After the Flood - or Before? (Extract)

By ARTHUR WASKOW
Extract from Issue 15, November 10, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. The Torah portion Noah, Genesis 6:9-11:31, is read on Shabbat, November 1 The Torah puts the first words of midrash - textual reinterpretation - directly in God's own mouth. They come in the story of the Great Flood. Before the flood, "YHWH saw that great was human-earthling's evildoing on the land, and every form of their heart's planning was only evil all the day... YHWH said: I will blot out human-earthling, whom I have created, from the face of the earthy humus - from human-earthling to beast, to crawling thing and to the fowl of the heavens, for I am sorry that I made them." (Gen. 6:5) After the flood, "YHWH said in His heart, "I will never curse the earthy humus again on account of human-earthling, since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth. I will never again strike down all living-beings, as I have done." (Gen. 8: 21) What has happened? YHWH takes the earlier text of God's own Torah and whirls it - gives it the opposite spin. The wisdom from the past must not be ignored - but now, in the light of an all-consuming holocaust, the lifeless carcasses of billions of creatures, the earlier wisdom leads to a new teaching. What was at first God's reason to wipe out the earth becomes God's reason to protect it - to send the rainbow and the promise that never again will the great rhythmic spirals of life be shut down. When the great flood of Hellenistic civilization washed away the world of ancient Israel and the whole of the Mediterranean basin, the Jewish people went through centuries of internal turmoil. Ultimately, the rabbis who shaped the Talmud saved, renewed and transformed Judaism by a great reinterpretation of the Torah. They digested Hellenism instead of either vomiting it or being swallowed by it. They integrated it into Torah - and in the process, Torah changed. Changed profoundly, though we still recognized ourselves and our teaching. Bereft of the land whose food had been the very mode through which Israel touched God, bereft of the altar where food became God's offering, the rabbis reinterpreted the role of food and mouth. Indeed, they called their new version Torah sheb'al peh, literally Torah through the power of the mouth. Oral Torah for an oral people. They asserted that this new understanding was old, for it came directly from the Revelation on Mount Sinai. Undoubtedly, it did - the process, not the content. The process of rewording, the process of midrash, just as the Torah itself taught that God needed to do after the Great Flood. The rabbis drew on and strengthened the Jewish perception of time as neither a straight line forward over a precipice nor a circle going endlessly nowhere, but a spiral - going backward in order to go forward. Shabbat makes our days into a spiral; we read our wisdom from a spiral scroll. And so we do midrash: spiral back to an old text in order to spiral forward into a new meaning. Extract from Issue 15, November 10, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.