If you are thinking at all about what happened when Noah was on earth, you might be wondering how the death of the entire planet by drowning (with the exception of the 8 humans and their floating menagerie on the ark) was exactly a "comfort."
So here, I am again, getting ready to sh'ma, and see if I can figure out what it is that YHVH wants me to hear and obey this week.
First of all is the way YHVH saw Noah: righteous and faultless. That's a pretty tall order. And humanly, we have to wonder how it is that someone who would plant a vineyard and get plastered on the wine qualifies as faultless. Perhaps it is because YHVH is able to see past our momentary weaknesses to our obedience to what He has called us to. It's also helpful if we could understand that the Hebrew verb root of our word righteous is the word tzadak, which basically means "usable". Something that meets the designer's expectation for the project at hand. That's a lot different from the way I have always defined that word! In other words, our focus is usually on what we do to be considered righteous, when instead the focus is really more about our willingness for Him to use us and transform us to do the job He wants done!
As William Bullock points out this week in his devotional on Noah,
Biblically, we can say a tzaddik is ‘righteous’. But that does not mean we think he is totally sinless. It just means he is not so badly warped, corrupted, damaged, or out of spec that he is unusable in for the Kingdom of Heaven’s projects in His generation... ‘righteousness’ comes solely from trusting and sh’ma-ing the instructions of [YHVH.]
Righteousness, for Noah and for us, was found in and trusting in [YHVH's] goodness and grace, and thereby surrendering to the Creator’s will, sh’ma-ing His voice, and doing what He said – and nothing else.
Righteousness, for Noah and for us, was found in and trusting in [YHVH's] goodness and grace, and thereby surrendering to the Creator’s will, sh’ma-ing His voice, and doing what He said – and nothing else.
The second thing I want to take away from this week's Torah portion is the understanding of the way YHVH saw the earth during Noah's time. As often as we complain these days about the hatred, the anger, the violence and the wickedness in the world, I think it must pale in comparison to how bad it must have been for the Creator to say, "Enough and No More!" when He looked on the corruption and total depravity of the earth. As it was described in this week's devotional:
The world was not just ‘messed up’ - it was in the throes of a death spiral... [YHVH's] intervention was an act of grace – a painful but necessary surgery that was the world’s – and mankind’s – only hope of survival... but for the Flood, [life] would not have been a life worth living.
That's a powerful picture - and for all the people who cry about how mean YHVH was to have allowed everyone to die such a horrible death, to put it in His perspective helps us see it as "an act of tough love wrought by a merciful Creator who is...fully devoted to that [mankind's] survival and fulfillment."
My prayer after reading the Parshah this week is to be the kind of worshiper that God would find "usable" and consumed with listening to His voice.
Torah Noach: Genesis 6:9 - 11:32
Haftarah: Isaiah 54:1 - 55:5
B’rit Chadasha: Matthew 24:1-44 I Peter 3:8-22 II Peter 1:3 - 2:22; 3:17-18
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