This sheet on Genesis 7 was written by Rory Katz for 929 and can also be found here
Today is the 39th day of flooding.
I decide to take another walk to the other end of the Ark. I take deliberate steps, both to savor the opportunity to stretch but also to avoid trampling any of the creatures who have become my closest companions. At last, moving past the pigeons, I reach the far wall and the Ark’s one window. I puff steamy air onto the glass, use my palm to wipe it clean-ish, and peer out.
Having lived my life amidst caked clays and grasses, I had never seen even a pond, or a lake. Now the land, the one that I had known, is hidden away beneath the murky waters. Just the peaks of the tallest mountains are still visible, but they too fall slowly beneath the water’s surface.
When eventually the waves extend high enough to reach the grey-blue sky, it is like an eclipse. Like quiet grief.
All that remains of my Earth is inside here, in my gopher-wood box-raft, this ark that cannot be steered. It hovers between the sea-waters below and the sky-waters above. Between the world that was and the world to come. We are a floating time capsule.
Yes, this flood will become famous. For millennia, it will be referenced in study halls, in newspapers, in poetry, in everyday speech.
But a true disaster—natural or not—is not an archetype. It can’t be for any of us who saw our homes destroyed and who fled our land with just a box of memories to buoy us.
When our feet touch land again, it is no longer freshly baked earth watered by the grace of dew. It is broken by rivers flowing over cracks and crests like spilt blood. The ground hurts. Still God asks each of us to live on, to be fertile.
Rory Katz is a Rabbinical Student at JTS, where she was awarded the Gladstein Fellowship in Entrepreneurial rabbinics. She earned a BA from Vassar College in philosophy.
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