Teva: The Ark and the Word that heal us from the flood

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

TEVA: The Ark and the Word that Heal Us from the Flood

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow*

The first words of midrash — textual reinterpretation — in Jewish history are put directly in God’s 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 takes on 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 rhythms and cycles of life be shut down.

The piercing humor of the brilliant Godwrestler, sage, and writer who saw God as the Great Darshan — the great maker of midrash, or reinterpretation — both bespeaks the perception of the role of sacred writing that was held by the writer who gave us the Book of Genesis, and calls us to join in this ancient process.

To join not simply with a piecemeal comment, a new twist here or there, but with something as deep and serious as this tremendous change God made in the Divine Plan.

When the Great Flood of Hellenism washed away the world of ancient Israel and the whole of the Mediterranean basin — as Hellenistic civilization swept over the economy, the polity, the science, the philosophy, the military system that embodied Biblical Israel’s encounter with God — the Jewish people went through centuries of internal crisis, conflict, 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 sabbatical year because they had no land left to give a year-long Shabbat, the Rabbis elevated and intensified the weekly Shabbat. Bereft of the agrarian cycle of the year, the Rabbis reinterpreted the meaning of the festivals. 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, they reinterpreted the role of food and mouth.

True, they kept the people’s oral focus — the focus on the human mouth as the touching-point with God. But they did this not only by elaborating the kashrut of everyday eating, but by focusing on words as the medium for relationship with God. Words to be read with the mouth, not the eyes — mouthed and called out and chanted.

Indeed, they called their new version Torah sheh’baal 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.

What the Rabbis did was draw on the Jewish perception of time as not a straight line, not a circle going endlessly nowhere, but a spiral — going backward in order to go forward. Shabbat makes our days into a spiral; the sabbatical year makes our years into a spiral; we read our wisdom from a spiral Scroll; the great Spiral of God’s entrance into human history both shatters our old forms and calls on us to birth new ones — drawing forth the new forms from the womb of the old.

And so we do "midrash": spiral back to an old text in order to spiral forward into a new meaning.

Today, the Judaism of the Rabbis has been flooded by Modernity as the Judaism of the Bible was flooded by Hellenism. The economy, the polity, the science, the philosophy, the system of self-defense that embodied Rabbinic Judaism's encounter with God has been washed away.

It is time for another Great Immersion in God, drawing from the mikveh of our rebirthing another Great Reinterpretation, another Talmud. It is time to digest Modernity without being swallowed by it or vomiting it out. It is time to renew Judaism in the light of the full equality of women and men in shaping what Judaism is to be; in the light of our realization that spiritual paths like Buddhism, Sufism, the spirituality of indigenous peoples, bear truths that we can learn from; in the light of our discovery that God and history seem to have given Abraham’s other family as deep a stake in and love for the Land of Abraham/ Ibrahim/Avraham as they have given us.

Encompassing all these, we must renew our Teaching in the light of the danger that the story of the Flood is no longer just a fairy-tale for children. For in our generation, human technology is posing a profound danger to the whole texture of life on earth, including us earthy-humans, human-earthlings — so that for the first time in human history, there is a real danger of a Flood of Fire and Smoke that could shatter the web of life upon this planet.

For we have accomplished the great task that Torah set before us earthy-humans as we hovered at the edge of Eden: "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it." We have filled the earth and subdued it. Where shall we find a Torah for the next turn of our ageless spiral? The Eden of Genesis was the Eden of childhood; where is the Torah of Eden for grown-ups?

Perhaps it is the Song of Songs, which teaches us:

Endless seas and floods, Torrents and rivers, Never put out love’s Infinite fires.

Shall we choose the fires of love — or of destruction? The fire, the cloud of smoke that rises from the Amazon — that fire is our warning:

We need to learn the name of Noah’s wife and listen to her teaching.

We need to learn the teaching of all the sages of all the other peoples who, according to the Talmud, knew when the Flood had descended on the earth.

What God needed to do after contemplating the Flood, we need to do before it happens: we need to reinterpret our Torah so as to give new life to Judaism, to the human race, and to all life that lives beneath the Rainbow Sign.

Teva, the word for the Ark that saved the future from the Flood, is also the word for "word." As Noah could not simply contemplate the Teva/Ark but had to enter it to save the creatures, so we have been taught — by the Baal Shem Tov, for instance — that we cannot simply mouth a Teva/word of prayer, but must ourselves go deep within it, to save and heal ourselves.

That is what the Rabbis did to save us from the Flood of Hellenism: they entered into the Teva, the Ark, of Teva, the word.

But just as the Rabbis entered a different Teva, so must we. After the Flood, the God Who was a Holocaust survivor could not ignore the old words that a younger God had spoken before the Flood, but could no longer rest content in mouthing them. Like God’s Own Self and like the ancient Rabbis, if we are to save ourselves we need to enter within new words of prayer and Torah, new Names of God.

What is this new Teva we must enter? To our ears, the same old Teva; to our eyes, a different Teva, spelled with different letters. We are an aural as well as an oral people: "Sh’ma," "Hear!" says God to us and we to each other. The new "Teva," which sounds the same though spelled with different letters, is the word for "Nature." An aural midrash for an aural people.

Where the ancient rabbis perforce withdrew from Teva, we must reenter Teva, now far more conscious and more loving than before. We must enter new aspects of our bodies and the body of the earth around us: new dances, new musics, new sexual ethics, new eco-kosher ways of "eating" not only food but also all the rest of what earth gives us (coal and oil, wood and paper), new ways of healing our societies and our relationship with earth.

A new Teva to save us from the rising Flood.

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* Rabbi Arthur Waskow is the author of Godwrestling — Round 2 and Down-to-Earth Judaism, the co-author of Tales of Tikkun, and director of The Shalom Center, a network of North American Jews who are working to heal the world by drawing on Jewish teachings and spirituality. Copyright (c) 1999 by Arthur Waskow