Noah and the Ways of the Divine Image

 

In the Bible, the foundational verse that defines the relationship between God and humanity is found in the Torah from last week; “Let us make humankind in our image (b’tzelem), after our likeness (d’mot)” from Genesis 1:26.  There is another word similar to image and likeness that we need to dismiss and that is shape (tay’ayr), as we read in Genesis 39:6, “Now Joseph was well shaped (tay’ayr) and handsome.”  The idea of image and likeness in Jewish tradition is not physical (i.e. Gen. 36:9), so we call on the teaching of Maimonides from his “Guide of the Perplexed.”  Maimonides teaches that “no other creature on earth possesses” the divine image, further adding that people have the “intellectual perception, in the exercise of which is employed via the senses, [something that is “similar” to the likeness of the] Divine Intellect with which humans have been endowed.”  All that to say that God fashioned humanity to be in the likeness of the Divine and humanity has the free-will to inculcate the inner divine likeness into how life is lived.      

Turning to the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z''l, he points to the failures in the lives of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and this week Noah, in connection to their own divine image. In this case when Adam and Eve met God in the garden after they ate the forbidden fruit, they failed in their personal responsibility; more so for their denials (Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake) of what they did wrong, resulting in the consequences of being removed from the garden.  When Cain was upset that his sacrifice was not accepted by God and Abel’s was, Cain killed his brother Able and failed in his moral responsibility since murder is not an emanation of the divine image within. Can you only imagine how the course of humankind might be different if Cain was happy for his brothers blessing and rejoiced with him (and we did that with each other?).  Instead, like his father and mother who were banished from the garden Cain was banished to a foreign land forever apart from his family and friends.

We see this with Noah as well.  In Noah’s case it was about collective responsibility, something that he did not achieve and therefore failed in doing so.  When Abraham stood before God over Sodom and Gomorrah he bargained for the lives in those cities, asking God to spare them from destruction even if there were as little as only 10 righteous people, something that Noah did not do.  Noah failed because he only worried about his immediate family given the ensuing flood as opposed to saving others who perhaps did not deserve their fate.  The Kabbalah address this failure of Noah, not as failure, but as process to assume the image and likeness of God.  You see Abraham had ascended to a level of connection with the Divine that endowed him with the importance of collective responsibility whereas Noah had not reached that level of righteousness yet.  One of my teachers, Cantor Lee Greenberg, calls upon a teaching by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin who notes that the rainbow here in parasha Noach is only half a circle, like half a picture and requires another half to complete its image or story.  In this case while God promised not to destroy humanity as evidenced with the sign of the rainbow, seen with the human eye, God did not guarantee that humanity would not destroy itself, the part that we do not see.  Collective responsibility is a way to make that circle whole, something that people do, not God. 

While I would prefer saying “divine character traits” as opposed to “responsibility,” per Rabbi Sacks, looking at Noah I want pose the following question: how much better would our lives be, not to mention the world, if the collective concern for the whole that is birthed out of our “divine character traits” operated more than it does?  You just cannot escape the social, political and even religious discord that is all around us, the anti-Semitism and senseless killings and hate, just to name a few.  Our systemic lack of concern for our “fellow” stands directly opposed for Torah to the divine image within. You know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but since we are fashioned according to the divine image, our “divine character traits” can transcend the brokenness around us - if choose to do so - each doing our part to help in what Rabbi Sacks calls the “collective responsibility.”  Let’s all strive to make this world a little better today than it was yesterday.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Adam