Noah and His Generation

One of the side-effects of the professorial trade is that, because you can stand up and lecture to students about Topic A, they sometimes conclude that you also have something to say about Topic B. Since that assumption is flattering to The Professor, when a student asks if The Professor wouldn't say a few words about Topic B, The Professor is inclined to say "yes".  So, here I am, about a month before you are reading this, re-reading the story of Noah. I am re-reading Noah because that is the Torah portion for the Shabbat of Parent's Weekend at MIT and I have promised to say something after Shabbat at MIT Hillel about that portion. Of course, at MIT they should have gotten someone from the Department of Ocean Engineering who could tell them about building floating zoos. Instead, they have gotten themselves the Psychology professor whose major qualification is that he cancelled classes on Yom Kippur.

It is going slowly for me. I have gotten stuck on the first line.  Parashah Noah begins with Genesis, Chapter 6, Verse 9: "This is the line of Noah - Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age." I am stuck right there. Why "in his age" (or "time" or "generation")? Why this relativistic term? Presumably, we are meant to make some comparison with the rest of his generation. What do we know about them? We know that they were so corrupt that God had decided to wipe the slate clean with a flood and to start anew with Noah, his family and all those animals on the ark. So, Noah was blameless in that age. How good is that?

"Not so good", says Rabbi Yohanan. He told the story of a man going into his wine celler and finding that a barrel of wine had gone sour. He tries the next and it is sour; and so the next and the next. Finally, he finds one that is only half sour. "This one is great", he exclaimed, "Compared to the rest, it could be called good."  . This was the view of Rashi who says that Noah would not have been remarkable had he lived in the time of Abraham. The comparison of Abraham and Noah is interesting in this regard. You may recall that when God tells Abraham that Sodom and Gomorrah are going to be destroyed, Abraham argues with God and gets God to agree to spare the cities if ten good people can be found there. In contrast, when God tells Noah that the whole world is going to be destroyed and suggests that Noah build a boat, Noah just builds a boat without a word of discussion. Would Abraham have argued?

However, as is often the case in such matters, another sage disagrees with this harsh assessment of Noah. The rabbi argues that "in his generation" should be understood to mean even in his generation Noah was righteous. His achievement is more notable than another who is righteous only in easy times. This is Satan's argument in the Book of Job. Satan tells God that Job is only a good man because he has a good life. In this view, Noah is a spectacularly good man because manages to be righteous in the midst of an unrighteous generation.

This ancient debate of the rabbis is echoed in the modern debates of psychologists about the roots of personality. "Trait" theorists hold that you are born with the bases of critical aspects of temperament, like your degree of extroversion or introversion. Like Rashi, a trait theorist might argue that Noah was predisposed to a level of goodness that looked really righteous in the context of the flood generation but would have looked merely adequate next to Abraham.  In contrast, "Situationalists" look to the environment for the forces shaping your personality. Situationalists might side with those rabbis who were amazed that Noah could manage to be righteous in the midst of an evil world. 

In the end, I don't think I will be able give my MIT students and their parents an answer to the puzzle of Noah on the basis of modern personality theory. I think, instead, that I might tell them that the phrase "in his age" is pointed at us. If Noah was going to be righteous, he was going to have to be righteous in his age. There was no where else to go.  We can seek some sort of guidance from his experience or from that of Abraham or of Martin Luther King, but if we are going to be righteous, we need to figure out what our age demands of us.

In the Purim Megillah, Esther tells her uncle Mordechai that, even though she is now the queen, she is not sure that she can go to the king to plead for the lives of the Jews. Mordechai responds that she should consider "whether you have not come into royal estate for just such a time as this?" (4:14) In that moment, she discovers what it will mean to be righteous in her generation.

It seems to me to be very hard to know what our times demand of us. It seems rather easy to miss the signals and never to figure out why you have been brought into the kingdom. This bothers me since it seems to suggest that in doing what I am doing I might miss doing what I should be doing. For me, Temple and Torah - broadly defined - seem like watchtowers from which one might catch a glimpse of the answer but I am not sure. You may have candidate solutions for my worry. If so, perhaps you could write them down. A discussion of how to be righteous in this generation would be a fine use for the pages of the Sinai News.