Flood and Faithlessness

Noah 5779 / 13 October 2018

At first glance, parashat Noah appears to sit squarely within epic-movie territory – literally. Quite a few summer blockbusters have drawn from our Torah portion, with varying degrees of accuracy. But it would be a mistake to stop there; the Torah can be very interesting, but it has a deeper purpose than entertainment. That the flood story has survived this long, treasured by untold generations and revered as sacred literature, suggests that it has something important to tell us about ourselves and the world we live in.

Nuances in the Hebrew text point us toward the heart of the story. The key verb here is שחת, which appears seven times in the opening scenes^[1] – one of only three places in the Bible where we find such a high concentration of this verb. Looking at all three passages in context, a pattern emerges. Here, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah,^[2] and in Jeremiah’s prophecy of the destruction of Babylon,^[3] the verb שחת is used to describe one of two things: God’s utter destruction of a wicked place or nation, or the wicked behavior that prompts God’s reaction. From these stories, and from other uses in the Psalms, we can infer that שחת refers specifically to moral corruption. It describes the perversion and destruction of a previously upright way of life.^[4]

Noah stands in sharp contrast against this background of depravity. The Torah describes him as צדיק תמים, “purely righteous;”^[5] while other Biblical heroes are described as צדיק, righteous, or תם, pure, only Noah receives the combined force of both adjectives, צדיק תמים.^[6] In juxtaposing these two terms, the Torah emphasizes the combination of qualities that Noah brought to the world: a צדיק, a person who holds justice as the highest ideal, who is also תם, pure, straight-dealing in all his interactions.

If you followed the Torah reading closely, you might have noticed that the Torah never explicitly lists the crimes that led God to wipe out humanity and start over. Midrash often steps into such gaps, and in this case the Rabbis conclude that the Torah doesn’t list their sins because they committed every sin imaginable. The midrash then picks up on the one small hint the Torah offers: just before God formally condemns the world we hear ותמלא הארץ חמס, “the earth was filled with חמס.”^[7] Whatever חמס is, it plays a pivotal role in the story: despite bearing the guilt of unspeakable crimes, our Sages teach that the people were not condemned until this חמס became a regular part of their society.^[8] 

The commentaries define חמס as an oppressive form of robbery, one that cannot be addressed through the legal system.^[9] More than the theft itself, חמס represents “the flagrant subversion of the ordered processes of law.”^[10] While the legal system can protect us from overt robbery, it stands helpless in the face of חמס – acts that are technically legal but morally indefensible. Only a person’s conscience could restrain him, and it is precisely that conscience that the corruption of שחת lays to waste.^[11]

No criminal wants to be caught; but unlike an ordinary robber, who attempts to hide his crime and evade prosecution, the perpetrator of חמס need not hide – he has deliberately structured his crime in such a way that he simply cannot be prosecuted, even when his wrongdoing comes to light.^[12] 

An early midrash illustrates חמס through the story of a grocer who puts bins of produce outside his market stall. All day long, people come by and steal from him – but each one takes just one grape or one cherry, just little enough that the authorities can’t prosecute. And yet, at the end of the day, the grocer has been thoroughly fleeced, left with nothing to show for it.^[13] The story, as told, might seem quaint – but it actually represents a scathing indictment of our own society. When mortgage lenders can prey on would-be home buyers at the lowest strata of our economy, engage in well-documented fraud, and escape criminal prosecution entirely;^[14] when the pretense of religious liberty is used to strip LGBT citizens of their dignity and deny women access to reproductive healthcare; when civil asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement agencies to seize property from innocent people who lack the resources to defend themselves;^[15] when, as Sarah Smarsh writes in her recent memoir, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, “[Poverty] was increasingly monetized to benefit the rich – interest, late fees, and court fines siphoned from the financially destitute into big bank coffers”^[16] – all of this is modern-day חמס.

While חמס involves robbery, ultimately it is not a property crime: it is a manifestation of idolatry. Whereas most ordinary thieves are motivated by a desire for the object itself, or the profit to come from its illicit resale, חמס represents a cold, passionless crime. It unmasks a willful desire to take advantage of those weaker than oneself simply because one can. Acts defined by חמס not only violate stated laws, they eviscerate any sense of basic fairness. Think about it: the calculated choice to steal just enough to slip under the threshold of prosecution, the concerted effort to lobby politicians and regulators to rig the rules of the game in your favor, demonstrate that you know full well that what you are doing is morally wrong – and you just don’t care. In its wake, חמס leaves the sundered bonds of civil society; at its heart lies a denial of God’s place in the world.^[17] It is the ultimate expression of faithlessness, not only a rejection of moral behavior in its specifics but a repudiation of the idea of morality itself. In the story we read this morning, that conscious, malevolent amorality brings the world to an end. In our own story, at least, the jury is still out.

Instead of individual sin, this morning’s parshah confronts us with the problem of structural injustice. As Rabbi Norman Lamm wrote in 1963,

[The crime of lynching] is exceeded by the greater blot on our record: the methodical economic exploitation of one segment of our population, the systematic oppression of one race as the source of cheap labor and its designation as the first to suffer in any economic recession. When the economy of a great nation is built upon such patent injustice, it is a crime of avoda zara [idolatry], it is a breach of faith. It bespeaks lack of faith in God who is one Father for all humans, making us all brothers. It is a lack of faith that democracy really can function as its advocates claim for it, and is not merely a propaganda term in power politics.^[18]

When people can game the system with malicious intent, חמס corrodes society. Those who care about justice are forced to look on, stripped of any real means to remedy the injustice around them; in due time society will lose its respect for the rule of law and institutions of civil society.^[19] ותמלא הארץ חמס, “the world was filled with חמס,”^[20] until even the victims turned around and took advantage of others wherever they could.^[21] People lost all sense of decency, constantly sought to harm others, drag them down wherever possible, even when it afforded them no real advantages.^[22] חמס became the universal way of life – until all was lost.^[23]

The Torah tells us this story because חמס, the systematic pursuit of crimes designed to escape prosecution, will arise in every age and in every human society. Within its cautionary tale, parashat Noah offers us an alternative vision: Noah himself, צדיק תמים, a plain-dealing man committed to justice for its own sake. He embodies the antithesis of חמס. He resisted the moral corruption and civic degradation of his age; his unwavering commitment to truth and morality distinguished him as the man to reestablish human civilization. Through these stories, the Torah invites us to escape alongside Noah – with the understanding that a space on the ark brings with it the responsibility to build a society committed to going beyond what is legal to do what is right. We have our work cut out for us.

---