Beyond Belief: Biblical Tales
Dr. Jeremy England on Parshas Noach
In case you missed last week’s announcement, our Reading Jewish History in the Parsha segment is entering a new chapter. With Rabbi David Bashevkin wrapping up his year-long parsha and Jewish history reflections, we’re excited to share that this series will now feature past 18Forty guests as guest writers. Each week, they’ll bring their unique insights on how Jewish history connects with the weekly Torah portion.
This week, we’re excited to welcome Dr. Jeremy England who joined us on the 18Forty podcast for our exploration of “Science and Religion.” Jeremy is an accomplished physicist, a biologist—and also a rabbi.
We learn much more from the Torah when we assume it knows what we know. For example, we know that plants need the sun to grow, and that creating things far less complicated than the whole world often takes much more than six days of work. We also know that people rarely live past a hundred years of age, and that handmade wooden boats cannot usually stay afloat bearing the largest zoo ever constructed as cargo. So, when the Torah says the sun was created a day later than plants, or when it describes the adventures of a six-hundred-year-old man who once built a boat and filled it with every kind of animal, our job is not to squelch questions to be able to believe what we are reading is true without thinking about it, but rather to ask the question why the text had to talk this way in order best to convey the truth God wanted to convey.
Viewed in this way, the seven days of creation seem to have a fairly basic bit of advice for us that can be applied to the rest of the Torah, namely that talking accurately about the events of the world in a way that explicitly references God as actor in and director of the story is often going to stretch and scramble time in ways that present us with oddly unnatural sounding claims. This is the key methodological point that will help us to learn from the story of Noah instead of just struggling to believe in it.
Funnily enough, Noah at present seems much more credible as part of our future than as part of our past. In this age of hi-tech, one constantly hears speculative talk about rising sea levels, radical extension of human lifespan, and the crafting of synthetic ecosystems on space stations or in Martian biospheres. The thematic content of Noah's adventure is so potently timeless that one does not have to work too hard to connect to contemporary discussions. But what does that mean, exactly? Is the (rather dizzying and terrifying) point that this part of the prophetic story actually hasn't happened yet, but soon will?
I will leave twenty-first-century doomsaying to others for today, and suggest instead that the chronological and chronometric fuzziness of Genesis invites us to examine why this timeless text would bother to say that Noah was six hundred years old when he built the ark and hopped aboard with his sons Ham, Yafeth, and Shem and their families. What is the function of reporting all these seemingly outlandish ages in Genesis, if it’s not merely an arbitrary collection of meaningless trivia?
An answer comes swiftly when we remember how frequently nations in the Torah are referred to by the name of an individual from which they sprang. Even Jacob fits that description. And nations certainly do arise, evolve, and develop over the course of centuries. Indeed, the Torah even tells us this in the aftermath of Noah’s story, as it recounts the birth of Mizrayim (Egypt) from Ham, of Yawan (Greece) from Yafeth, and eventually even Yisrael (Israel), from Shem. What if the Torah is trying to teach us something as true today as it was thousands of years ago about the rise and fall of civilizations? The most basic message (repeated in the contrasting examples of Lot’s Sodom and Jonah’s Nineveh) would of course be that the collapse of societies is connected to their wickedness before God. But is there more to glean than that?
As time passes, nations and empires come and go. Great flourishing is followed by degradation and destruction, and often only a remnant of what was becomes the seed of what follows. Noah and his family were one such seed, but could they provide the model for the selection principle God applies to every seed that makes it through to the next round as cultural evolution proceeds? What does it take to flourish, throughout human history? Well, there’s the raw power and productivity of Egypt that Ham represents, there’s the wisdom, beauty, and craftsmanship of Greece that comes from Yafeth, and there’s the seeking of proper relationship with God that we get from Shem.
Every civilization that has ever succeeded for a time, had a sufficiently potent total dose of Shem, Ham, and Yafeth. Interestingly, the same seems to have been true in various epochs of Judaic success. Solomon was a great Semite king, but to build his temple to the Lord he needed Tyrian wood that came as a friendly gift from Yafeth. Rabbi Yokhanan ben Zakai presided over the catastrophic erasure of Judean economic and military might during the Roman destruction. Still, his mission to preserve knowledge of God in the Torah academy of Yavneh was pursued with such a heavy dose of Shem that it bought the Jewish people two thousand years of miraculous survival without land or army.
Where is it all leading? Through the ages, one may speculate humanity and the Jewish people as well are spiraling upward towards more ideal blends of the three brothers. As Noah intones:
“And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall live in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”
In other words: power, wisdom, and beauty all have their place in the ideal society, so long as they are elevated by their application to the proper service of God.