"All this and just 'perhaps'?!" : Thoughts on Parashat Noach - Rabbi Talia Avnon-Benveniste

On Shabbat at 6:29am on the morning of Simchat Torah, we woke up to a changed country. Various portents in the heavens and the earth foretold of the great disaster that was approaching. We did not yet know its magnitude. Eerily, in a literal translation of the verse in Noah, the ark of our land was breached before our eyes and filled with Hamas. Until then we had concerned ourselves with the sun. We ourselves were "sunny,” seeing the sun rise each morning, bringing life, and not considering the clouds. But we will never be able to erase the traces of darkness that have remained in our souls since that day.

Thus begins a turbulent portion in the Bible, Parashat Noah, which we return to read this week, just a few days (so it seems) after beginning a new cycle of Torah reading, and mere moments after the quiet, melancholy hakafot of Simchat Torah.

And the portion writes of an ark of gopher wood that became the protected space. Of the remnant of life that existed beneath God's heavens in the generation of innocent Noah:

And so, for forty days and forty nights–for 12 months–the ark was tossed in turbulent waters while the earth around it was destroyed.

And the land that had been until then Eden's soil – lands of fields and orchards, lands where animals grew, lands of hiking and rest, lands of valleys and mountains, lands of village paths, and lands of wheat, dates and anemones–that land became, beneath the ark, a land of graves.

And for forty days and forty nights, and for an entire year, came fierce rains from the heavens, as it is written:

The Bible spares us the stories of those who tried to survive and failed. But these images remain in our imagination. And all that remained from that flood and destruction was just an ark, and few lives within it.

God spoke so few words then. We already know from the Book of Chronicles that during difficult events God tends towards silence. And indeed, when the storm broke and from the ark came sounds of deep wailing, God's response was the sound of silence.

Tractate Menachot states:

and adds: "Speech cannot occur with one letter, until two or more letters gather to become a word (tevah)." And in the Torah portion there is another word – God's word– and it is a word of 2 letters: “צא” ("Tzei"): "Go out from the ark." "Go out," God says to Noah, just after the great wind subsided.

Two letters that make a word. Two letters that are the universe born after the great and terrible noise. Or as the prophet Isaiah called: "...saying to the prisoners, 'Go out,'... to be a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to apportion the desolate heritages."

And thus God says to Noah, simply, "Go out:" Go out to establish a darkened land, go to inherit desolate territories. "Go out from the ark."

Perhaps you might say that two letters are not enough to go out and see burnt landscapes, destroyed houses, the broken roofs of cowsheds or chicken coops. That two letters are not enough to open a window and emerge into another life.

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A few days ago, during a particularly difficult day from the past year, we awoke to yet another morning in a land of war. That morning, various portents in the heavens and earth foretold of a long battle-flood. And that morning, in this land, I searched for a window. I read Tractate Chagigah 4b and there I discovered the following story:

The sages sit and share with each other the verses that cause them to weep. Each reads their chosen verse and breaks down at different points. And then Rav Ami reads the third chapter of the Book of Lamentations and arrives at the verse:

"Let him put his mouth in the dust; perhaps there may be hope." Sixty-six verses are in this chapter, three for each letter, and right at its center, at the very core of the lamentation, a window: "perhaps" "there is" and "hope."

"Let him put his mouth in the dust." The mouth is full of dust and mourning. And still: "perhaps there is hope."

And Rav Ami asks: "All this and just 'perhaps'?!"

This is the moment when he breaks. Not from the dust in the mouth, not from the depth of the tragedy, not from the ongoing reality that is all like dust in the mouth, but from the "perhaps." "All this and just 'perhaps'." After all this – all we have left is just maybe? Not the certainty that things will be better. That a “sunny” day will come again...

No. There is only "perhaps." "Perhaps there is hope.”

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Shabbat Parashat Noah 5785 will mark a year of destruction. A year of war. We will awake to a tormented land. A land crying out for love. Various portents in the heavens and earth will announce: "All this and perhaps" – "perhaps there is hope." And we do not yet know its magnitude. We will hold onto the knowledge that after "all this," there is perhaps.

And we will descend and pass before the ark: the ark of the Tablets of the Covenant. The Torah of hope.

And we, the many rabbis doing justice in a magnificent rainbow of colors, will hold fast to the faith that, although we cannot eliminate the clouds of loss that remain in our souls, our footsteps will be, after all this, perhaps. An eternal hope.

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