(Delivered October 17, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

I have been writing divrei Torah for several years now but strangely, I have never written one on Noach before. Somehow, despite my immersion in Jewish life all this time, I was never scheduled to offer the sermon the week when Noach was read.

Imagine my surprise, then, as I set about finding a subject for writing, to discover just how dark it is. Like really dark. Despite the many beautifully-illustrated children’s books depicting Noah’s Ark, and the cutesy songs about the flood, this is really a parsha for mature audiences.

Let’s start with the part that Noach is most famous for: the flood. At the edge between Breishit and Noach, God looks at the state of humanity—the destruction and violence, the חָמָס—the lawlessless—of it all, and falls into a divine depression. Feeling profound regret at having created the world in the first place just one parsha back, God slips into a funk. Sad and hopeless, God decides that there is only one person who is even remotely worth saving, the namesake of our parsha.

So God speaks to Noach and tells him disaster is coming, instructing him on what to do to survive. Noach himself may be the most righteous of his generation, the best of a bad lot, but the truth is, in a different generation he probably wouldn’t be thought of as a paragon. He might not even be thought of at all. After all, when God intimates that things are about to get bad, Noach doesn’t think to try to save humanity. He’s got his own, he’s allowed to take his family with him and that’s it. That’s all he cares about.

And so, God’s sadness turns to violence and the world that was created from water just last week, to water it returns.

The flood comes: endless days of rain, the whole world drowning in its own sinfulness. Even after the rains slow, the land is soggy for much longer. All together, Noach and his family and the menagerie of animals are on the תֵּבָה—the ark—for over a year. Finally, they come out, and face the task of rebuilding and repopulating. So that’s Exhibit Alef in the darkness of Parshat Noach.

Exhibit Bet is what happens with these traumatized people in the aftermath of the flood. Months and months of isolation and uncertainty couldn’t not take a toll. Noach himself kind of falls apart. Having had more than enough of water, thank-you-very-much, he clings to the land, planting a vineyard and becoming a winemaker. But the trauma and survivor guilt catch up to him, and he struggles with alcohol and with sexual impropriety. When his immorality is discovered, it’s hard to discern who is the more correct—the descendants who protect his reputation, or the ones who allow the truth to be the truth. Were Noach’s vices better off swept under the carpet, as Shem and Yefet delicately tried to do, covering him tactfully with a blanket when he was found drunk and naked in his tent? Or were Cham and Canaan right to point out his failures?

The news these past weeks has forced us to reckon with the question of what happens when the wrong person‘s dignity is protected. The story of Jane Doe and what happened to her at Cornell is tragically not unique; indeed it’s only the latest such offense to come to light. And all the cosmetic changes to Cornell’s policy regarding fraternities won’t get at the cultural forces that allow certain kinds of people to do horrible things while the suffering and the soul-searching fall to the victims rather than the perpetrators. The fact that this event is not sparking a moment of painful reckoning on the part of men is hard to fathom; then again, the question of who is deserving of dignity is apparently as old as the Bible.

And then there’s the matter of the preview of some of the seven tribes that the Israelites will conquer in their progress to the Promised Land. Like Chekhov’s first-act gun, we know that the mention of the Jebusites and the Amorites and so on in act one will result in horrific violence before the curtain falls. Between siblings and between tribes there is already the intimation that humanity really doesn’t know how to do conflict well.

In all, Parshat Noach takes a very dim view of humankind. It starts in lawlessness and degradation and, despite the potentially cleansing waters, finds its way back to more degradation.

Eventually, God comes to the dark realization that יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַע מִנְּעֻרָיו—the formation of the human heart is evil from the beginning. Basically, humanity is rotten to the core, but, like Noach, the צַדִּיק of his generation, it’s still the best we have.

And so, the sadder-but-wiser God acknowledges the complexity of being human, the difficulty of free will, the orneriness of the human heart and makes the Torah’s first בְּרִיתִ—its first covenant. Unlike most covenants, which typically mark an agreement where each side has something to offer the other, this one is unconditional. Knowing all too well the limitations of the human race, God nonetheless places the rainbow in the sky as a sign that the catastrophic flood will not be repeated.

In Breishit, when the pre-world was תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ—a wild, watery mess—God looked at it and said, I think I can do something with this…I just need a little light. And here, in Noach, God looks to a new wild, watery mess, acknowledges the truth in the darkness, the human consequences from said mess, and says, OK, this is what I have to work with. Let Me see what I can do. Let Me make it beautiful despite.

Shabbat shalom!