(This dvar torah was originally presented in October, 2000)
 
 

 There’s a Hasidic story about a hasid who was about to make a pilgrimage to spend time
with his rebbe.  “What are you going to learn from the great rebbe?” asked one of the hasid’s
friends.  “Devekus?  Kabbalah?  The secrets of the Torah?  The mishna, the gemara, the teachings
of our sages?”

 “No,” answered the hasid.  “Mostly I want to learn how the rebbe ties his shoes.”

 Ah!  The Hasidic story.  It resonates with a form of spirituality many of us feel, intuitively
and intellectually, today.  That’s right -- you can learn more from watching the mundane acts of a
sage than from the Doctor of Philosophy, with a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee.
“One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man/ Of moral evil and of good/ Than
all the sages can.”  So says Wordsworth.  And the Indigo Girls.  And so, concurrently -- with the
right training, the right orientation, the right turning of the mind -- we can be in constant contact
with the ayin as much when we are doing the dishes as when we are learning, or davening, or
committing acts of lovingkindness -- the three pillars upon which the world rests.  Because God is
everywhere, every moment is a potential moment of contact with the Ineffable.

 Right?

 Actually, I think our Jewish sources are ambivalent on this point, ambivalent at best,
really.  Because what the panentheism of Hasidism necessarily leads to is a form of Quietism --
essentially, the belief that one need only open one’s mind to have the Infinity of the eternal fill the
soul.  “Without going out of my door/I can know the way of Heaven.”  So says the Tao te Ching.
And the Beatles.  And if you can have ultimate knowledge in your living room, why leave?  Why
do anything to change the world, or attempt to alter the flow of life in the universe?

 Quickly we see that Quietism, which appears in many forms of Buddhism and Taoism, has
a necessary result: submission to the Way of God.  God is everywhere, everything is equally good
-- the peasant’s little hut and the nobleman’s castle.  A convenient little doctrine, this opiate of the
masses.  But let’s be more sympathetic.  “Desire is the root of suffering,” said Gautama Buddha,
and I believe him!  Some of my most beautiful ‘spiritual’ moments have been when I stopped
investing everything in the world with my ego, with my wants and needs.  Cleansed of ego, the
world appears as it really is -- infinite, and beautiful.  If we stop wanting the world to constantly
conform with our wishes of what it could be, we can gain a truly deep sense of acceptance and
love of the world as it is.  Quietism has its appeal.

 In fact, all this is actually about this week’s parsha.  (Yes!)  Because I want to suggest that
Noah typifies the Quiestic ideal, and yet the Torah categorically rejects his Quietism in favor of
the Activism of Abraham.

 Noah is, as we know, instructed by God to build an enormous ark for the select few
creatures God is going to save from destruction.  And he obeys, he listens.  He gets to work, and
builds the ark.  Note that Noah doesn’t argue for the millions of living things God is going to
slaughter, as Abraham might (recall, of course, Abraham’s famous bargaining session with God
over the number of righteous people necessary to save Sodom from annihilation).  He is accepting
of God’s will, and submits to it unquestioningly.

 Notwithstanding this akedah-like fidelity, there are more than a few clues that Noah is no
Abraham, that he is not the Jewish paradigm for goodness.  The sages debate the linguistics of the
description of Noah in the very first line of the parsha -- ish tzadik tamim haya b’dorotav.  Does
this phrase mean that Noah was righteous and simple/perfect *for* his generation, or *despite*
his generation?  There is no definitive answer.  But certainly, after the Flood is over, Noah’s
behavior is questionable – the Torah goes out of its way to relate his planting a vineyard, getting
drunk, and getting naked.  (Our commentators color the tale quite vividly, in fact...)

 Even before then, however, Noah’s Quietism, his passivity, is disturbing.  Avivah
Zornberg has pointed out how silent Noah is throughout the Flood story.  He says nothing, not to
God, not to anyone.  (Even Abraham at his most Quietistic, in the Akedah, says “Hineni,” here I
am.)  But even more: Unlike Abraham, Noah doesn’t seem to try to save anyone.  The dimensions
of the ark, Zornberg points out, following midrashic commentators, are enormous; Noah is
constructing a vast, vast edifice that would surely provoke questions from the curious as to what
Noah is doing.  Kal v’chomer if we follow the midrash that has Noah taking 120 years to build the
ark, from the planting of cedar trees to the final hammer blow.  In all that time, working on the
world’s largest conversation piece ever, didn’t Noah say *anything* to his fellow human beings?
Bad enough he didn’t argue with God -- didn’t he at least try to cajole his fellow man to change
his behavior?  Even Jonah said “Forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”  Maybe Noah, like
Jonah, didn’t *want* the people to repent, didn’t want God to hold back punishment.  Or maybe
Noah -- unlike Jonah -- simply didn’t want to challenge God.

 Contrast Noah’s behavior with Abraham’s.  If Noah is the paradigm of Quietism, Abraham
in his bargaining for the people of Sodom is that of Activism.  Noah, we might imagine, is filled
with the ruach elohim as he does God’s bidding.  But Abraham is an independent ego: he stands
up to God, argues with God.  Even before the Sodom debate, our midrashic sources imagine
Abraham (then Avram) trying to argue his way out of God’s first commandment to him -- lech
lecha.  Nechama Leibowitz cites Rashi (I think) as putting words into Abraham’s mouth in the
first few lines of lech lecha.  Go out from your country, God says.  But my country is my
homeland!  Abraham replies.  Yes, out of your homeland too, says God.  My homeland, but what
about of my father’s house!  Yes, out of your father’s house.  Perhaps this is why the akedah was
a necessary travail for Abraham; he had stood up to God so many times, he had to be tested.
That’s why the suspense in the akedah is so strong -- Abraham is such a powerful figure; so much
seems at stake.  He might not actually do it.  But can you imagine Noah in the akedah story?
Where would be the interest?  Of course he would do it; it wouldn’t be a test at all.

 On the cosmological level, Abraham in the Kabbalistic schema represents hesed, which
beyond mercy encompasses activity, extension, going-out (lech lecha), a potency of expansion.
Noah is more like Yitzhak, associated with gevurah, contraction -- and also din, judgment.
Abraham by his extension of his self-ness against the Infinity of God brings about righteousness
and love into the world.  Noah does not extend himself; he has no love, it seems, for his fellow
human beings, even if he is ‘close to God’ in accepting with equanimity the Divine decree.  (Even
Jonah, I would argue, is closer to the Jewish ideal; although he is ultimately, utterly wrong in
foreclosing the possibility of forgiveness, he may be right in refusing to be the agent of what he
perceives to be injustice.)

 Many commentators on religion have noted the relative (though not total) absence of unio
mystica in Jewish mysticism, as compared with Eastern, Islamic, and Christian mysticisms.  Where
a Hindu seeks to unify atman and brahman, lose the individuality in the All, the Kabbalist more
often than not retains a sense of self even in the heights of mystical ecstasy.  Yes, ahdut, mystical
union with God, exists in the Kabbalah.  But it is not ahdut but devekut, “cleaving,” that is the
ideal.  The distinction is subtle, but significant.  In devekut, I attach myself to the Other -- but I am
still myself, to some extent, even if the distance between me and God is zero.  God is Here, but so
am I.

 And so are other people.  Judaism does not generally venerate the hermit who retreats to
the forest to commune with God; it venerates the individual who leads a community, or commits
acts of lovingkindness, or is hospitable.  In its 20th century incarnations, Judaism became a
resource for social activists who saw in our tradition a mandate to improve the lot of the least
fortunate.  This is not Quietism -- it’s activism, in the secular and theological senses of the term.
It’s a lot of ego-work -- you don’t defeat the malefactors of great wealth by staying at home and
thinking -- but, like Abraham’s, it’s ego-work that furthers the spread of love throughout the
world.  True love, in the Jewish idiom, is extension beyond the self.  It’s not losing myself in You
and, worse, expecting You to lose your individuality into Me.  It’s the coming together of the I
and the You (Buber), the self and the Other (Levinas), the meeting of both in the transitory
moment of the Eternal.

 This is mirrored in what God requires of us as Jews.  Noah’s brit after the Flood requires
nothing of Noah at all; it’s basically just a promise from God not to destroy the world again.  But
Abraham’s brit -- as elaborated on throughout the Torah -- requires more; it requires that we do
mitzvot, that we keep our end of the bargain, that we act not as drones or erased-selves but as
individuals, actively asserting ourselves in the material world.  I hope I’ve made it clear that I find
this modality of Jewishness troubling; there is an extent to which we necessarily distance
ourselves from God by maintaining our egos even at the moment of our love’s consummation.
And on a more mundane level, there is something deeply appealing about a community of quiet
Buddhist monks contemplating the impermanence of existence, as opposed to a community of
raucous Jews davening, talking, thinking of stories and myths and matter.  At the same time,
though, recognizing the difference between ourselves and the Other in earthly and in sacred love
raises the stakes; it makes the encounter dramatic.  And transforming the world in which we live
demands an acceptance that this world, though fleeting, matters.

 Noah fails as a Jewish hero because he dissolves his ego into the will of the Divine --
precisely the ideal I described earlier, and the paradigm of certain strains of Buddhism popular in
America today.  (Although, it should be noted, most forms of Buddhism practiced around the
world venerate bodhisattvas, Buddha-like figures who turn from Nirvana to our world of Samsara
out of compassion for the suffering of living creatures.)  We speak of “losing ourselves” in joy, in
ecstasy, in contemplation.  And yet if we lose ourselves, we lose our ability to question God’s
plan and wrestle with God, and in the very exercise of our audacious Jewish chutzpah, increase
the spread of hesed in the world.  We are God’s agents precisely when we question God’s will --
with the conscience and love the Omnipresent has planted within each of us.
 
 
 
 

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