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November 2, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Noach
Our Ark and Our Arc
November 2, 2024 – 1 Cheshvan 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
On the morning of Kol Nidrei—Friday, October 11 to be exact—my colleagues and I were doing a Kabbalat Shabbat service with our youngest learners, our preschool children who range in age from 15 months to 5 years old. Yom Kippur was in the air. Kol Nidrei with all its solemnity, was in 9 hours. How to convey Kol Nidrei intensity to our youngest learners?
So I asked them: what is your favorite Jewish holiday? One hand after another shot up. The first young child answered: Halloween! The second learner spoke up: Halloween! And so it would go. Surprisingly, not a single child said Yom Kippur was their favorite Jewish holiday. No three-year-old said I just love Unetaneh Tokef. The clear choice for favorite Jewish holiday of our youngest learners is Halloween.
I have been thinking about their response, and while of course Halloween is not a Jewish holiday, in a deep way, they are right. Holidays are supposed to be joyful. What is more joyful than Halloween the way we practice it today? It’s about parents and children planning out costumes, walking the streets together in search of candy bars, and dividing the spoils at the end of the night. It’s about neighborhood and community. It’s about creativity. So many families really do up Halloween with intricate gothic scenes. It’s about fun. And of course it is about Heath Bars, Butterfingers, Snickers Bars, Kit Kats. All good stuff. Maybe our youngest learners are on to something.
There is only one problem. The Halloween so many of us observe, sweet neighbors giving sweet children sweets, works great for children. But in the real world adults face complexity. Joy does not come so easily for us.
This week I was doing a zoom Sisterhood class. We were talking about the relationship between the Jewish holiday season that we had just concluded and the real world. Person after person spoke of a creative tension that was deeply felt, that never went away, and for which there is no answer. The adult learners offered statements like: How could I sit around the Rosh Hashanah table and eat apples and honey when Israeli soldiers were fighting and dying in Gaza and Lebanon? How could I sit in my Sukkah and observe a festival of joy when our country is on the precipice of this election, where no matter how it turns out half the country is going to feel angry, disenfranchised and worried? How can I feel light and joyful when there are people I love who are battling serious challenges or who have suffered serious losses?
Doing joy for children requires a costume, a nice neighbor, and a candy bar. Given the real worries of the world, how do adults do joy?
As the holiday season ends, and as the season of ordinary days begins, our Torah offers us two very different models.
One model for living in a world of anxiety, edge, worry, and loss is Noah and his family in the ark. The world is being destroyed. All life perishes. It’s like Hurricanes Helene and Milton on steroids, Helene and Milton, Helene and Milton, Helene and Milton, lasting and lasting for days and days and then months and months destroying everything in their path. Against that world of destruction and death, Noah and his family have built a counter world in their ark where they sheltered from the storm, safe and protected. One model for dealing with anxiety and adversity is simply to hide away.
But there is a second model as well. Noah is usually compared, unfavorably, to Abraham. When God says to Noah I am going to destroy the whole world, everything that breathes will perish, Noah does not raise a peep. Noah just builds his ark. Noah just takes care of Noah and his family. But when God says to Abraham I am going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham famously challenges God. God forbid that you should do such a thing, Abraham says. Shall the judge of the whole world not judge justly? If you destroy all of Sodom and Gomorrah, will you not sweep away the innocent along with the guilty. How is that fair? Abraham then famously negotiates with God that if there are 50 40 30 20 10 righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah God will renounce the plan to destroy these towns.
Abraham’s mission, to use the Torah’s words, is laasot tzedakah u’mishpat, to do justice and righteousness. Abraham cannot be happy in his own safe counterworld if innocent people are suffering.
So the Torah offers us two models: the Noah move, build our ark, take care of our own family; and the Abraham move, do justice and righteousness, do our part to fix the world. These two models are in obvious tension.
For years I misunderstood the relationship between them. I thought the relationship was an “or.” Either we are Noah, or we are Abraham. Either we find comfort in our ark, or we are focused on fixing the world. Either we are about our own family, or we are about justice and righteousness. And in that or typology, our tradition prefers Abraham’s posture.
But I now think that this framing is a mistake. The Torah gives us both models not to make us choose between them, but to figure out how to do both. Perhaps the safety of our Noah’s ark strengthens us for our Abraham work in the world beyond our ark.
Dr. Martin Luther King famously taught that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The arc that Dr. King used in that famous quote is a-r-c. Noah’s ark is a-r-k. There is a deep relationship between these two arks, a-r-k and a-r-c.
We get renewed, restored, rejuvenated, strengthened in our a-r-k, which allows us to have our impact on the a-r-c of the moral universe. First Noah, and then Abraham. First the restorative quality of home and hearth, and then the hard work of adding our energy to the arc of the moral universe.
When you think about it, we all know this. We all do this. It is the natural rhythm of the world. All of us experience this in our own daily rounds.
We are outside in the world, doing the work of our lives, making our contribution, working on our a-r-c. In that outside world, we experience bumps and bruises, frictions and conflict, frustrations and setbacks. That is the nature of hard work. As Dr. Rochelle Walensky taught us in her talk here before Neilah, she had a colleague who had a sign on her desk that said hard work is hard. Because hard work is hard, we come home depleted. If we are blessed to have a loving homelife, we get restored at home—whatever that restorative rhythm looks like for us. Asking our loved ones about their day and sharing the details of our day. The cocktail we drink. The music we listen to. The Netflix we watch. The book we read. The workout we do. The homework we help our children with. The news we catch up on. The dinner we cook. The dishes we do after dinner. The mail we go through. The nighttime ritual, if we have young children, of putting them to bed. Or if we do not, the nighttime ritual of signing off with our loved ones who do not live under our roof. All that home and hearth is Noah’s ark, and it prepares us for the work outside our home, the arc we are always working on—the hard new day we will have tomorrow, the hard new day for which we will have fresh energy.
So, as we leave the holidays and head into a season of ordinary days, in our ever-complicated world, the good news is that the Torah teaches us how to amplify and magnify our positive impact in our home and on our world. Let’s go out from here and make our a-r-k warmer and more restorative. And then let’s go out into the world and make our a-r-c higher and more impactful. Shabbat shalom.