I sometimes imagine what it would have been like to have
been born at a different time. In some
ways I fantasize that I could have been born in the Chalutzic generation, that generation
of pioneers who went out at the beginning of the 20th century and
the end of the 19th century to settle the land of Israel. I’d have
liked to have been one of those initial kibbutzniks, draining the swamps and
building up the land.
Or, I imagine that I would have been born just a few years
later than I was, so that I could have been born as a digital native with the worldwide web
already existing and all of that technology already at my fingertips rather
than developing as I grew up. Either
way, I was born into the generation in which I was born, and there’s nothing
that I can do to change it.
In this week’s Torah portion, as we read about Noah, we’re
introduced to him as an ish tzaddik tamim hayah bedorotayv. He was a
righteous man, he was blameless in his generation. For the rabbis, this led to a great deal of
debate as to how righteous, how blameless he really was. On the one hand, they read this “in his
generation” suggesting had Noah been born in another time, he might not have
been that special. If Noah was born
to a different generation, people wouldn’t have noticed his righteousness.
This leads into the comparison between Noah and Abraham that
takes place contrasting these two biblical figures in the way that they
behaved. Ultimately the rabbis seem to
conclude that Abraham was the more righteous person and that’s why the covenant
of the Jewish people started with him.
But I think this misses the important point about saying “in
his generation”. Noah was born in a
generation which was so bad, so wicked, so evil that God decided to destroy the
whole earth, save for Noah. And, in that
generation, he was still worthy of being described as tzaddik righteous and tamim blameless. Perhaps we should therefore
elevate Noah even further, because in the situation in which he found himself,
to be righteous and blameless was a very impressive state.
Noah therefore comes as a reminder to each one of us,
that it doesn’t matter how we would have behaved had we been born 50 years
earlier, or how we would have behaved had we been born 50 years later, we’re born
into the context in which we are born and we have to make the best of it,
living our lives in a way which can be described as righteous. We don’t choose when we are born but we
choose how we live our lives and what we do with that birth. In his context, Noah was the one man worthy
of saving the world and for that, he was righteous then and we should still
consider him righteous today.
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