Noah

To think about wine

.

by Rabbi Gustavo Surazski

.

Every year, while reading the first verses of Parashat Noah, I ask myself the same question: Why isn’t Noah the father of the Jewish people? "Noah was a righteous man, faultless in his generation. Noah walked with G-d" (Genesis 6:9). What more is required?

.
Commentators on the Torah suggest countless explanations to that same question. Most of them relate to Noah’s indifference to the destructive outcome of the flood. It’s written in the Zohar that when Noah exited the ark and saw that the world was in ruins, he began to weep and said to the Holy One:

“Lord of the Universe! You should have had mercy on your creation!”. The Holy One replied: “Now you say this? And not when I said to bring the flood?! Since you heard that you would be spared in the ark, the evil that would fall upon the world didn’t enter your heart!” (Midrash HaNeelam, Noah)

.
However, this year I would like to add an additional reason for denying Noah the right to be named the founder of the nation. This reason relates to the beginning of Noah’s path after the flood.

.
Immediately after exiting the ark, the Torah tells us: "Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard" (Genesis 9:20). The Midrash (Bereshit Raba 36:3) explains the word “Vayachel” not in the sense of “beginning” (lehatchil) but from the root “profane” (chulin). ("Noah profaned himself and he became profane). Noah could have begun by planting a fig tree, or an olive tree or something else that provides reparation to the world.

.
How would we have reacted had we been in Noah’s place? We see the world in ruins and we have to begin from scratch… How would we begin?

.
Someone might begin by building a house, another by building a school. What did Noah think of? He thought of wine!

.
We see that this wasn’t the situation with the forefathers of our nation. Of what did our forefathers think?

.
They thought of finding wives for their sons, for example. They worried that their sons wouldn’t take wives from among the daughters of Canaan (Genesis 24:3, 28:8). They thought of what would follow, they thought of their families. When Iaacov went down to Egypt, the Torah relates that he sent his son Yehudah "ahead of him to make preparations in Goshen". (Genesis 46:28).

.

According to RaSHI, Yehudah was sent first in order to establish a house of study in Egypt from which would come teaching”. Iaacov thought of education in order that his sons wouldn’t arrive in Egypt without finding there a spiritual center that would meet their needs. Of what did Noah think? Of wine!

.
A friend of mine told me many years ago that he once stayed at a hotel in the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. In the state of Nevada, as you know, gambling is legal and Las Vegas became the casino capital of the United States and of the entire world.

.
My friend, who went there for the purpose of business and without any connection to the casinos, returned late to his room at the hotel in the city after a long day of work and wanted to open his window to breathe some fresh air. He pushed on the window and saw that it wouldn’t open. He immediately called down to the reception desk and asked for the reason behind it. The clerk answered that in the State of Nevada, and in Las Vegas in particular, people might jump out of the window after losing their money gambling, so it was hotel policy to lock all of the windows.

.
That sounds odd. How is it possible that a person would place his fortune in a higher order of importance than his life? Don’t people realize that there is no comparison? Is it really true that people need to form such a policy in the hotel in order to save their lives? Yet this happens.

.
Something similar happens, for example, when driving under the influence of alcohol. Everyone knows that it is dangerous. But the state threatens drunk drivers who are caught with fines of hundreds and even thousands of shekels. Everyone knows that the combination of alcohol and driving can be fatal. People know this, yet the State still takes it upon itself the responsibility because it knows that many people at the time of the act will be thinking of the alcohol and not of life… as did Noah.

.
Choosing the correct order of priorities is one of the toughest battles an individual faces in his lifetime. It is the key to building the future of mankind, societies and countries.

.
Rationally, the matter seems simple enough. The vast majority of mankind thinks “in present tense” and not in “future tense”. Noah established for himself a faulty order of priorities. He thought of wine and made the insignificant important, and the important insignificant. It is impossible to found a nation with eternal values upon such an order.

.

Other Drashot

.

Parashat Noah - Stone or Window?

Bereshit

The Righteous Bird

by Rabbi Gustavo Surazski

A rather short and wonderful commentary tells us that everyone tasted from the Tree of Knowledge except a bird called Chol (Genesis Rabbah 19). According to our Sages, the same lone and righteous bird still lives in the Garden of Eden to this day. He lives alone in the Garden and no one knows him.

As our Sages see it, the Chol bird symbolizes the tension between public opinion and personal opinion. Would we be prepared to pay the price of social exclusion in exchange for choosing a moral and correct course of action? Isn't it really preferable to act according to the opinion of the widest majority, even if it is warped?

And we are not only speaking of corruption here. There are less meaningful social customs which we would prefer not to choose, and which social pressure causes us to choose anyway. Even the smallest and most irrelevant things such as clothing fashions.

And here is another example connected to Israeli reality: I am driving in a massive traffic jam on the road which is moving ten meters per minute, and I see one car, then a second and a third car overtaking me from the right hand side, along the edge of the road, which is forbidden, and nevertheless arriving home one and a half hours before me. And at the same moment I would like to be just like them, but I know that it would be wrong…

This is the tension between personal and public opinion…and this is the point of the midrash about the Chol, the righteous bird.

I read about a very interesting experiment performed by an American university a few years ago. On one board was a drawing of ten equal parallel lines of equal length and ten volunteers stood opposite the board. They were asked to answer only one question: Are the ten lines identical? They all replied in the negative.

How is it possible that ten people would say "no" to something so obvious and openly visible? Wasn't it clear to everyone that those lines were equal?

The answer is simple. Out of the same ten volunteers, nine belonged to the university staff. Only the tenth was an outsider. The experiment was supposed to test the reaction of the tenth person, and his ability to express an opinion which contradicted that of the majority. He thought that it was an experiment of the Exact Sciences Faculty, but it was, in fact, of the Humanities Faculty..

In this same experiment, the Chol, that lone and righteous bird, would have contradicted the majority. And how about the rest of us?

According to the book of Genesis, two cherubim stand at the entrance of the Garden of Eden in order to guard the way to the Tree of Life. But…who knows? Perhaps they are also standing there to prevent that righteous bird from leaving.

.

Because public opinion is such a persuasive force, and the temptation is always so great…