Dear {{first_name}},
Disappointment and regret. Those are the feelings God expressed after only ten generations into the history of the world. God created the world with such great hope and faith that this world would be meaningful and beautiful. But all of creation turned out to be corrupted, violent and wrong. It was at this moment God decided that perhaps creation was not all that it was cracked up to be. At this moment, God looked down on creation and bemoaned how everything had “gone sideways”. In that moment of remorse, God saw a spark… Noah. The text described him as איש צדיק תמים היה בדרתיו את האלקים התהלך נח. A righteous and blameless man in his generation who walked with God was Noah. The world was pitiful and yet there was this spark that was Noah.
I would assume that in God’s arsenal there were many options to destroy the world: fire, earthquakes and so much more and yet God chose a massive flood. The question must be asked as to why. In addition to this question, there’s often an assertion made that God destroyed the first creation and started from scratch with a new one, but this is plain wrong. God didn’t start from scratch but rather restarted with the remnants of creation that survived the flood on the ark: Noah and his family and their floating zoo. For that reason, I would assert God didn’t destroy the world so much as purify it through a giant mikveh… the flood.
Unfortunately for us, evil has never been eradicated. We’ve never been able to live in a world of love and peace and joy without also living in a world with hate and war and violence. We seem fated to live in a world of these dualities and cannot have one without the other. Thankfully, the world isn’t primarily bad, and thankfully it’s primarily good, but we all recognize the bad is quite deadly and infringes on all we love and hold dear. In the Talmud we learn about a debate between Rabbi Meir and his wife, Beruriah, about some wicked people who lived around them. He prayed for them to die so they would not affect him anymore but Beruriah told him with their deaths sin would still exist. Instead, he should pray for the end of sins so sinners would no longer exist (Brachot 10a). This brilliant statement is something we still believe today, hate the sin and not the sinner, and it’s something we need to debate at length.
Today the evil in our world has been brought to the forefront once again in the group called Hamas. As so many have said “they are evil incarnate”. This group has no shame… no morals… and no redeeming qualities. They are morally depraved and will stop at nothing to destroy Jews and the Jewish State: Israel. One must ask if this is a time where perhaps the sin and the sinner are one and the same? Is it enough to end their sinning or do we need to end them all together? For those of us who still hold out hope that one day Israel can somehow remove itself from the Palestinian people through a negotiated settlement, we must first remove all of the evil and start over with people we can partner with in the future. Israel has been left with no choice but to eradicate Hamas now just as God eradicated Hamas (that is the word in this week’s Parsha, Hamas, which means evil) all those years ago.
When the flood concluded, we were treated to new-found hope through the dove and olive branch and the rainbow. The dove because after the long time the world was covered with water, dry land and life had indeed reemerged. The rainbow was God’s way of showing us a promise that the world would never be destroyed again through rain and floods. We must see there are indeed stormy days ahead of us filled with ugliness and hurt. The days ahead of us will be difficult and we’ll see things we don’t want to and we’ll mourn. But we must recognize when this is over, there will be a rainbow and there will be hope. There will be hope for a world that's been cleansed and purified of one of its ugliest and most hateful people, and from that cleansing, perhaps we will be able to finally find a new direction.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Hearshen
