Parshat Noah: Children of the Rainbow

Today’s Torah portion is Noah (Genesis/Bereshit 6:9 - 11:32). Though it begins with the story of Noah, the ark, and the flood, it also contains within it the story of the Tower of Babel. 

In the middle of the Noah narrative, after the flood has subsided and Noah, his family, and the animals begin to repopulate the earth, one of the first things Noah does is to plant a vineyard. He then makes wine (we won’t discuss the time lapse) and passes out drunk. While lying naked in his tent when one of his sons, Ham, enters the tent and sees him. He runs out to tell his brothers Shem and Yaphet what he has seen. They then go into the tent and cover up their father. 

When Noah awakens and hears what Ham has done, he curses him saying, “Cursed be Canaan, son of Ham, a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.  Blessed be God, the God of Shem and may God extend Yaphet to live in Shem’s tents.  And to them both, Canaan shall be a slave.”

This short passage was one of the roots of Christian religious support of slavery in America and elsewhere. For you see, one racist origin theory claims that all Black people are descendants of Ham. Therefore, in a perverted way, their abduction and enslavement was merely fulfilling the Bible's will. 

And yet, when I look at the entire story in context, I have to wonder if the wrong person was being punished. For Noah’s punishment of Ham was really the first example of scapegoating. It then resulted in the Noah commanding the enslavement of an entire people rather than looking at his own shortcomings.

I agree that Ham should have covered Noah rather than running to tell his brothers. However, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He was shocked by what he saw. Here was their father, the man chosen by God to save the world, lying drunk and naked in his tent. In shock, he turns, runs away and tells his brothers what he saw. His brothers, since they have already been warned of the situation, have a moment or two to think it through and respond appropriately, whereas Ham did not. 

When he awakens, rather than expressing shame for what he did or asking his sons for forgiveness after putting them in an awkward situation, he instead turns on Ham and curses his offspring, also Noah’s descendants, with perhaps the ultimate curse (variations of it appear elsewhere in the Torah): his children shall be enslaved to his brother’s children. And so, the seeds of the enslavement of Africans are planted.

But if you look at Noah’s behavior, he had already set the wheels in motion. We read that Noah was a righteous man “in his generation." Rashi commented in the 12th century France, that it was only in comparison with the all the wicked people in the world during his times that he seemed righteous. If he were to have lived in the days of Abraham and Sarah, he would not have appeared so righteous. This is certainly borne out by the fact that the first thing he does after planting a vineyard is to make wine and get so drunk that he passes out naked!

Not long before that, God put a rainbow in the sky as a promise that the earth would never be destroyed again. But this was not just a promise. The rainbow was a covenant, a binding agreement, between God and humanity transmitted via Noah. Yet, even after receiving the covenant from God, he on enjoying himself by drinking wine, getting drunk, and then blaming things on his son Ham. 

And yet, Noah’s curse actually still acknowledges that Ham is part of the family. He has not been disowned. Therefore, Ham’s descendents, as well as Shem and Yaphet’s descendants are all family. They are inherently equal in the eyes of God. It is only Noah’s curse which creates the the subordination of one by another.

And yet, even the curse seems to be quickly forgotten, since all of the people of the earth, the descendants of all three of Noah’s sons, work together to build the tower. When God sees what they are trying to do, God says “ “Lo! They are now one people and they have all one language and this is the first thing they undertake!”

In order to punish all of humanity for their ego and chutzpah, God creates languages so that they can no longer communicate and work together. And so their project falls apart.

One could say that it is then that the various peoples are created which also allows for prejudice and racism.  And yet, according to the rabbis, this is not the case. For we read that the problem with the Tower of Babel was not that all the people were trying to reach the heavens. It was something much more insidious.

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).”

It was the fact that the masters and the wealthy viewed a brick as more valuable than a human life which enabled the curse of Ham to truly take hold in their minds. This allowed the enslavement of those whom they know longer saw as their brother’s children, but simply as “the children of Ham,”  who were less than them and whose destiny it was to serve and be enslaved. If some of them were to die as a result, what did it matter to them? That is the true curse of Noah!

The question still remains, “how do we break this curse?”  Actually, that’s not the question at all. The question is, how do we realize that we are all (metaphorically speaking) children of Noah. Yet, in spite of that, it was his ego and self-centeredness that caused him to divide his family as he did rather than acknowledge his own sin? How do we help those who still see division as part of “God’s will” to realize that it is merely a result of our hubris which dates back to Noah? How do we help those who may still believe in the misinterpretation of the origin story realize that, in the year 2020, it really does not matter.

We know that biologically we are all related. There is no real genetic difference between what we have come to refer as “different races.”  We are all human beings. None is better than another merely by their birth, the color of their skin, or the language that they speak.

We can do this by returning to the covenant between God and Noah, and his children, before Noah went and created chaos, sowing the seeds of racism and slavery. That covenant of the rainbow.

When God puts the rainbow in the sky, not only does God say that it is a promise to never again destroy humankind by flood, but God says that “this is the sign of the covenant that I give between Me and you and between every living soul that is with you for the generations forever (Genesis 9:12).”

The rainbow is for all the children of Noah and their descendants. Not only for certain people who act or look a certain way. The rainbow is an eternal covenant, regardless of Noah and his curse. 

The rainbow is a covenant of Peace/Shalom for all of us, but the ancient rabbis also believed it was so important that it was one of the 10 miraculous things that God created before twilight at the end of the sixth day of creation. These ten things were then used later at special times in the biblical narrative. The rainbow was the first of these.

The rainbow is a sign of peace as well as a reminder that everything and everyone, with all of our attributes, are part of the greater whole. This supersedes any spurious curse which an irate and embarrassed Noah issued against one of his sons. 

Let us do our best as human beings and, as specifically as Americans, not to let ego, hubris, or the belief in any kind of superiority or hierarchy among humans guide us. Instead, let us remember that we are all children of the Rainbow, infinitely beautiful and eternally connected through the Divine and with each other.

Shabbat Shalom