הִנֵּה הֵם בָּאִים יָמִים שֶׁל שֶׁקֶט – אַחֲרֵי הָרַעַשׁ הַגָּדוֹל וְהַנּוֹרָא
אֶפְשָׁר לָנוּחַ קְצָת עַל הַמִּרְפֶּסֶת – וְלֶאֱסֹף אֶת שִׁבְרֵי הַסְּעָרָה

הִנֵּה הֵם בָּאִים יָמִים שֶׁל שֶׁקֶט – כְּבָר שָׁכַחְתִּי אֵיךְ שֶׁהֵם נִרְאִים
אֶפְשָׁר עַכְשָׁו לִפְתֹּחַ אֶת הַדֶּלֶת – לִשְׁלֹחַ אֶל הָרוּחַ צִפּוֹרִים

This is my 8th grade graduation song. It was written 25 years ago, at a time of relative peace in Israel and on the cusp of promise at the very beginning of the Camp David Summit in the year 2000.

Here the days of quiet are coming
after the loud and terrible noise
it’s possible to relax for a bit on the porch
and to collect the fragments of the storm

Here the days of quiet are coming
I already forgot how they appear
it’s possible now to open the door
to send birds into the wind.

The song is about the quiet after the storm, when you look around to survey the damage, reflecting before acting, knowing the hard work of rebuilding lays ahead.

The song itself is peppered with imagery from the story we read this morning, of Noah and the flood.

הִנֵּה הֵם בָּאִים יָמִים שֶׁל שֶׁקֶט – נֵצֵא אֶל הַחַלּוֹן לִרְאוֹת
אִם כָּלוּ כְּבָר הַמַּיִם – אוּלַי כְּבָר יֵשׁ בָּאֹפֶק אֲדָמָה
זוּגוֹת זוּגוֹת – נֵצֵא זוּגוֹת זוּגוֹת
נַבִּיט אֶל הַשָּׁמַיִם – נְחַכֶּה בְּיַחַד לַיּוֹנָה.

Here the days of quiet are coming, we’ll go to the window to see
if the rain has already stopped falling, perhaps there is land already in the distance. Two by two! We’ll go two by two. We’ll look to the heavens
We’ll wait together for the dove.

What do we do in those moments after disaster? What do we do after the flood? This is the question that this parsha asks of us. This is the question that today’s world asks of us. How do we see the world? How do we see ourselves? How do we act?

The parsha offers us a few answers and a few examples. First we see Noah. The most righteous person of his generation. He is the only person in the entire Bible described as “tzadik,” righteous. And his technical prowess and skill set allowed him to build an incredible structure that saved selections from all of creation to live on in a new world.

And yet the trauma of the flood changes him completely. The Noah we see at the end of his life is not the person we saw at the beginning. The man who saved his family from the Flood is now so undignified that two of his sons are ashamed to look at him and cover up his nakedness when he gets drunk off his newly planted vineyard wine.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explains that Noah is the classic case of someone who is righteous, but who is not a leader. Noah was a good man in a bad age. But his influence on the life of his contemporaries was, apparently, non-existent. That is implicit in God’s statement, “You alone have I found righteous in this whole generation” (Gen. 7:1)

You alone, as in you kept yourself alone, perhaps you made no effort to engage with your generation for the better. Rabbi Sacks says that the Hassidim had a simple way of making this point. They called Noah a tzaddik im peltz, “a righteous man in a fur coat.” There are essentially two ways of keeping warm on a cold night. You can wear a thick coat, or you can light a fire. Wear a coat and you warm only yourself. Light a fire and you can warm others too. We are supposed to light a fire.

But perhaps warming others and coming together has its own set of dangers. Perhaps unity can lead to its own version of destruction, as we see at the end of the parsha. The Tower of Babel. The Torah says that the people of the earth speak safa echat u’d’varim achadim, one language and the same words. They say to each other,

הָ֣בָה ׀ נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ עִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙ וְרֹאשׁ֣וֹ בַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וְנַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם פֶּן־נָפ֖וּץ עַל־פְּנֵ֥י כָל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

“Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

Unity can be misguided. Dr. Rachel Anisfeld looks at these few verses and highlights the danger of oppressive uniformity. She says, “All of this uniformity creates a throbbing, hypnotizing rhythm and a grating sense of sameness. All the people speak in the same manner, saying the same things with the same words because this is the communal refrain that has been inculcated into their consciousness through mesmerizing repetition.”

Bookending the Tower of Babel’s incredibly short nine verse vignette are two extremely long lineages. Name after name after name, individual after individual who lived long and storied lives. The genealogies stand in stark contrast to the anonymity of the Babel story itself of unity to such an extent that it becomes simply uniformity and anonymity.

נַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם

Let’s make a name for ourselves, because no one has a name anymore. The echo chambers that have guided us and perhaps supported us or inspired us on social media have also created for us a deep void of meaning and lack of self-identity. We no longer know what we ourselves believe, we no longer know what is true and what is just repeated so often that it sounds true.

It becomes increasingly clear that “safa achat,” one language, doesn’t actually mean unified, and it isn’t actually good. Perhaps that is why the word for the Hebrew language in Hebrew is lashon kodesh, not safa kadosh, holy tongue not holy language. The tongue is the organ that actually enables speech in humans. It is what allows us to express our unique selves, our personal identities. It is what enables conversation and passionate debate.

Jeffrey Stout, the author of “Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents” writes, “Our capacity to live peaceably with each other depends upon our ability to converse intelligibly and reason coherently. But this ability is weakened by the very differences that make it necessary. The more we need it, the weaker it becomes, and we need it very badly indeed.”

We are here today, after the flood, after the war, and we need to be able to speak to each other now, to see each other now in all of our complexities. We need to be able to engage in order to begin to rebuild. What tools will we need to do this work? And how can we do it amidst the trauma we all still feel in the aftermath?

Erica Brown, in her book on Leadership Lessons from the Torah portions, writes that “Noah was, in the words of leadership experts Ron Heifetz and Marty Lin-sky, a master of technical leadership. He focused on what he had to do logistically, but that ironically blinded him from seeing what he had to do adaptively. Adaptive leaders do more than solve problems. They examine causes, assess risks, and anticipate challenges and resistance. They learn the skills that will help them manage contingencies and crises.

Noah sadly could not adapt. The enormity of the trauma he experienced was overwhelming. He plants a vineyard and drinks himself away. We understand his desire to lose himself in obliviousness. Drinking might have temporarily numbed Noah to all he ignored when building the ark, but at some point, the sobering reality set in. Noah had to construct a new world immune to the moral challenges of the one he left. His technical skills would be of little use. Everything about the new world required adaptive leadership, required vision and humility and understanding. And hope.

In the second verse of that song I began with, the composer sits with her pain, sits with her companion in her sorrow, and then looks up and begins to dream about what could lie ahead.

הִנֵּה הֵם בָּאִים יָמִים שֶׁל שֶׁקֶט – אַחֲרֵי שֶׁכְּבָר אִבַּדְנוּ אֶת הַכֹּל
תֵּשֵׁב אִתִּי עַכְשָׁו עַל הַמִּרְפֶּסֶת – תִּבְכֶּה אִתִּי בְּיַחַד עַל אֶתְמוֹל
הִנֵּה הֵם בָּאִים יָמִים שֶׁל שֶׁקֶט – שְׁנֵינוּ כָּאן בְּיַחַד עַל הָהָר
הַמַּיִם כְּבָר יָרְדוּ וְיֵשׁ גַּם קֶשֶׁת – אֶפְשָׁר לָקוּם, סוֹף הָעוֹלָם עָבַר

Here the days of quiet are coming
after we have already lost it all
sit with me now on the porch
cry with me about yesterday

Here the days of quiet are coming
the two of us here on the mountain
the water has already receded and there is a rainbow
it’s possible to get up, the end of the world has passed.

The end of the world has passed. So here’s one last lesson from the parsha for us today. Amidst the very detailed instructions God gives to Noah for how to build the ark, God says, Tzohar ta’aseh lateivah – Make an opening for daylight in the ark. Imagine that. This ark was going to carry Noah and his family through hell and back over forty days and forty nights of rain, and yet they could not seal it completely. They couldn’t totally close themselves off from the world. There had to be an opening. A way in. And a way out. That same window is the one through which life eventually finds a way to continue. It is the opening through which Noah sends the raven, and eventually the dove.

The raven, because after such trauma, it is messy and common and hard. A raven is gritty and defensive, and real. And yet, after time, the dove emerges to pave the path forward, to find the budding hints of life in the aftermath of destruction. And so can we.

Netzeh el hachalon lirot, we must go out to the window and see. There is hope, there is beauty, there is a rainbow, there is a way out of here – a path forward.
Kein yehi ratzon, so may it be.
Shabbat Shalom