Noah 2001

In the Torah portion, Noah, we learn about the great flood. We learn how only Noah and his family survived. The word Noah means at rest. Noah was a self-contained individual. He was righteous. He was pious. He was a man of great accomplishments. The rabbis say he invented the plow. He tried to save the members of his generation by explaining to them what he was doing when he built the ark. It took him 120 years to build the ark. After the flood was over and Noah left the ark, the first thing he did was plant a vineyard, and then got drunk. Here was this pious man, this self-contained man who suffered terribly after he left the ark. After all, he lived through a holocaust. He came out to total destruction: no more Mends, no more family except his immediate family. It was a hard experience. It was like the Jews who survived the Holocaust, who went home to their shtetels and nobody was there. They were all dead. Of course, there were Czechs and Poles but no Jews. It was a terrible thing to come and find nobody. Most of them, though gathered up their courage and decided to start over someplace else in Israel and America and other places.   After Noah came out of the ark and got drunk, we learn how Cham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and he told his two brothers who were outside, "And Shaim and Yafes took the garment and put it on their shoulders, and they walked backwards and covered the nakedness of his father." When Noah woke, he cursed Canaan, the son of Cham. It seems very strange that he should give such a strong curse to Canaan that he would be a servant to Shaim and Yafes just because he saw the nakedness of his grandfather. After all, among the Chassidim today, fathers and sons go to the mikvah together every Friday and nobody covers themselves up. You see the nakedness of your father. Why should there be this strong curse? The Medrash tells us that the reason for this strong curse is because Cham and more particularly Canaan either castrated Noah or had homosexual relations with him. Why should the Medrash go to such length to describe the sin? When the sons of Noah are listed, they are always listed as Shaim, Cham, and Yafes. Shaim was actually the younger one. Yafes was the older one. The reason Shaim is mentioned first is because Shaim stands for ideas. Shaim in Hebrew also means name, and if you can name something, you have control over it. E=EMC squared, we know is the equation for energy. We can manipulate things if we understand them and can name them. We are not   exempt from them. Just because I understand if I cut my finger I will bleed, does not mean that if I cut my finger now that I understand what I am doing that I will not bleed, but I can make sure my finger does not get into contact with sharp knives. If I understand gravity, I can understand how much force I need to give a rocket to propel it so it can escape gravity. The rabbis tell us that our soul has two parts that it needs to survive: ideas and feelings. That's why Cham is mentioned second. After all, if we are changing the order, why wasn't Cham mentioned third since Cham stands for emotions? Maybe we should think that we need first ideas and then beauty. Yafes stands for beauty, and finally emotions, but that is not so. We first need ideas and then the soul craves feelings. Unless you give a soul positive feelings, it will take any kind of feelings, even very negative ones. If we do not give our body good food, it will search out junk food. If we do not give our soul positive emotions, it will seek out junk emotions. That's why today there is so much violence and sadism and perverted sec in movies and on television, because people crave emotions, and if we will not give them positive ones, they will take negative ones. Have you ever noticed how when there is an accident on the other wide of the freeway, everyone on your side slows down to see it? They crave this negative emotional experience.   Noah, when he came out of the ark, was filled with negative emotions, and he conveyed these negative emotions to his children.

Cham and Canaan reacted to the holocaust of their day similarly to how many reacted in our day: negatively. After the war, there were only 300,000 Jews left in Poland, just 10% of the Jews. There were 3,000,000 before World War Two. 150,000 left Poland, and 150,000 left Judaism and pretended they were Catholics and Poles and not Jews. Today, many of their children are coming back. One of responses of the Holocaust was not to have children. This was a terrible world. This is why the rabbis explain Canaan castrated his grandfather. We do not need any more children. The world is a rotten place. We do not need to bring any more children into this rotten place. The second response is that there is no morality in the world. We can do anything we want. It does not make any difference anymore. Nobody cares. That's why some of the rabbis say Canaan had a sexual relationship with his grandfather. These are all negative responses. The other two brothers disregarded their father's own negative response, and proclaimed that the world could still be beautiful, and that we could still do great things, that we could create a paradise here, and they took a Simla, a garment, and covered   their father. The word Simla can stand for Shalom, peace, harmony, for Massim, doing good deeds, for Limmud, learning, and also for the word Lonu, for us. We are important because G-d wants a relationship with us, and the Hay stands for G-d. In other words, there is so much we can still accomplish. In spite of everything, we can do good things. This was the overwhelming response of most of the Holocaust survivors. They were determined to have new families and do great things, and, by and large, they did. That's one of the reasons I work so hard for the Holocaust Museum because these people are positive role models for us. Cham and Canaan picked up the negative feelings of their father, and they acted on them. Shaim and Yafes, on the other hand, said there could still be beauty and morality in the world. We can create peace and harmony and good things here. We do not have to give in to negative feelings. We are so blessed today because our bar mitzvah boy is coming from a family who survived the Holocaust and Soviet oppression, and they never gave in. They were always proud to be Jews, even though it could be very dangerous. They could have been sent to a gulag for circumcising their son. They even took their lives in their hands and ran across the border of Czechoslovakia through Yugoslavia until they got to Austria. They have always been proud to   be Jews, even though they lost so many people in the Holocaust and were oppressed by the Soviets.

I am reminded of the story about a man in the Soviet Union in the 197G's who applied to go to Israel. He was interrogated by the KGB. They asked. “What’s the matter? Don't you like your housing?" The man said, "I can’t complain." They then asked, "Don't you like the food?" The man again said, "I can't complain." They asked, "Don't you like your job?" The man replied, "I can't complain." They then asked, "Why do you want to leave?" The man said, "Because I can't complain." Noah perhaps had a right to complain. He had lost everybody, and he was in advanced years, but his son and grandson, especially his grandson Canaan, were still young. They should not have seized on the negative feelings and acted on the negative feelings. They should have instead emulated Shaim and Yafes and been positive. Let us ail face our problems in a positive way so the Mashiach will come quickly in our day. Amen.