Toby Rosebrugh, Bar Mitzvah
Shabat Shalom.
The parsha for today, as you know, is the story of Noah. It is all about when G-d created this huge storm, which lasted for forty days and nights. Noah had to build this ark, which protected his family and nature from the storm. When I say nature, I mean the animals. Everyone else who lived at that time died in the flood-waters.
G-d does something else to the people in this parsha, at the tower of Babel, but that's another story. What I'm going to talk about is that I think that G-d shouldn't have started the storm in the first place. In my opinion G-d should have told Noah the same thing as he told Jonah: to tell the people that they deserve a second chance.
So the question is: why did G-d decide to destroy all the people? The whole explanation for why G-d did this is in two small verses: Genesis Chapter 6 verses 11 and 12. " And the earth was corrupt before G-d and the earth was filled with violence. And G-d saw the earth and behold it was corrupt for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth".
It is interesting that the three different chumashim I looked at have different translations of the word "Chamas". The Hertz Chumash calls it violence, the Eitz Chaim Chumash calls it lawlessness and the Artscroll/Stone calls it robbery. I also looked at a Hebrew dictionary and it said that "Chamas" is also cruelty. Whatever this word Chamas really means, it doesn't sound very nice.
So G-d is was looking at a cruel, corrupt, lawless world. This sounds really really bad. If there was lawlessness the world did not seem very safe. Some people might think that having no laws is OK. They don't like laws because laws prevent them from doing things, which they call fun. But if there are no laws people could get hurt. G-d must have seen people getting hurt and felt badly about that. G-d felt that he should not have created the world in the first place if there was going to be a lot of violence.
The other problem is that the earth and the people are corrupt. Corruption is lying cheating, stealing and being completely untrustworthy. This would be a cause of all that violence. Maybe G-d felt that these people did not deserve a second chance because if he made a bargain with them to not destroy them, they could not be trusted to keep their side of the bargain because they are so corrupt.
It looks like G-d is upset that He created people with the ability to do good instead of bad, but the people just did bad things. Since the people made the choice to be evil, they also had to accept the consequences. Maybe G-d thinks that if He didn't create the consequence of the flood, that people would still be bad even today.
So I can understand why G-d feels he cannot trust the people and that they must be destroyed. I still think that G-d should not have destroyed the people and the animals. The Torah teaches us that it is evil to destroy the earth and to murder. This teaching comes from G-d, but it is G-d who sent the flood, which destroyed everybody outside the ark, in the Noah story. I don't think that G-d wants to teach us that killing and destruction are the answer to problems. I also think that G-d knows this because after the earth was destroyed He sent us a promise that He wouldn't do this again. That promise is in the Rainbow.
I would like to finish with something I found interesting. It goes like this:
Shabbat Shalom!!