Noach
Weekly Wisdom - Noach
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman
This week is parashat Noach. Noach is described as a righteous man in his generation, someone who walked with the Divine.
But soon thereafter we encounter the Divine in a state of impulsivity and rage. The Divine is frustrated with the descent of humanity into violence, chaos, and lawlessness, and says to Noach: "You build an ark, bring your family inside with you, and bring two beings from every species with you. I am going to destroy all of earthly existence with a flood that will last 40 days and 40 nights."
When we sit to practice, we often encounter impulsivity, the quickness of the anger, the sharpness of it, the repetition of reactivity, circling andspiraling.
Sometimes there is intelligence here. The Divine was deeply grieved. Several chapters earlier in Torah, we're told multiple times in Parashat Bereshit that creation is good, and at the very end, hineh tov me'od - it is very good. And so soon after, humanity descends into chaos and disconnection.
Noach, for his part, doesn't reach out beyond his own circle. He fulfills the Divine's instructions but doesn't think about reaching out to others and supporting them.
This text gives us profound practice instruction for what happens inside and outside when we allow the feelings of disconnection, non-belonging, isolation, and separateness to take over the entire range of our experience.
May we learn from Noach what happens when we don't pause. May we learn to engage without judgment with what arises: allowing it to be here, recognizing its intelligence, but also allowing it to arise and pass as it will, and reminding ourselves and feeling into a sense of connection and interdependence with all that lives.
At the end of our parasha, the Divine recognizes the choice that was made and its consequence, and promises never to do it again, giving the rainbow as a siman, as a sign of that covenant.
When we find ourselves in places of disconnection, may we honor and include that in our experience – and remember that it is not all that is here. May that be fertile ground for our practice.
Shabbat shalom