Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Today’s Noah

What if Noah had been an exemplary spiritual leader and not just, as the Torah tells us, a righteous person by the standards of his own generation? Picture Noah as a true prophet of his time, a man who knows that God is about to destroy the world. Such a person would have done far more than simply build an ark for his own family. He would have labored tirelessly to warn the entire human family. He would have spoken from every rooftop, announcing that the earth would soon be destroyed if they did not immediately change their lives. He would have begged, cajoled and proclaimed, “There is still time, but do not tarry, for the end of the earth is at hand!”

Avraham Burg’s bold new Torah commentary inspires us to probe the Torah’s wisdom for our own time. Burg uses his own moral and spiritual imagination to uncover new layers of meaning in the ancient text. For him, the destruction described in this Torah text leads to reflections on the Nazi Holocaust For me, the Torah’s narrative of global annihilation has a closer analog in the reality of environmental destruction, and the very real threat to the earth born of human hubris, greed, denial and neglect. Our generation faces the real possibility of ecological disaster, caused by human misuse of the earth given to us.

It takes but a small leap of imagination to transpose Noah into the contemporary context. A contemporary Noah would write, blog, organize and use media to persuade the world to wake up to impending calamity. This Noah would be driven by the threat to the whole human family and would confront our collective denial of the real dangers our civilization faces.

We have many such voices of bold, transformative leadership on this issue. Remembering Rachel Carson, who launched the environmental movement, we now have Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, Rabbi Arthur Waskow and many others who continue to sound the environmental alarm. Yet these prophets have faced intense resistance, because we as a species resist change, but also because some find it in their own interests to deny the facts of climate change.

To take the Noah story seriously is to remember the covenant blessing that God offered to humanity after the destruction. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow has written, “In the rainbow covenant God promised not to destroy the Earth because of us, but God did not promise that we wouldn’t destroy the Earth… . We must realize that God’s covenant is not enough to save us… . We have reached a point where we can undo God’s rainbow covenant at the expense of our own lives and the lives of other creatures.” (www.theshalomcenter.org)

The parasha’s powerful imagery challenges us to hear the voices of the contemporary prophets who speak the truth about impending environmental catastrophe. It implores us to wake up from our ordinary concerns to heed their call, and to act before it is too late.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg, the first woman ordained as a Conservative rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary, conducts programs of interfaith dialogue at the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning in St. Paul, Minn.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.