Out in Front of G-d

I’ve been trying to put feelings together on Noach for some time, but the threads keep getting more woven and it’s harder to simply write something short from the tapestry.

The fact that he is righteous in a generation of violence.
That he never questions g-d, never says a single word until he curses his own son.
That he creates a previously unknown sacrifice that burns up the (kosher) animals he had kept alive with such effort for over a year in a tomblike floating box.

Noach is like the one who does not know even how to ask. And he never grows from that state. He saw a world of violence and hurt; he saw a g-d who used violence against violence. The lessons he learns from those interactions?

To kill and burn what he spent a year keeping alive. To plant vineyards so he can forget the bodies of his neighbors floating by, the neighbors who stoppered the water with their own babies. To silently acquiesce to worldwide murder.

The sacrifice he offers is the first “pleasing aroma” of the Torah, but when you break the words down that “pleasing” has more to do with calming, with soothing. It comes from the same root as Noach’s name – to rest and settle, to quiet. Noach’s sacrifice is to sooth his own self, to quiet the part of himself that believes in a punishing g-d.

To offer death after so much death seems nonsensical. And yet the world shows us this pattern over and over again. People who are hurt and do not grapple with their pain frequently inflict harm back onto others through that lens. Even Avraham nearly falls into the pit : death as a sacrifice to the shadow of his childhood trauma.

How do we break away from this pattern – offering death for death, trauma for trauma? We become like Avraham. El Shaddai called and said not “walk with me” but “walk before me.” We must learn to not let the g-d of the world, the darkened mirror of our current reality, stop our imagining. We must walk before that g-d image, we must get ahead of it, we must walk “l’panai” facing g-d. Only in this way can we envision and embody a growing g-d, greater than the limits of our possibility.