This week's Torah portion is one of the best known in our whole year cycle. You know the story, and can probably sing it, too (Oh, God said to Noah: there's going to be a floody-floody...); God speaks to a man named Noah, and tells him to build a giant boat ahead of a cataclysmic flood with the capacity to wipe out all life on earth. People (and by extension, the rest of creation), God says, have become evil, and God wants to start over, this time beginning with Noah, his family, and mating pairs of every animal.
Parshat Noah begins with a cryptic sort of phrase:
נֹ֗חַ אִ֥ישׁ צַדִּ֛יק תָּמִ֥ים הָיָ֖ה בְּדֹֽרֹתָ֑יו
Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation.
What does this mean? Commentators have wrestled with this question for centuries. Was Noah actually righteous, or only in comparison to the evil people all around him? What made Noah righteous or blameless? The text does not detail his actions, only that he was the one who found favor with God.
I wonder, though, whether it was not Noah's prior actions that marked him as righteous, but rather his character. When faced with the knowledge - the reality - that disaster was coming and that he had tools at his disposal to be able to help, Noah rose to the task. While many in his position might have dismissed the news of the flood as impossible or shied away from the charge to build the ark and fill it with animals as too daunting, Noah stepped up.
As in Noah's generation, in our day, too, we are faced with the option of whether to step up and act. We know that we are living through the largest refugee crisis in human history. We know that climate change is a pressing existential threat to life as we know it on our planet.
Faced as we are by the realities of the "cataclysmic floods" of our day, what will each of us do? How will we each be remembered?
May we also be "righteous in our generation" as we stand up in the face of disaster, and become a part of the efforts for relief.
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