Shabbat Shalom .. Parshas Noach

Shabbat Parshas Noach

And G-d spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying: "...This shall be the sign of the covenant which I am making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all generations.

"My rainbow I have set in the cloud... When the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud, I shall remember My covenant... Never again shall the waters become a flood to destroy all flesh."

Genesis 9:8-15

The rainbow, of course, is a natural phenomenon. Rays of sunlight pass through water droplets suspended in the atmosphere; the clear, crystal-like droplets refract the light, unleashing the spectrum of colors it contains and displaying them in an arc across the misty skies.

Yet before the Flood, this natural occurrence did not occur. There was something about the interaction between the moisture in the earth's atmosphere and the light emanating from the sun that failed to produce a rainbow. It was only after the Flood that the dynamics that create a rainbow were set in place by the Creator as a sign of His newly-formed covenant with His creation.

The spiritual and the physical are two faces of the same reality. This change in the physical nature of the interaction between water and light reflects a deeper, spiritual difference between the pre- and post-Flood worlds, and the resultant difference in G-d's manner of dealing with a corrupted world.

Contrary Differences

An examination of the Torah's account of the first twenty generations of history reveals two primary differences between the world before the Flood and the post-Flood era.

The pre-Flood generations enjoyed long lives -- we find people living into their 8th, 9th and 10th centuries (Noah's grandfather, Methuselah, lived 969 years; his father, Lemech, 777 years; Noah himself, 950 years). The Zohar explains that this was an era of divine benevolence, in which life, health and prosperity flowed freely and indiscriminately from Above.

Following the Flood, we see a steady decline in the human lifespan. Within ten generations, Abraham is old at the age of 100.

The second difference is one that seems at odds with, and even contradictory to, the first: After the Flood, the world gained a stability and permanence it did not enjoy in the pre-Flood era. Before the Flood, the world's very existence was contingent upon its moral state. When humanity disintegrated into corruption and violence, G-d said to Noah:

The end of all flesh is come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I shall destroy them and the earth.

Following the Flood, G-d vowed:

I will not again curse the earth because of man... neither will I again smite everything living, as I have done. For all days of the earth, [the seasons for] seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

No longer would the cycles of life and nature totter on the verge of extinction whenever man strays from his G-d. The post-Flood world is a world whose existence is assured, a world that is desired by its Creator regardless of its present state of conformity to His will.

And the guarantor of this assurance, the symbol of this new stability, is the rainbow. [...]

Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson; adapted by Yanki Tauber.

After the Flood, God imbued the world with new potential.

Full shiur at Chabad online.