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And God Remembered Noah with Love

Why was Noah instructed to build an Ark?

This seems like an obvious question but there is a profound dispute between Rashi and Ramban, our greatest medieval commentaries about precisely this question. 

After giving Noah exact instructions about the construction of the Ark, God shares what is in store for the world: 

וַאֲנִ֗י הִנְנִי֩ מֵבִ֨יא אֶת־הַמַּבּ֥וּל מַ֙יִם֙ עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לְשַׁחֵ֣ת כׇּל־בָּשָׂ֗ר אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ֙ ר֣וּחַ חַיִּ֔ים מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם כֹּ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־בָּאָ֖רֶץ יִגְוָֽע׃

For My part, I am about to bring the Flood—waters upon the earth—to destroy all flesh under the sky in which there is breath of life; everything on earth shall perish.

Rashi explains this moment as if God said to Noah: When I created human beings all those years ago, the angels told me it was a bad idea. I went ahead and created them anyway - but now I think they might have been right! 

God’s regret is so great that it causes God to reconsider the primordial debate with the angels about whether or not creating people would be a good idea. The flood comes, according to Rashi, as God reconsiders the entire human experiment. 

But if you think about it for a moment you will realize that this does not make sense as Ramban points out. If God had reconsidered the very existence of humanity, why would God have saved Noah and his family on the ark?

The book Yekev Efraim by Rabbi Yaakov Kopel Schwartz resolves the contradiction. Noah was saved in the ark as an individual because he was a righteous individual. But only later, when Noah, his family, and the animals floated across a flooded world, did God decide that humanity would survive and be given a fresh start. 

This means that all of us were on that boat with Noah. All of human history and all of our lives hung in the balance along with Noah and his family on the ark.  

And this moment when God remembers Noah with love, serves as the opening vignette for the Zichronot section of the Rosh Hashanah Mussaf prayers. 
 

וְגַם אֶת נֹֽחַ בְּאַהֲבָה זָכַֽרְתָּ

And Noah, too, You remembered with love. ..His remembrance thus rose before You, Lord our God, that his offspring be made abundant—like the dust of the earth, and his descendants as the sand of the sea. As it is written in Your Torah: “And God remembered Noah, and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the Ark, and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.

The medieval commentaries on the Machzor try to source this Divine love back into the Torah but there is truly no clear biblical precedent for this moment as it is depicted in our Machzor. In the context of our Rosh Hashanah liturgy, Divine remembrance “with love” places us with Noah on the ark as our very lives too hung in the balance of God’s decision to give humanity a second chance. This consciousness can shift how we understand the meaning of the Torah reading on Rosh Hashanah and uncover a powerful theme of this season. 

Originally, the Torah reading on Rosh Hashanah was similar to that of the other holidays. We read the relevant sections from Parashat Emor in Leviticus that describe Rosh Hashanah itself. It was only after generations that the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading over two days shifted to our current practice of reading consecutive chapters in Genesis that depict the birth of Yitzhak, the banishment of Yishmael, and the binding of Yitzhak.

Earlier this summer some of us studied some of the earliest midrashim that first connect Avraham to Rosh Hashanah. These midrashim assert that the binding of Yitzhak occurred on Rosh Hashanah and gradually the akedah, the binding itself, becomes a significant theme of Rosh Hashanah. 

Therefore when we read about the birth of Yitzhak on day one and the binding of Yitzhak on day two, Avraham as the “knight of faith” is the hero of Rosh Hashanah. And you do not have to flip through many pages of the machzor to find Avraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a motif of the poetry of the season. 

But, as Professor Uriel Simon, the late Professor of Hebrew Bible at Bar Ilan University noticed, there is one literary parallel after another between the expulsion of Yishmael to the desert and the binding of Yitzhak as a sacrifice in the following chapter of Genesis. Both children are given their names by God in response to how their mothers received the news of their impending birth.  Avraham is instructed by God to send both Yishmael and Yitzhak, seemingly, to certain death. Avraham complied with the Divine command despite his love for both children. Both children are saved at the very last minute through angelic intervention. The same words and phrases repeat in both stories time and again.

Professor Simon suggests that the parallel stories create a bond between the two eldest sons of Avraham which allows them to reconcile and bury their father together. But in the context of the Torah reading for the two days of Rosh Hashanah, the two nearly identical stories can allow us to shift our focus from Avraham’s heroism to Yishmael and Yitzhak’s vulnerability. 

Reading these two stories, one day after the other, recognizing that they are fundamentally the same story shifts our focus. Avraham is displaced, somewhat, as the hero of Rosh Hashanah; after all - if we were already spiritual carbon-copies of Avraham we wouldn’t need Rosh Hashanah. We are not meant to see ourselves as Avraham waking up early in the morning (VaYashkem Avraham BaBakokker) of the day he expects to lead his sons to their deaths, in both Bereishit chapter 21 and in Bereishit chapter 22.  We are meant to see ourselves as Yishmael and as Yitzhak: vulnerable, utterly bereft of anyone who can protect us, and dependent on God’s protection for our very lives.

We are meant to see ourselves as Noah in the ark.  God remembered Noah with love - which means that God decided that humanity would get a second chance. Noah and by implication each one of us, was adrift on a vast and endless expanse of water, waiting for a moment of Divine mercy that would make life possible.

Lenny Topp was my father’s closest childhood friend. They learned together at Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva on the Lower East Side while studying psychology together at City College uptown. After they completed their degrees - semicha, ordination, from the  yeshiva and a BA from City College, my father stayed in New York for graduate school and Lenny went to Worcester. Lenny remained an observant Orthodox Jew his entire life, whereas my father was no longer observant for many years by the time I was born. Lenny and his family hosted me for countless holidays during the years between the death of my father and my own marriage. He suffered a debilitating stroke shortly after my second year learning in yeshiva in Israel. I remember how much I regretted delaying calling him until it was too late  to tell him about some of the fascinating ideas and perspectives I had been exposed to that year. 

We spent Rosh Hashanah in Manhattan that year and we walked to Mt. Sinai Hospital to visit him.  I don’t know if he recognized me after the stroke. He was still able to sing nigunim with great fervor and great beauty, but his mental capacity never recovered. His wife said something to me at the hospital which I think about frequently. Upon learning about the very unusual and rare form of stroke or aneurism that had afflicted a very small and delicate and particular region of her husband’s brain, she said to us, “I don’t know how any of us are alive and walking about.” 

Everything is so precarious. The functioning of our bodies is so precarious. In the words of the Asher Yatzar blessing recited after using the toilet, we marvel at the ways that our ability to stand before God is dependent on the openings remaining open and the closed parts remaining closed. We are all like Yishmael. We are all like Yitzhak. We are all like Noah and his family on the ark. And, every other human being is also living a vulnerable and precarious existence and deserves and needs our compassion and forgiveness. 

On Rosh Hashanah we celebrate three stories with happy endings and hope that our own stories have happy endings as well. But we know that there is not always a happy ending. And, in fact, sooner or later, the same ending is ordained for each of us.

In numerous passages in his writing and over decades of his teaching, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik taught that an awareness of mortality is quite different from a morose focus on death. Just as fear of heaven, should relieve us from the fear of anything and everything else, “when one’s perspective is shifted from the illusion of eternity to the reality of temporality, one can find peace of mind and relief from other worries.”

We have a chance this day and this season to focus on what truly matters and what truly endures. On Sunday morning I visited the Ohev Sholom Cemetery with a few members of the congregation. They shared moving stories about their deceased friends and relatives buried there and I felt so honored to be a repository of their memories. Without exception, the stories that they remember and tell years later were stories of the kindness displayed by the deceased or their generosity, or the love they poured on their family and community. 

An awareness of our vulnerability and an honest grappling with our mortality, can give us the freedom to think about the enduring  impact we wish to have on our families and on our communities. And, of course, what is true for ourselves is true for others as well. The Torah’s language describing God’s recall of Noah and the animals on the ark is echoed in God’s final message to Yonah that we will hear on Yom Kippur afternoon. People and animals, not necessarily knowing how to act in the right way in sometimes confusing circumstances can arouse God’s loving recall, and should arouse our own forgiveness and mercy as well.

As we think about ourselves on Rosh Hashanah this year, we might know that things are not entirely OK. We can feel like Yishmael and we might feel like Yitzhak. But let’s try to do the best that we can, within the circumstances and conditions that we encounter. And, let’s do this together. We are, each and every one of us, quite literally, in the same boat.