The prologue of the story of Noah actually begins at the end of last week's Torah portion. Parashat Bereishit ends with God regretting the creation of human beings. The text tells us, "Adonai saw how great was human wickedness on earth and how every plan of the human heart was nothing but evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5-6). God had a simple solution to the problem. Drown them all.

Something must have happened, though, during the Flood. God must have had a change of heart.

Before the end of the Torah portion (Noach), God says, "Never again will I doom the earth because of human beings, since the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth" (Genesis 8:21).  Quite a turnaround. First God says that human beings must be killed because they are wicked, then God says that they must not be killed because they are wicked. How do we explain that?

We can say that God experienced a moment of insight about human beings. (You can hardly blame God for needing some time to figure us out. We are a difficult brood.) God realized that, as imperfect beings with limited knowledge of the universe and the result of our actions, there is a need to deal with us compassionately. God realized that death and killing does not work as a response to every ill and every fault. God might also have realized that drowning us all would be unjust. Why should the innocent die for the sins of the wicked?

I suppose that, from God's perspective, none of us is entirely innocent. We all have faults. We all have made mistakes. We are all complicit, in one way or another, with the injustice of the human condition. God realized, though, and God now teaches us, that it is wrong to inflict death upon people who try to live good lives and do their best to live with respect for those around them, even if we sometimes fall short of our highest aspirations.

At the end of the Flood story, God gives some new instructions to all of humanity about how to treat each other. God says, from now on, "There shall be a reckoning for human life of each person for his or her fellow human being." Enough with the killing. No more needless death. (Genesis 9:5).

I've been thinking about that lesson this week. It applies, I believe, to any discussion about the controversy over the opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, by John Adams, and the current production at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Since the day my grandfather took me to see a production of Carmen at the Met when I was nine years old, I have been a fan of grand opera. I also love and appreciate contemporary art music, especially the work of minimalist composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams. I keep a recording of Adams' Nixon in China, which I love to listen to on long trips, on my iPhone.

But I cannot listen to his Klinghoffer. 

There is a reason that people are standing in protest outside of the Met every night that Klinghoffer is performed, and I think it should have something to do with this week's Torah portion. The opera tells the story of the Achille Lauro, the ill-fated cruise ship that was hijacked by four men representing the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1985. On the second day of the hijacking, the men shot an American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, in the head and dumped his body overboard. 

Klinghoffer was a 69-year-old man bound to a wheelchair. He was murdered for no reason other than that he was a Jew. Adams' opera attempts to tell the story of the Achille Lauro in a way that gives even and equal treatment to the plight of the Palestinian people and to the Jewish people by allowing both Palestinian and Jewish characters to express their perspectives. 

That seems laudable. I think, though, that it entirely misses the point. That is the reason why this opera should be protested wherever it is performed.

The story of the Achille Lauro is not the story of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman (a woman who converted from Judaism and is now an Anglican priest) got it completely wrong.

The story of the Achille Lauro is the story of the murder of an innocent man – who had nothing to do with the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. What is more, he was murdered by terrorists who did nothing to benefit the Palestinian people. It is the story of human beings who failed to understand one of the fundamental teachings that every human being is supposed to understand. Enough with the killing. No more needless death. 

Klinghoffer's murderers were not, as the opera supposes, basically good people who were driven to an extreme act by the suffering of their people. That is a lie. The intentional, willful and calculated murder of an innocent man served no purpose. It did nothing and could do nothing to benefit anyone other than the terrorists themselves. They only sought to give themselves an international spotlight and to aggrandize their own power. If anything, the incident set back the cause of the Palestinian people by justly infuriating those on both sides of the conflict who love peace and justice.

The fundamental flaw in Adams' opera is that it attempts to equate the suffering of Jews and of Palestinians with a situation that had no equivalencies. Leon Klinghoffer posed no threat to the terrorists and had done nothing to harm them. He was a victim of hatred, pure and simple. Whatever you may think about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the choice to use the incident of the Achille Lauro as a metaphor is deeply flawed and intensely offensive to an idea of morality. That is what needs to be said loudly and clearly at every performance of Klinghoffer. 

The music might be stirring, and the intentions of the composer and author may have been good, but the opera fails to meet the basic standard of decency that should prevail over all. There is no glory in murder. There is no equivalency between murderers and their innocent victims. There shall be a reckoning for human life.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Noah: The Redemption of God
Noah, the Silent

God told Noah about the cruelty of the earth's creatures. God said, "Look, I am bringing the Flood waters onto the earth to kill every living, breathing thing under heaven. Everything on earth will die" (Genesis 6:17). And Noah said nothing.

God gave Noah detailed instruction on how to build the ark — what kind of trees to use, how to seal it against leaks, where to put the windows and doors, and the dimensions of its length, breadth and height. What did Noah do? He got out his axe and started cutting down trees. And he said nothing.

God said to Noah, "Bring two of every living thing into the ark,   two of each form of life to keep them alive with you. They will be male and female" (Genesis 6:19). Noah assembled the menagerie. He did as he was told. And he said nothing.

Through the entire Flood story, Noah did not utter a single word. He followed God's every command. We are told three times of his absolute obedience. But he was silent. 

I want to consider what kind of hero Noah is in this story. And I also want to consider God. Frustrated with the creatures that filled the earth, God decided to ditch the whole project. God opened up the floodgates that separated "the waters above from the waters below" (Genesis 1:7) to return the earth to the chaos that existed before creation's first day. Not only that, God chose one lone human being to be a witness to the terracide. 

Noah played his part. Faced with the extinction of the human race, he never questioned God. He did not desperately bargain with God, as Abraham would later do in an attempt to save the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Noah did not argue and plead with God as Moses would later do when God threatened to destroy the Israelites for the sin of the Golden Calf. No. Noah was silent, and that silence seems to speak volumes about him. 

We only hear Noah's voice later in this week's Torah portion (Noach), when he became a drunk and passed out naked in his tent. His son Ham saw Noah lying there and told his brothers, Japheth and Shem. They came to cover up their father, carefully avoiding the sight of his nude body. When Noah woke up and found out what Ham had done, he blazed in anger against him and spoke the only words ascribed to Noah in the Torah. He said that Ham's descendants, the Canaanites, would be cursed and would become slaves to serve the descendants of his brothers — all because Ham saw his father naked when he was drunk (Genesis 9:21-27). 

What is this story about? Noah was silent in the face of world-wide slaughter, but angrily cursed his own son for the "crime" of seeing him naked. God, who could not tolerate the cruelty of human beings, decided that it was better to kill them than to allow their imperfection to continue. The morality of the story seems upside-down. It inverts our expectations about right and wrong. 

And all of it comes from saying nothing.

God, up to this point in the Torah, did not have any relationship with any human beings. God had not conversed with them since the days of the Garden of Eden; God only gave orders. Maybe this was the reason why God so easily came to the conclusion that humanity could be discarded with no more feeling than a scientist gives to washing a petri dish clean of bacteria. Morality, it seems, only begins with connection — with having a relationship and an emotional bond. 

Noah, too, seems strangely aloof. He did not discuss the Flood with his wife and children. He just collected them and put them into the ark along with the pairs of aardvarks, guinea pigs and snakes. He did not talk to the God who did not know him, who did not relate to the struggles and conflicts of living a human life. Noah was silent, disconnected, and, therefore, without a sense of moral duty.

The Talmud seems to hint at this. Where the Torah says that Noah was "a righteous man, pure-hearted in his generation" (Genesis 6:9), the rabbis comment, "In comparison with his generation he was righteous, but if he had been in Abraham’s generation, he would not have been considered of any importance" (B. Sanhedrin 108a).

This is our lesson. To be moral requires connection. You cannot live a righteous life in isolation from humanity. Morality is a trait that emerges from the experiences of caring for others, knowing their lives, seeing them in pain, having compassion for their flaws, and loving them despite it all. It cannot come from silence.

By the end of the story, God learned the lesson, for the Torah tells us, "God remembered Noah" (Genesis 8:1). After one hundred and fifty days of the Flood, God saw poor Noah in the ark, taking care of the animals, wondering whether he too would eventually drown in the waters that consumed the rest of the human race. God saw Noah and learned how to care about one person … and that opening of God's heart opened the possibility of caring for every person. 

God smelled the sweet odor of Noah's sacrifice and decided, "No more shall I curse the earth because of the humans. Their desires are ill from their youth. So, no more shall I destroy all life as I have done" (Genesis 8:21). After the story of Noah, God reached out to connect with Abraham and formed a covenant — a lasting relationship based on compassion and trust.

This is the story, at last, of God forming a tender and caring connection with humanity. This also is the story of just how wrong things can go when we allow ourselves to become lost in the silence of fragmentation and disconnection. We can treat each other like petri dishes of bacteria. We can curse our own children. We can destroy worlds. 

E. M. Forster said, "Only connect!" and it is the great lesson for our spiritually disconnected age. If we try to live only in the cocoon of our narrowing comfort zones, cut off from meaningful connection to others, if we pursue only our own selfish interests, we will drown. Always, at any cost, end the silence. Connecting with others is our only way to become human. In the end, it is our only way of becoming godly.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Noah: The Redemption of God
Counting from Freedom to Covenant: Connection

While this kind of arithmetic is an important way to make choices about how we spend limited healthcare resources, there is something disturbing about it. We don't like to say—as the calculation suggests—that a life is worth $50,000. It makes us wonder about our commitment to the idea that human life is invaluable.

In this week's Torah portion, Noach, we read the story of the building of the Tower of Babel. After the Flood, the people decided to build a tower out of bricks that would extend up to heaven. God, seeing the people build the tower, frustrated their plans by confusing their speech, causing each person to speak a different language. Unable to understand each other, the people abandoned the tower and scattered (Genesis 11:1-9).

The ancient rabbis asked an inevitable question about the story: What was wrong with building a tower to the sky? Isn't it good for people to aspire toward heaven? The rabbis read between the lines of the story to show how the problem with the Tower of Babel was that it made people devalue human life.

According to a classical midrash, the Tower was of such great height that it took a person a year to climb from the base up to the top. Every brick that was baked on the ground and brought to the top of the Tower was, therefore, considered extremely valuable—it represented a huge investment in energy and time. As the Tower grew taller, according to the midrash, its builders began to see bricks as more precious than people. "If a person fell and died they paid no attention, but if a brick fell they sat and wept, saying, 'Woe upon us! Where will we get another to replace it?'" (Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer 24:7).

The sin of the builders of the Tower of Babel was not that they wanted to climb up to heaven. They may have begun their project with good intentions, but, in doing so, they turned human beings into mere commodities of limited value. That was their sin. They lost touch with the truth that human life is invaluable, that we are each created in the image of God.

Our society today wants to do great things, too. We want to build great cities. We want to explore the universe. We want to build devices that give us amazing powers of calculation, communication and creativity. We want to amass wealth, luxuries and military security. But at what price? What objects of our own devising do we value more than the lives of human beings?

In the realm of medicine, health insurance and public health policy, we legitimately weigh how we spend money to save lives. We want to make wise choices to maximize our resources to do the most good. Using a formula based on costs and benefits is how we say that in numbers. But, even there, we recognize the dangers of putting  a price tag on life. Human beings are not numbers.

How much more, though, do we need to be careful when our appetites for power, prestige, comfort and security blind us to the value of human life? Which bricks do we mourn as the bodies fall from today's towers? We must avoid the error of Babel by not ignoring the price we pay when the pleasures we seek lead to the exploitation of works, the poisoning of our environment, and the death of innocents.

Each life is of infinite value, including our own. When we ignore the value of the lives of others, we cheapen our own life, and we degrade our relationship with the one in whose image we are formed.


Other Posts on This Topic:
The Problem with Certainty
Balak: Seeing God's Image in Our Enemies
Letting Go

The Rambam says that God is utterly unchanging. He says that God is an eternal perfection that exists outside of time and that is not subject to change. This week's Torah portion (Noach) seems to contradict that philosophy.

At the end of last week's portion (Bereshit), we hear that "Adonai saw that the evil of human beings on the earth was great and that every train of thought of the human mind was only evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5). And so, God contemplated ending the great experiment by destroying the newly-created human race. "Adonai regretted having made human beings on the earth and God's heart was saddened. Adonai said, 'I shall wipe out the human beings whom I have created from the face of the earth'" (ibid., vv. 6-7).

And then God saw Noah.

Noah is one of the oddest heroes of the Hebrew Bible. He is almost completely silent. God tells Noah to build an ark, and Noah builds without a word. God tells him to collect animals; Noah says nothing and collects the mated pairs. Noah is, perhaps, the perfect cure for God's regret. Noah does nothing but obey God.

After the Flood comes to destroy humanity, after God looks down on silent Noah as the ark floats on the sea that devoured the earth, God thinks again. God says, "Never again will I curse the earth on account of human beings, for the inclinations of the human mind are evil from youth, so never again will I strike out all life as I have done" (Genesis 8:21). 

Both things cannot be true of an unchanging God. God cannot first decide to destroy humanity because human beings are evil, and later decide never again to destroy humanity because human beings are evil...unless, of course, something happened to make God change. 

Rashi says that it was the prayer that Noah offered to God on board the ark that forced God to change (Rashi on Genesis 8:1). After the Flood, when God took in the "pleasing odor" of Noah's sacrifice, the divine quality of compassion awoke to temper the divine quality of justice. God was changed from being a seeker of perfection and destroyer of imperfection and became, instead, a God who forgives imperfection and appreciates human beings as we are.

So, we are left with this question: If God can change, why can't we? 

Why can we not allow our hearts to melt when we are angry and frustrated with a world that is so deeply imperfect? Why are we not able to forgive when others hurt us to our core? Why do we punish ourselves over and over again for the mistakes that we cannot help ourselves from making?

This is a deep question that is central to the quest for joy. If we are not able to relent in our anger, hurt and self-condemnation, we will doom ourselves to misery. Yet, if even Rambam's God of eternal perfection can have a change of heart and recognize that our human imperfections make us beautiful—not unworthy of existence—then we can change our hearts, too.

Smell the pleasing odor. Forgive. Heal. Relent. Live joyously.