Noach:
What Happens When the Cheque Stops Coming?
Noach is the proponent of ‘promised land
thinking’. In his attempt to return to Paradise, he is connected to Cain.
We can’t go back towards Paradise. We have to
step ahead into the darkness. Hence, the Ishbitzer’s teaching is that unless we
step into our own darkness, into our own hisaron/deficit,
there can be no redemption.
The fantasy of seeing Hashem through the lens
of one’s own perception is underplayed. I have never seen it developed well.
And yet Avraham, at the Akeida, hears his
father’s voice in Hashem’s command to sacrifice his son, and at the burning
bush, the Midrash tells us that Moshe literally heard the voice of his father
Amram.
At the Akeida, when God says olla, Avraham hears “destroy your son completely”.
According to Rashi, the whole Akeida story revolves around a misinterpretation
of the word olla: whereas Avraham
hears olla-sacrifice, Hashem
is saying olla-raise
up.
The upshot of the Akeida is that Yitzhak leaves home for the first time.
The cusp of the sword for a parent is that if you keep your child at
home, even if you rationalize by calling it a kindness (see Sanhedrin 76b), you
are responsible for the child’s built-up anger.
Noach was sailing of to make a perfect world. According to the Midrash,
he worked day and night, feeding the animals, and making sure everything in the
Ark was pure and holy, and yet, the day after he finds dry land, he becomes
drunk and is sodomized and castrated by his sons.
Noach couldn’t figure out how this had happened to him, when he had had
such good intentions. It’s such a fabulous moment, and so stunning and shocking
to the reader. It appears to be unintelligible.
Heichel means both “profane” and “begin”. In The
Living Torah, Aryeh Kaplan interchanges these two meanings. In Genesis 6:1, he translates heichal
as “began”; ‘Man began to increase on the face of the earth’. The sexual
aberration occurs here, at the beginning: “The sons of God saw that the
daughters of man were good, and they took themselves wives from whomever they
chose.” (Ibid 2)
Later, in Genesis 9:18, we have the same conceptual beginning. “The sons
of Noah who emerged from the ark were Shem, Ham and Yefeth. Ham was the father
of Canaan. These three were Noah’s sons, and from them, the whole world was
repopulated.”
The following verse reads “v’yichel Noach/Noach began to be a man
of the soil”. An alternate meaning is
that he profaned the soil by planting a vineyard. “He drank some of the wine, making himself drunk, and uncovered
himself in the tent.”
‘Uncovered himself’ is understood in the Gemara in Sanhedrin to mean he
was sodomized and castrated. This shocking incident comes about very abruptly.
This could be called ‘day-after Torah’, and in it, Noach finds himself all the
way back on step one. Instead of the spiral of Tshuvah, he is stuck in
repetition-compulsion, because he hasn’t moved an inch from where he started.
The flood was the product of sexual aberration and violence, and now, after the
flood, the sodomy is the sexual aberration, the castration is the violence, and
the incident is so shocking because it comes from the rebellion of Noach’s son.
The Midrash tells us that with the best of intentions, Noach bans sex on
the Ark – because, he reasons, we should not enjoy ourselves in this way while
people are drowning. This is part of the ‘Utopian seduction’, which attempts to
sail off in a linear voyage towards the light. This is called “walking with
God”. The problem is, in a sense you have to walk against God – this is the
“stiff neck”. Individuation and
autonomy cannot happen with God.
One euphemism I have for the test of the ‘day-after Torah’ is “what
happens when the cheque stops coming?” When do you withdraw support, because
the support itself has become debilitating? At some point, the parent has to
stop writing cheques, because there is a moment where if you write one more
cheque, it becomes an act of cruelty instead of love. This is the whole idea of
codependency. In this Torah, God is the quintessential parent, educator and therapist,
and so He makes the Nes/test and Nes/miracle out of the same
material. There is always the “day-after” and so in a consistent manner, the
test always follows the miracle.
We actually build the innovation of Avraham Aveinu into the year, by
having Tishrei full of light, in the form of the simcha/joy of the
Yomtovim, followed by the bitter month of Heshvan/mar Heshvan – the
bitter month of accounting when we must face ourselves. This is the moment of Lech
Lecha/go to yourself, in which we find ourselves in the abandonment and in
the darkness. In this context, darkness and abandonment are acts of love. The
light of Tishrei has to stop, and we must have a month empty of Yomtovim/good
days, in order to find out who we are.
In this empty month, we find out if the changes we swore to make on Yom
Kippur have really had an effect. Heshvan – the ‘bitter month of accounting’ is
the test that comes after the miracle of the yomtovim of Tishrei. This is a
tool that is built into the very structure of the timeframe when we read these
Parshiot. Avraham arrives at the Promised Land and there is no water. There is
the light of revelation, and then the next day, there is nothing. This is what
we call Hester Panim/God’s hidden-ness. As at Purim, we learn that we
can only receive the Torah in the darkness of exile, when God is absent from
the Megilla. In the perception of abandonment, we can throw a tantrum and cry
for what we want, or, as at the parting of the Sea of Reeds, we can step into
the darkness.
In Parshat Noach, the word Nichem appears three times before the
flood. Once it means “regret”, once it means “comfort”, and once it means
“leadership”. The same word also appears three times before the parting of the
sea in the Book of Exodus. This ties the parting of the sea to the flood, as
does Moshe being the gilgul/reincarnation of Noach. In a larger context,
the two episodes are also linked by the idea of tantrum, rage and being backed
into a corner. In order to mature and become the autonomous person, we must
deal with the rage. In both episodes, the miracle is dry land, and the test is
dryness, in the form of thirst. The real miracle is in the test – and at the
sea, in the test, the Jewish people said “God has abandoned us -let’s go back
to Egypt”.
In his test, Noach is lost in bitterness, and so he is back on step one.
Avraham, as the Esh Kodesh points out, has the tenacity that enables him to go
forth and find Hashem’s deep light in the darkness, in the Warsaw Ghetto. This
autonomy, as opposed to stubbornness, defines the person of integrity. Autonomy
is not stubbornness. The autonomous person is a very flexible person, because
his ego isn’t on the line. If the Esh Kodesh was stubborn instead of
autonomous, his book would have been consumed with a sense of victimization and
rage towards the Nazis. This is Avraham’s innovation of “walking before
Hashem”. It incorporates the whole crucible concept of inoculating oneself with
adversity, so that when the cheques stop coming, you have the ability to step
into the darkness and find God. Through this we experience Mar Cheshvan - and
the three days in the desert without water - not as the ultimate abandonment
but as God’s ultimate love. If you experience it as abandonment, what will you
do? You will drink, and your son will sodomize and castrate you.
Avraham’s innovation enabled him to perceive God’s love through the
tests, and not through the miracles. The revealed light is beautiful, and
important. If you are not nourished and supported by parents, you are in
trouble, but the greater love is when the parent stops writing the cheques, and
allows the child to be who he is and achieve his maximum potential.