules for the emerging humans as they recreate society. A prominent one prescribes capital punishment for murder, verse 9;6 saying anyone who spills a human’s blood, ba-adam damo yishafech, his blood shall be spilled by humans. Onkelos adds (I think because the verse says ba-adam, by people, although it doesn’t obviously mean what he is about to say) be-sahadin al memar dayanaya, with witnesses, according to the word of judges.
He seems to have worried readers would take it to allow vigilante justice. In correcting the possible error, he does not clarify whether courts are necessary to be sure the culprit did it or because only courts represent society in punishing murderers. I suspect the latter. If the Torah tells us we can kill murderers, we would know on our own we have to be sure they were actually murderers. To me, Onkelos is saying Hashem granted only courts, with proper procedure, the right to represent society and punish murderers.
Abraham Leaving His Father, Alive or Not
Bereshit 11;32 tells us Terach died in Charan. Rashi points out this doesn’t belong where it is said, since Avraham (then known as Avram) had left sixty years before. Without reviewing his proof of the chronology, the question is why Scripture moved Terach’s death forward. He says it is to blur this sequence of events, to avoid people saying Avram did not honor his father, abandoned the old man. Nor was it a lie, Rashi says, the verse could accurately say he was dead, given the Talmudic idea that evildoers are called dead during their lifetimes, while the righteous are called alive even after death.
[Note how Rashi wants to find a way this isn’t a lie written here, even though he is also comfortable, in other places, saying the Torah writes out of order.]
In his view, Scripture sometimes hides truths people will not accept. Justifying Avraham’s apparently neglectful treatment of his father was too complicated or likely to fail; instead the Torah misled readers about the timing of Terach’s death.
Second, he throws in the idea that being “alive” doesn’t always refer to a physical state. We focus on breath and a heartbeat, but life encompasses more than the physical.
Five comments about the Flood and what came after, the world it created. Through an ark that managed to contain more than it physically could, where the year of the Flood reset the natures of all living creatures, with a continued understanding of human weakness, weakness that might need a court response. With an outlier Rashi on a different topic, how the Torah doesn’t want cynics to be able to claim Avraham left his aged father to his own devices.
The rest of what we have seen:
Onkelos, Bereshit, 6;9
Ramban, Bereshit 6;9
Meshech Chochmah Bereshit 6;9
Kli Yakar Bereshit 6;9-12
Rashi, Bereshit, 6;11
Onkelos, Bereshit, 6;12 and 13
Chatam Sofer, Bereshit 6;20
Ramban, Bereshit 7;7
Rashi, Bereshit, 7;12
Ha’amek Davar 8;7
Ramban, Bereshit 8;11
Onkelos, Bereshit, 8;20 and 21
R. David Zvi Hoffmann, Bereshit, 8;20
Sforno, Bereshit 9;5
Malbim, Bereshit 9;5
Meshech Chochmah, Bereshit 9;6
Onkelos, Bereshit, 9;13, 16, and 17
R. Hirsch, Bereshit 10;5Ramban Bereshit 10;9
Rashi, Bereshit 11;1
Ibn Ezra, Bereshit, 11;1.
Ha-Ketav ve-Ha-Kabbalah Bereshit 11;4
Rashi, Bereshit 11;5
Onkelos, Bereshit 11;5, 11;8
Sforno, Bereshit 9;5
Malbim, Bereshit 9;5
Meshech Chochmah, Bereshit 9;6
Onkelos, Bereshit, 9;13, 16, and 17
R. Hirsch, Bereshit 10;5Ramban Bereshit 10;9
Rashi, Bereshit 11;1
Ibn Ezra, Bereshit, 11;1.
Ha-Ketav ve-Ha-Kabbalah Bereshit 11;4
Rashi, Bereshit 11;5
Onkelos, Bereshit 11;5, 11;8