October 9, 2021
Author(s): Rabbi Michelle Robinson,
October 9, 2021 – 3 Cheshvan 5782
Beyond Noah’s Rainbow
with Rabbi Michelle Robinson
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Have you ever seen the cartoon of Noah’s ark floating on the water in the distance while two dinosaurs in the foreground look out and say, “Was that TODAY?” Or the one with unicorns standing at the foot of the ark saying to Noah, “We’ll wait for the next one.”
My favorite of this genre pictures Noah standing on deck as two holes gush with water. He looks down and says, “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought the termites.”
We tend to approach the tale told in our parasha today as an upbeat children’s story, complete with matching nursery décor. But these cutesy cartoons point to a darker truth. The story we read today is about as child-friendly as an original Grimm Brothers fairy tale. There is death, devastation, despair – brokenness and a repair that does not quite repair.
We like happy endings. So, our retellings of Noah’s ark usually stop with the rainbow. A promise from God, “You’ll never go through this again.” That would indeed have been a great ending! Noah leaves the ark triumphant to a new world, a fresh world, filled with a spirit of joyful possibility, and lives happily ever after. Only trouble is, that is not our ending.
If we read to the end, we find a man whose heart is broken. What happens after the sparkling rainbow moment? Noah plants a vineyard and gets drunk. The post-ark portion of the story devolves into a troubling tale of family dysfunction that is hard to read even today. You see, when Noah leaves the ark, it is not to a perfect world washed clean; he brings the termites too.
In many ways, so do we. Like Noah, we are looking for our new starts to be uncomplicated, only to soon find, as the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Into every new beginning comes the complexity we carry with us, for better and for worse.
Early in the pandemic, I was deeply moved by a viral YouTube video, “The Great Realization,” by Tomos Roberts. Roberts imagines for us a post-pandemic world where we come to understand that the pre-pandemic world was fundamentally broken – and we have fixed it.
“We noticed families had stopped talking,” he writes, “… and the work-life balance broke…amidst the noise, they felt alone. And every day the skies grew thicker, ‘till you couldn’t see the stars.”
But, when Covid came, he continues, “while we were hidden… people dusted off their instincts…they started clapping to say thank you and calling up their mums, and while the car keys gathered dust, they would look forward to their runs… And so when we found the cure and were allowed to go outside,” he goes on, “we all preferred the world we found to the one we’d left behind.”
Halavai. If only.
Now, closer to 2022 than 2020, read any newspaper on any day and “the great realization” feels so painfully and permanently unrealized. Noah’s rainbow soaked in wine.
I was struck watching journalist Miguel Marquez’s recent interview with a nurse who refused to be vaccinated. She plaintively evoked the moments at the start of the pandemic when people would clap them in to work each day as heroes. She shared how painfully she feels the loss of that unity now that she is on the other side of a medical divide. I could not more deeply disagree with her decision, but I found myself nostalgic with her for that time when it felt, even for a moment, that we could share a vision for our world.
As the recalcitrant nurse continued to speak, it became clear that perhaps part of the reason we do not end with the rainbow today is precisely because, just as for Noah, our rainbows are fleeting too. If we stopped reading at the rainbow, it would indeed be a children’s tale with little to teach us about our own lived experience.
It is exactly in not ending there that we find the gold. Yes, in our lives, as in Noah’s, the termites come along for the ride; we all carry contention, conflict, and pain. The question that shapes our story is, what do we do about it?
Do we get drunk as Noah did? Try to escape from the challenges and intractable conflicts of the world and our lives with a bottle of wine or a pint of Häagen Dazs or a Netflix binge? Do we violate someone else’s trust, as Noah’s sons did? Do we get angry, as Noah got angry, cursing those around us – adding fuel to the fire of estrangement between family members or fraying the frail strands between those who disagree?
Or do we plant and build nonetheless?
It turns out that that is what inspired Tomos Roberts to write his poem in the first place. “If you decide to believe that the world outside your window isn’t going to get better,” he said in an interview, “I think the world outside your window will support your theory completely. On the other hand,” he continued, “if you decide to believe that potentially things could get better, you can start to make that happen, first on an individual level and among your family. If enough people did that, that change would ripple out exponentially.”
Today I am feeling that ripple deeply. Eight years ago today, I was pacing the outdoor courtyard at Newton-Wellesley Hospital awaiting my youngest’s arrival. The phone rang, and on the other line was Wes with heartbreak in his voice and the news that Rabbi Chiel was in his final hours. Every year, as we celebrate Benjamin’s birthday, I recall that moment in a garden filled with sunshine as a great light went out in our world. And I study his Torah.
Rabbi Chiel, was, as all of us blessed to know him remember, an extraordinary preacher, pastor, a teacher of teachers, and a gadol whose deeds continue to ripple out exponentially in our world.
He taught, “Somebody once said that our prayers to God should not be, ‘Dear God, give me a life that is free from problems,’ because there is no life like that. Instead, our prayers each day should be: ‘Dear God, give me the strength to face whatever life might bring my way.’”
In his book, “Discovering Life’s Meaning,” he shared a story first told by a friend of the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim. He wrote, “One morning this friend went to the Kotel, the Western Wall, the last remnant of our Temple, in order to pray. He was met by an elderly man with a bag of cookies and a bottle of liquor who greeted him by saying: ‘My friend, I have a simcha, a celebration! Share it with me.’
“He partook of the food and drink. Several days later, he returned to the Kotel at the same hour, only to be met by the same elderly man with the same greeting. And so it went three or four times.
“Finally, unable to restrain his curiosity, he asked the man: ‘What sort of celebration can last so long?’
“The elderly man replied: ‘I am a survivor of Auschwitz. Also, I am a Kohen, a priest, and as you may know, among our people, a Kohen in any other country of the world may only bless the people a few times a year, on the holy days. But in Jerusalem, a Kohen can bless people every day… I come here every single day to observe my duty and my privilege. This is my simcha. It will last as long as I live.’”
As Rabbi Chiel concluded, “This is a man who suffered the hell and agony of Auschwitz and could have emerged from that inferno angry, bitter, hating the world. Instead, he sees each day as a simcha, a celebration, not only because he is still alive, but because he can be a source of blessing to other human beings.”
So too, may we.
Shabbat Shalom.