By Andrew Wallenstein, November 2, 2024
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
We have come to the portion of the trial in which I present the closing argument on behalf of my clients, the tragic generation of the Mabul, on whose behalf I filed this class action lawsuit seeking damages… from God and Noah.
Yes, even planet-wide floods that occurred millennia ago are covered under the statute of limitations.
—–
Now I couldn’t blame u if you came to this courtroom thinking you knew the story of the flood. It seemed so simple back in Hebrew school, didn’t it? Man was evil. So God told the only righteous person, Noah, to take his family into a… floating zoo while he drowned the rest of the world that got the deaths they deserved. Open shut case, right?
But when we re-examine the parshah, the story is far more complicated than u remember. Immoral as my clients may have been, I call into question the morality of the God that passed such merciless judgment… …as well as Noah, the man who might as well have been God’s accomplice. When we scrutinize their actions and inactions as the Torah recounts it, you must call into question whether what the generation of the flood experienced was the textbook definition of a wrongful death.
—-
So I’m going to ask the jury to focus at the heart of this case: motive. From the very beginning of the flood narrative, God’s rationale is suspect. Oh, he lays it out for us in Perek Vuv, Pasuk Hey clear as day. Why did my clients deserve to die? the Torah tells us, and I want you to listen closely to the translation word by word: Vechol yetzer machshovot lebo God thought EVERY plan in the human heart rak rah kol hayom was ALWAYS bad ALL the time. Wow, that’s pretty extreme…and pretty implausible. Everybody was wicked every second? Does that include the children killed in the flood? Were they so wicked they needed to be destroyed? The commentator Radak asks why were all these animals wiped out as well? What could they have done to deserve this?
—-
Oh well. I suppose it makes Noah all the more remarkable for being what the Torah tells us is the only Tzadik in the world. Very distinguished… …though it’s a little odd when you think about it. The Torah doesn’t actually tell us what Noah did to earn such a lofty reputation. But I want to ask the jury to focus on the facts about Noah made plain in the text: He does what God tells him. Took it on faith when God told him a flood was coming and built a massive ark at his request. But If I were a tzadik, you know what I’d like to think I’d do? I’d warn my fellow human beings to mend their ways. Maybe let my legendary righteousness influence them. But The Torah makes no mention of any interaction between Noah and the rest of humanity. Oh there are midrashim that say he tried to engage with the people, but the torah does not.
Perhaps then God shouldn’t have been surprised when after the world has been wiped away and Noah is back on dry land what’s the first thing this paragon of propriety does? Gets drunk and passes out naked. And then when he awakens from his inebriated stupor and learns that his son Cham saw him [gasp] unclothed in his tent, what is Noah’s response? Maybe a gentle reprimand? a slap on the wrist? No, this beacon of scrupulosity we call Noah curses his son to be the progenitor of a doomed nation. For the sin of seeing his father drunk and naked. BTW, that curse, the jury might be surprised to learn, is the only statement the Torah records Noah making. He never said anything extending himself to others, that’s for sure. Aren’t we glad God picked him to be the flood’s sole survivor, to set a great example for the next generations.
—-
But let’s give Noah credit for this much: Ever the loyal servant, he makes a sacrifice on an altar. Apparently it had quite an impact on God, who as Breishit Chet Pasuk Chuf Aleph recounts, says, “Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind” Now as quick as I am to commend God for swearing off ever killing off the entire world ever again…what are we to take away from this statement? Is this God’s way of expressing regret, or in fact he doesn’t regret what he did at all. He’s just coming to the conclusion he’s never going to do it again. Been there, done that.
The closest we get to God’d rationale comes later in this same maddening pasuk. Why will God never doom the Earth again? כִּ֠י יֵ֣צֶר לֵ֧ב הָאָדָ֛ם רַ֖ע מִנְּעֻרָ֑י “because the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth” OK, maybe you can interpret that as God expressing regret. Maybe he’s saying there’s no use trying to fix these fickle humans, they’re rotten from day one. But you know…there’s something about that yetzer lev phrase he uses to explain his regret that mirrors the phrasing of the rationale God laid out in that first passuk we examined earlier. So now let me reconcilie these two pesukim for the jury: Why is God destroying the world, according to the Torah in the beginning of the story? Because כִּ֠י יֵ֣צֶר לֵ֧ב הָאָדָ֛ם רַ֖ע the heart of man is evil. And why is God never going to destroy the world again as he said after the flood? Vechol yetzer machshovot lebo rah Because the heart of man is evil. How’s that for circular logic? I guess God’s moral calculus here is clear as day, we can just send this jury home.
If this wasn’t confusing enough, god revisits his decision in the next perek when he makes it a crucial component of his BRIT, his covenant. But this time his vow not to wipe out the world comes with a curious qualifier. As he says here, and I’ll translate: “ never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Uh OK Pardon our confusion, god, but last perek when you made clear you wouldn’t greenlight another genocide, you didn’t specify a method of destruction. So where does that leave humanity? Does this open a loophole that allows God to end life on Earth, that it’s AOK as long as it doesn’t involve H20?
Because I’ll tell you this. It has me thinking very differently about the story in the very next parsha, about Sodom. Are we to believe the God that brought destruction to Sodom is a more evolved God because 1) he uses fire instead of water and 2) he wipes out just a few cities’ worth of people for being evil instead of the whole of humanity?
The Radak tries to make sense of all this in his commentary on Perek Chet, Pasuk Chuf Aleph… The reason God was able to say he wouldn’t have to destroy humanity again was because he was able to look into the future and see that the majority of the human species would be as depraved as those before the flood. Well Sodom certainly wasn’t the majority, I’ll give God that. But I’m still troubled by this notion that God saw my clients as, and you’ll forgive the flood metaphor, the high water mark of evil. Surely, my clients—who the mefarshim tell us were just the tenth generation of humanity after the Garden of Eden—were too primitive to have mastered evil this early in the life of civilization. I mean isn’t the evil of civilization actually kind of understandable? There was no righteous figure who led by example; that could have been Noah but the Torah provides no record of that.
Why couldn’t this doomed generation been given some opportunity for repentance? Instead of God communicating with one righteous person, go build an ark, why not have sent someone as God does many times later in the Tanach, like a prophet, to warn everyone: Hey, straighten up or pay the piper?
And as for Radak, why was he so sure humanity would never be that evil again? Because, as he explains, “News of the flood was handed down to future generations and served as a warning against man from ever becoming that corrupt again.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you to pause and consider the implications of that statement. Is the true lesson of the flood that what humanity really needed to keep its yetzer harah in check was fear of divine punishment, demonstrated on a previous generation?
But what kind of morality is that if we are choosing morality because we fear God’s wrath?
Sadly, my clients never got a chance to reckon with this new moral reality. Instead they were drowned, and if you still say, well, they got what they deserved, in closing I ask you to consider: a simple but profound question the Chizkuni raises: Why didn’t God understand the nature of man before the flood? didn’t God foresee the wickedness of man because he is, well, God? And I would take that one step further: if God is the inventor of humanity and humanity malfunctions, isn’t the defective invention that is humanity the fault of the inventor…so why are we punishing the inventions?
When my clients met their fate in a flood they never knew was coming, did they not even deserve the decency of understanding that the flood was a punishment meant for them? God never told them the point of the flood and neither did Noah. They were given no arks of their own or even an understanding of why that Noah fella earned himself an ark in the first place. They probably didn’t even know why they died.
How just then can a punishment be if the recipients of said punishment doesn’t even understand IT IS a punishment?
And with no one remaining to speak up for my clients, I say to this jury: it is up to us to redress the grave injustice of their watery grave.