This week, the second week of our annual Torah cycle, we read the story of Noah and the ark – arguably the best known story in Torah. Images of giraffes poking their heads out of portholes grace many children’s books and pieces of Judaic art. If on Jeopardy, in Bible stories for $300, you got the clue “40 days and 40 nights,” you would know just what the question is.
But the Noah story is much bigger than a child’s tale about building a ship and walking animals up a gangplank. It is a troubling story, begging many age-old questions about Divine justice and intent. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, how did God not foresee the human misdeeds that would then drive God to want to hit the reset button?
If we bracket those theological problems, we are left with a harrowing story about global catastrophe. Just six short chapters after the Creation, and the Creation is undone. The story has received well-deserved attention as an allegory of climate collapse, of calamity brought about by human misdeed – a cautionary tale that we have recited for thousands of years without it actually making us any more cautious.
This week Noah received a reconsideration in a beautiful drash by Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman, distributed by Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s Shalom Center, which mobilizes Jewish action to protect the environment. Rabbi Friedman contrasts Noah with Abraham. When God, later in Genesis, tells Abraham that Sodom and Gommorah are to be destroyed because of the wickedness of the people, Abraham resists. He speaks up and challenges. “Well, what if there are 50 righteous people – will You still destroy the cities?” “No,” says God. And Abraham bargains the number down to 10. “If there are 10 righteous people, will You destroy the cities?” “No,” says God. “The cities will be saved.” Alas, there were not even 10 righteous, and the cities were destroyed; nonetheless Abraham acted to try to stop it. Noah, on the other hand, is told that the entire human and animal population of the world is to be destroyed, and he doesn’t open his mouth to object.
Rabbi Friedman tells us that our tradition calls us to be Abraham, not Noah. We must speak out, act, put our words and money and bodies on the line. We don’t know if we will succeed; the destruction could come anyway. But still we must try with everything we have.
So I encourage you to read Rabbi Friedman’s words in their entirety, as well as the words of Rabbi David Seidenberg who reminds us that the rainbow covenant that God makes at the end of the story is not just with humanity but with all living things, a detail we often overlook in our placing human experience at the center of it all.
I would now like to move our attention off of the problem of Noah and evil and climate and onto what grabbed me this time around, and that is the Sea itself. Because in a way, the Sea is the main character of this story. It isn’t a story about rain, but about containment of the Sea. Yes, it rains for you-know-how-long. But it isn’t the rain alone that causes the flood. Torah tells us that the gates of the heaven broke open but also niv’k’u kol ma’yonot t’hom – the springs of the Deep split open. T’hom – the Deep. The same Semitic word from which we get the name of the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat. T’hom is the deep water that we first hear about in the 2nd sentence of Torah: “The world was void and without form and there was darkness on the face of t’hom, the Deep.”
The Deep. This endless ocean already exists before Creation even starts, and Torah doesn’t explain how it got there. It is primordial, powerful; it rivals God for primacy. This is the water of the Flood. Forty days of rain are nasty, but the destruction comes from the unchaining of the previously subdued Deep. It is the pre-Creation order coming to reclaim its place.
The power of the Sea comes back again and again in our texts. Besides Creation and Flood, it stands as barrier to the Children of Israel in their flight from slavery, and God is required to cleave it in half, as is done 40 years later, with a bit less spectacle, in the crossing of the Jordan River. The raging Sea chases a defiant Jonah until he is thrown overboard, where he is swallowed by a fish and sings sacred songs from within its belly. In the Book of Psalms, God’s primordial conquest of the Sea is hinted at, and we learn that the great sea monsters, the leviathans, are now God’s personal pets.
These tales resonate because this is how we experience the Sea: huge and frightening, fascinating and terrifying. We know it is the deep water more than the dry land that characterizes planet Earth. The Sea is vast and mostly unknown. Life emerged from it, yet we cannot survive in it, despite our bodies being essentially Ocean in to-go bags. The Ocean is the most powerful force in our experience of the world, and yet most of us in this Zoom room choose to live within 20 minutes of it. And somehow we find that calming.
Because there is also something so inviting and calming about being on or at or near the Sea. We humans – we like our maps and our milestones, and so being in the middle of endless Ocean is deeply disorienting, until we surrender to it. And then it both exhilarates and calms us. Helpless in whatever tiny vessel we are in – and all vessels are tiny compared to the Ocean’s dimensions – some kind of deep peace surfaces and primal faith is awakened even in the most skeptical of us. Please God, let me arrive safely at the far shore. Or, Oh my God, this is so beautiful. Or maybe the simple faith of in-breath and out-breath, the slow and steady appreciation of oxygen, whose passage in and out of our lungs sounds uncannily like the Divine Name.
Being on the Ocean, in the surrender, in the wonder, in the gentle breath, is a kind of shmitah. It has nothing to do with farming. But everything to do with letting go.
And while our bodies are something like 75,000 cubic centimeters of saltwater, our minds, our spirits, are Oceans. It is comforting to be contained in these familiar bodies. But there is something in us that wants to be vast. This is, I think, why we live here, why we go to the Ocean when our spirits are low, why we dream of being on or in the Ocean. We want to recapture the sense of endlessness that our souls once knew.
You all know that I am not an outdoorsy person, nor am I much of a swimmer. But I have spent time at Sea. In my Kinsey Sicks days, we would frequently perform on cruises. Sometimes 2 or 3 cruises a year, each one for a week or 10 days. And while the other Kinseys would find people to hang out with, my favorite thing to do was to climb to the crow’s nest – not an actual one usually, but a library or something called the crow’s nest – which would be the highest vantage point a passenger could achieve. And I would just look at the endless water, so close in color to the sky that you sometimes couldn’t tell if you were floating upright or hanging upside down from the heavens.
On these voyages I would always have with me a tiny book of poems from Yehudah HaLevi, the Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet, born almost 1000 years ago. In his 60s he undertook to sail to the Holy Land. He wrote all about this Sea voyage: the glory and the wonder and the fear and the nausea too. This book, which I’d found I don’t know when or where, was made up of English Gabriel Levin translations of HaLevi’s Sea-voyage poems, the last words he wrote. I would read them aloud in the crow’s nest.
This week, thinking about Noah and family floating on an endless Ocean, filled with grief and fear and probably wonder as well, I revisited these poems and at last hunted down the Hebrew originals, and saw for the first time how juicy they were. Full of rhythm and rhyme, with frequent internal rhyme and clever biblical references. But these poems are not just clever and catchy. They capture the longing to to reach a destination and the longing to be infinite. They express the hope and faith that the Divine would subdue the Sea one more time and allow the poet to arrive at a place he considered holy.
וְלֵב הַיָּם יְכַחֵשׁ בָּאֳנִיָּה
כְּאִלּוּ הִיא בְּיַד הַיָּם גְּנֵבָה
וְיָם יִזְעַף וְנַפְשִׁי תַעֲלֹז, כִּי
אֱלֵי מִקְדַּשׁ אֱלֹהֶיהָ קְרֵבָה.
Drenched in spray, the ship’s
snatched by the hands of the thieving sea.
Waters rage but I stand firm,
my spirits raised, God,
drawing near to your sanctuary.
And so tonight we will honor the journey on the Sea. With the poetry of Yehudah HaLevi. We will imagine it and remember how we as bodies feel on and near it. Also also we will remember the vast oceanic Soul within us, the tehom, the Deep, that is our inheritance. What does the ocean in us feel like? What life is evolving in it? What is on the other shore, if there even is one? What is the joy of being afloat atop it; of being submerged within it; of simply being it? We look inward; we smell salt spray; we see the Sea.
All images by Irwin Keller.
To read the “On the Sea” poems in Hebrew, go to https://benyehuda.org/author/161 and see the section called “Al Hayam” – על הים. The thin volume of Gabriel Levin’s translations of the “On the Sea” poems is out of print, but they are included in this larger volume, Poems from the Diwan (https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Diwan-Poetica-Yehuda-Halevi/dp/0856463337).
I’ve also been moved of late by the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (click here) and from a conversation with artist Jody Iselin (click here).