Noah Rainbow by Phillip Ratner
It is what the Creator wants from us: to be and manifest His Light, His will, His Love. This is sealed in His first two Commandments of the Decalogue: “I am the Lord your G-d, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall not have other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-5, Deuteronomy 5:6-9). When one denies this Truth, also denies his/her own existence and freedom, because in this denial other gods are acknowledged as real. These gods are ego’s fantasies and illusions of the material world, and they are the idols that corrupt life.
Corruption means decay and decomposition associated with death, and we can say that before the eyes of Love corruption is indeed death. The first two blessings of the central Jewish daily prayers somehow reflect the first two Commandments mentioned above, because they refer to the Creator as “our G-d and G-d our fathers, the G-d of Abraham, the G-d of Isaac and the G-d of Jacob” (…), who is our “King, Helper, Redeemer and Shield. Blessed are you Lord, the shield of Abraham.” These are some of Love’s ways and attributes: to help, to redeem and to protect; and our Patriarch Abraham is exalted in this blessing as the epitome of the loving kindness with which the whole Creation is sustained. The second blessing praises His might to “revive the dead, You have the power to save (…) You sustain the living with loving kindness, You revive the dead with great compassion (…) Blessed are You Lord, who revives the dead.” It is clear that the opposite of life is death, and it is Divine Love that eliminates death caused by the corruption derived from idolatry.
In the times of Noah his generation was dead before G-d, because living in the illusions of idolatry does not make sense in the eyes of Love. We have mentioned that mystic Sages say that water and fire represent cleansing, purifying and transformation, and not necessarily death or destruction as many believe. We said in our commentary on Bereshit that the purpose of Creation is to discover and to know the Creator through His Light, His Divine Love that created everything that exists; why then destruction should come from Him? We must understand that we have to go through transformation in the process of knowing the Creator, because revealing His concealed Presence in the darkness also requires revealing Him in our own consciousness. If we don’t find Him inside of us, how can we find Him in His Creation? In this context we must understand the Flood, the waters that cleanse our awareness of what is the Truth.
The generation of the Flood was corrupted and already dead before G-d, and this kind of death had to be removed from the Earth. Even knowing that He is the “King who puts to death and restores to life, and causes Redemption to flourish”, He wants us to choose life when we exercise our free will. Even when He cleanses us by restoring life to us, He stills endows us with freedom of choice; and it is free will that makes possible to choose the idolatry of the lower levels of consciousness, after the Flood. Love, the revealed Light of the Creator, is the permanent connection with Him symbolized by the rainbow: “And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting Covenant between G-d and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the Earth.” (9:16).
This new humankind that flourished on Earth are the descendants of Noah: “And the sons of Noah that went forth from the ark were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth; and Ham is the father of Canaan.” (9:18). A new human being emerged with three main levels of consciousness: Shem represents the highest awareness of Divine Love, Jerusalem and its Temple, and the Levite priesthood; Japheth represents the mind and thoughts related to the material world; and Ham, “the father of Canaan”, represents the lower aspects of consciousness that we have to conquer in order to be and manifest Love’s ways and attributes: “(…) a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he (Noah) said: Blessed be the Lord, the G-d of Shem; and let Canaan be their servant. G-d enlarges Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be their servant.” (9:25-27). Let’s note that Japheth shall learn from Shem, because all levels and dimensions of consciousness must follow our highest awareness of Divine Love. As we say in the book “God as Love”, every aspect and expression of our consciousness was created to discover, to know and to proclaim the Glory of G-d, which fills all the Earth. Our mission is to be aware of this Truth.
Free will once more was exercised by this new humankind, and ego’s agenda was again the choice: “And they said: ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name (…)” (11:4). A city and a tower that represent a consciousness of their own with a mentality of their own separated from the Creator. Some of our contemporary Sages define this period of our history as the birth of the totalitarian mind that conceives ideologies such as Nazism, Fascism, Fundamentalism, and fanaticism related to political, religious or cultural beliefs that pursue the elimination of diversity in the human spirit. “And the Lord said: ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withhold from them, which they purpose to do.” (11:6). This is exactly what the Nazi ideology and other totalitarian regimes want: to impose a lifestyle that does not recognize G-d but only gods of flesh and bones that they would call “the perfect, superior race”.
The portion ends with the birth of two extraordinary human beings that redirected the course of humankind: Abram and Sarai. Our oral tradition tells us that Abram recognized the Oneness of the Creator at the age of three, and ever since he rejected idolatry amid a family of idolaters and under the rule of idolaters. His keen intelligence led him to conclude that everything comes from one Creator and it is sustained by Him, hence we owe our existence to Him and none else; and Abram was willing to die for this Truth. The Midrash says that his own father accused him in a court of law of denying and rejecting idolatry, and Abram was sentenced to death in a crematory chamber. Then Love meets Love, and G-d saved him from the flames in front of his executioners, and chose him to make His Covenant; the Covenant with Israel, his descendants. With Abram and Sarai our history, Israel’s history, begins.
