Noah
and the limits of righteousness
This is the second installment of our new series called “Soul Sketches,” in which we will meet Noah, the tenth generation descendant of Adam, and the only man in history (so far) who could put on his resume that he single-handedly saved humanity from extinction, together with all species of insect, bird and land animal.
Noah is called by the Torah "perfectly righteous in his generation,” meaning, he had the moral backbone to live a righteous life even though no one else even had the faint ambition to do so. He stood upright in the face of the hurricane force winds of a society that had lost any redeeming qualities.
Noah is one of the few people whom the Torah singles out as “having found grace (חן) in God’s eyes,” which is unequivocally a wonderful thing. Grace comes from seeing another person make great efforts, stretching themselves to their limits, even before they’ve reached their goals. It’s what you feel for a child as you watch him stubbornly learn to walk, even as he keeps falling.
Noah no doubt did this. No one can say he didn’t work hard.
He is described as having “walked with God,” which is understood to mean that he did everything he was told by God to do. God would reveal His will, and Noah would respond without hesitation. Noah walked in lockstep with God’s steps. There is no bigger illustration of this than his spending over a century building a massive ship, precisely as he had been instructed to. He then proceeded to gather every species of animal in existence onto it, despite the cartoonish absurdity of the task. Most mind-boggling of all, for over a year, around the clock, he saw to the needs of those innumerable creatures stuck on that giant floating crate, in what could only be described as a living hell.
And as soon as he emerged from the ark, having ostensibly accomplished his mission, he brought sacrifices that atoned for the ills of humanity that had brought about the flood in the first place.
Yet despite all of these accolades, he is framed by the Torah as a failure.
Although Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were direct descendants of him, Noah is emphatically NOT considered one of our forefathers.
Moreover, Jewish tradition generally sees Noah as a foil to better appreciate later figures like Abraham and Moses — not as a paradigm to be followed in and of himself.
The question is clear: how can “perfectly righteous” not be enough?!
What are we supposed to make of Noah? Is he a role-model to follow, or not??
An irony is found in Noah’s name, which in Hebrew is Noach-נח, like the word “Menucha-מנוחה,” which means rest and relief. It’s ironic because Noach seems to never stop moving with productive activity.
His father Lemech named him “Noach” because of a vision he had when Noach was born that he would grow up to "bring [much needed] relief (ינחמנו) [to the world] from [their] work — from the stress of [their] hands due the earth that God had cursed."
What was the stress that plagued the world?
The stress of work.
The Earth had been cursed due to the sin of Adam, making farming a long, grueling process. Lemech foresaw what eventually came to happen: Noah spent his youth as a social entrepreneur working to find technological solutions to the challenges of the increased demands of work. It was Noah, according to this tradition, who developed the agricultural tools that allowed people to get the same work done in much less time. Naively, he worked under the assumption that with less time and energy needed to develop the land (Adama-אדמה), more time and energy would be available to develop their humanity (Adam).1
His theory of change turned out to be false. With better technology to get their work done faster, people overwhelmingly did one of two things:
They now worked more since they could now produce more, or
They played more with more leisure time.
No one, it seems, used the newfound time and energy gained from technological advance to grow themselves, and help others around them grow as well.
This was a crushing disappointment to Noah.
He lost faith in people’s willingness to change, and lost faith in himself and his ability to inspire change.
This loss of faith humanity became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is why Noah “missed the boat” on what Hashem actually wanted from him when he asked him to build a boat. Hashem naturally preferred to not wipe out 99.9% of humanity and start over. The massive ship Noah was told to build was merely meant to be a conversation piece to get people to change course. Noah, however, just plowed ahead. He did what he was told to do. He “walked with God,” but didn’t “walk in front of God.” Meaning, he didn’t think ahead to what God actually wanted, a few steps beyond the words He was saying.
Noah “found grace in God’s eyes” for his willingness to get the job done, but failed to reach the goal because he couldn’t see the world with the idealism through which God’s saw the world.
It’s ironic and sad that Noah worked so hard with the goal of getting people to work less on their fields on more on themselves, only to discover the inexorable inertia of human behavior which just chugs along unthinkingly, and then respond by putting his own head down to work day-in-day-out to build a boat in a landlocked country without asking God if maybe there was a better solution to the problem He was wished to solve.
Noah’s nonstop work on the ark with the animals is even more emblematic of his life except, by this point, there was no turning back the clock. The world he could have saved with more perspective was no more.
This tragic realization at the end of centuries of labor appears to have completely crushed Noah’s optimism — the very outlook that would have been vital to revitalize humanity and the world at large.
Despite all the signs that the waters had dried up, and he could step out of the ark and restart, Noah didn’t budge. God had to explicitly commanded him to leave the ark. And when He did so, he told him that it is his responsibility to restart humanity by having more kids with his wife, which Noah simply couldn’t bring himself to do.
Noah was completely and utterly burned out.
Instead of planting wheat, a staple for building society, he planted a vineyard and got drunk — a shocking but not so shocking end for one of the hardest workers the world has ever seen.
Noah was righteous and “walked with God” even “in his generation” — despite and in spite of his generation.
He swam with all his soul his whole life against the current.
And burned out.
Ten generations later, a descendant of Noah’s, a man by the name of Abraham developed a different approach. Abraham “walked out in front of God,” worked hard and lived a very full life, but managed to die a happy, very much energized man.
God’s punishments are understood in Jewish thought to be corrective as opposed to punitive. Man (adam) was made to actualize his potential. Because he failed to appreciate the work needed to do so, and sinned as a result, God gave him more work to do in the physical earth (adama), which would serve as a visible, visceral metaphor for his own development as a person.