Noach – Torah with Joseph

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom,

Last week we did the portion of Genesis that starts in Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, and ends in Genesis chapter 6, verse 8. And now we’re doing the portion of Noah that starts in Genesis chapter 6, verse 9, and ends in Genesis chapter 11, verse 32.

And of course, the portion of Noah is another one of these fundamental, root parts of the Bible that without understanding them, we would have a very difficult time understanding the nature of man and also the character and the nature of God.

Our Torah portion starts in chapter 6, verse 9, that says that Noah was a righteous man in his generation in the sight of God. God looked, and in the sight of God, Noah was a righteous man in his generation.

This is a very important text because it teaches us some very, very important principles. But before I get back to the text, let me go back to the earlier verses of chapter 6.

The earlier verses of chapter 6: God looked at His world, and in man, and in the man’s heart, and He saw that man’s heart was wicked, evil, all the day long. All the thoughts of a man were wicked.

God Was Sorry That He Created Man

And one of the saddest texts is verse 6 of chapter 6 of Genesis. It says God was sorry, He repented, that He created man. Oh, this is so sad. It is so sad that I can’t even imagine how sad God must have been.

You know, Picasso, the great Spanish artist, painted a lot of paintings. Every day he worked eight hours producing art, and his art sells for millions of dollars nowadays. When he died, they found in his basement thousands of paintings that he never showed to anybody else, that he didn’t think were good enough to show or to sell. He didn’t destroy them; he stored them in his basement. And after his death, his daughter brought them out and started selling them again for thousands of dollars each, even though Pablo Picasso himself didn’t like his creations, he didn’t destroy them.

In our story, God created the world, the universe, and He created man and woman. And ten generations later, He looked at His creation and said, “I’m sorry that I created man.”

There is nothing sadder in the whole Bible, in the whole history of humanity, than this verse, that God repented, God was sorry, God regretted creating man—men, you and me, Jews, Arabs, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, Brazilians.

However, in this sad moment, the grace of God is demonstrated. In this sad moment, my dear brothers and sisters in Korea and around the world, He said, “Yes, but I’m going to start over.” Not to create new men and new women, but to take a man who is righteous in his own generation.

Righteous in His Own Generation

Our rabbis say that if Noah lived in the days of Abraham, he wouldn’t have been considered so righteous. If he lived in the days of the apostles, he wouldn’t have been considered so righteous. Because that statement, “righteous in his own time, in his own generation,” makes it a relative righteousness, relative to all the evil that was going on in his world.

He was righteous in the sight of God. And this is an important principle throughout the whole Bible: God grades us not in absolute terms, He grades us in relative terms.

The best example of this is from the book of Leviticus. When Moses delivers to the children of Israel the relationship of the sacrificial system to the society of his days, God says to Moses: if somebody is wealthy and he sins, he has to bring a bull. What is a bull? Five hundred, six hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred pounds of beef to put on the altar for the atonement of his sin.

If he’s not so rich, a goat or a sheep is enough. The same sin. The rich man sinned, the less rich man sinned, the poor man sinned the same sin. But God says if you’re poorer, two birds, two turtledoves, are enough.

We know that when Joseph and Mary brought baby Jesus to the Temple when He was thirty days old for His purification and Mary’s purification, they brought two birds, two turtledoves, which shows that they were not the poorest of the poor, but they were also not rich.

And a poorer person, if he brings a handful of grain anointed with oil, it has the same power of sacrifice as the rich man who brought a bull.

We see this not only in relationship to riches, but in relationship to position and relationship to God. Moses paid a very dear price for a sin that would have been considered a minor sin if somebody else had sinned it. But because Moses was Moses, communicating with God mouth to mouth, eye to eye, his sin required a much heavier punishment.

That relativity is expressed already in chapter 6 of the book of Genesis. Noah was righteous in his own generation.

God Destroys the World With Water

And God, when He decided, “Okay, I’m sorry that I created man, but I’m not going to destroy man completely. I’m going to save a family of eight people: Noah and his wife, his three boys and their wives.”

And I’m going to destroy the world with water.

We’re seeing now in our own day, because of changes in climate, floods taking a totally different turn than they were twenty-five or thirty years ago. Floods washed the city of New York. Storms washed New Orleans on the same date that they did eight years ago.

Water is destructive. It’s necessary to drink; it’s the stuff of life. But the stuff of life can also be the stuff of death in the hands of God.

Another important thing to learn from this portion is that it was a surprise to Noah and his family and to the human race in his day. Because until that day, it didn’t rain in the world. The world was watered from under the ground and from the dew on the earth.

Suddenly, rain. Rain that lasted many, many days. Rain that brought the destruction of mankind, and only eight people were saved.

Clean and Unclean Animals

Another interesting thing in our portion is the first time we learn about clean and unclean animals. Animals that can be eaten and are considered clean, and animals that are unclean.

We read in our portion of the Torah that from the unclean animals, Noah had to bring two pairs of each species. Snakes, giraffes, lions, hippopotamuses, two pairs. Shrimps and lobsters, no need to bring because they live in the water.

But of the clean animals, we learn in our portion that Noah had to bring seven pairs. That means fourteen animals of each clean species.

This is very interesting because this is long, long before the Law was given to Moses on Mount Sinai—hundreds, no, thousands of years before.

The Fingerprint of the Creator

We also mentioned the Babylonian creation myth called the Enuma Elish, which includes a flood story. This shows that inside human DNA there is a built-in memory, a latent memory in the cells of human beings, that we are not an accident in the cosmos.

The fingerprint of the Creator is in us. We all have two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth—a face. That’s the fingerprint of the Creator.

The Judgment and the Grace of God

And so we see in Genesis and in the story of Noah both the judgment of God and the grace of God.

God is a just rewarder. He rewards the righteous with goodness and mercy, and He rewards the wicked with judgment.

But God also has a limit to His grace. His love is limitless, but His righteousness and His expectations of us are real.

He created us to have something of His character, His nature. And through Yeshua, Jews and non-Jews of every race can say, “Abba, Father.”

Another lesson we learn from the portion of Noah is that even after salvation, sin continues. Noah sinned. His sons sinned. Humanity sinned again, building the tower of Babel.

This is our nature. God gave us freedom of choice out of love, not trickery.

Finally, God sent His only begotten Son, the Lamb of God, knowing we would need grace.

Next week, we will continue with Genesis chapter 12, with Abraham our father—a new saga leading to redemption through the seed of Abraham, to be a blessing to all the nations.

God bless you all.