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October 2000

The Disappointing and the Disappointed (2000)

Noach
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In reading today’s Biblical Portion concerning Noah and the flood, we cannot fail to be stirred by the pathos, and moved by the intensely human drama, of Noah’s predicament. Here was Noah, a pious, gentle soul, who had seen much of life and civilization in his day. He knew intimately the people who were his contemporaries whether good or bad, and he was in touch with the major trends of his day, whether he liked them or disliked them. And in his old age, G-d sends him and his family into an ark, windowless and cut off from the world, and keeps him there for forty days and nights. During this time a great flood rages and destroys all life, levels mountains and hills and changes all. Now think of the plight of Noah as he emerges from the ark; listen to his heartbeat as he steps out and beholds the terrible scene. What was once his home is no more. His property and that of his close friends is no longer recognizable. His old friends have died in the ravaging waters. The very landscape has changed the landmarks with which he was so acquainted since childhood are no more. The world he once knew is no more. Here before him is a strange desolation. No doubt there welled up in his soul bitter feelings of melancholy and despair. Sadly he thinks, “Yes, I and mine were saved. But if this is what we were saved for, to be the sole witnesses to complete and utter ruination, I don’t think life is worth living. Perhaps it would have been better if I too had perished in the Deluge. Why live, why hope, why work? All is gone, and there is nothing to look forward to.”And at this point, our Rabbis tell us, G-d appears before Noah and does not allow him to continue this moroseness and despair and hopelessness. For G-d showed Noah three worlds. He showed him, first, olam be’yishuvo, the world as it first was, in its “normal” days. He showed what Man could have accomplished: a Paradise, a Tree of Eternal Life, a Tree of Knowledge. He showed Noah the chance man had to attain health and wis…
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Almost two years ago, I stood before this congregation and apologized for allowing personal sentiments to color my remarks. That was the occasion of the Bar Mitzvah of my first son, Joshua. I now happily impose upon this patient congregation once again, and ask you to indulge me if a number of my comments turn out, in a manner purely unpremeditated and completely coincidental, to be inspired by and have some relevance to the Bar Mitzvah of my second son, Shalom. I hope that what I have to say will be at least of some passing interest to others as well. What can one say to a youngster being initiated into Jewish manhood? What advice can we give him about what it means to be a man, in an overcrowded, dirty, depressed urban society, in which violence and pessimism and depersonalization are accepted facts of life? – in which adults habitually grasp at the last straws of their vanishing youthfulness by retrogressing into adolescence and preferring to be boys rather than men? – in which Judaism and Jewishness are in drift and on the brink of chaos?IIThat to be a man is an achievement, is obvious from the first words of this morning’s sidra. Man, איש, is the Torah’s encomium for Noah even before it accords him the honorific titles of צדיק (righteous), תמים (whole), and את האלקים התהלך נח (Noah walked with God). Simply, and perhaps this was the greatest compliment, Noah was called an איש, a man. Obviously, the Torah is speaking about the moral and spiritual content of manhood in the sense of a mature adult, not of the official and conventional definition of the category of “man.” Halakhically, a child becomes a man at the age of 13 years and one day; the legal transition from minor to major is very abrupt. But, in the larger sense, what does it mean to be a man?IIIThe first thing has to do with the social, political, and intellectual climate of our times. We live on an overcrowded planet, in which the sophisticates and cognoscenti who speak in the name of Science teach us …
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