Parshat Noach .... By DIN

 

In this week's parsha, Parshas Noach ... we find an interesting verse....

ויחל נח איש האדמה ויטע כרם 

"Noach, the man of the earth, planted a vineyard"

This happened right after the flood, when Noach and his family left the ark.

Rashi struggles with the word ויחל.....Rashi says that this word comes from the word חולין.... "profane" 

שהיה לו לעסוק תחילה בנטיעה אחרת ..... "for he should first have engaged in a different sort of planting"

Unkelis understands the word ויחל to mean "and he began" so according to Unkelis the verse translated in English would read:

"Noach began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard"

Rashi could not go along with Unkelis's understanding of ויחל since if this would be the meaning of that word, it would be superfluous, since it's obvious from how the Torah relates the story that this is what Noach "began" to do.

Either way, all agree that the first thing Noach did was to plant a vineyard and subsequently got drunk.

Chazal say that Noach from the word  ויחל debased himself because he planted a vineyard before planting something more practical like wheat etc..

Question: 

Notice that in the verse I quoted above, the Torah calls Noach איש האדמה..... a man of the earth.....

But in the very first verse in this week's parsha, the Torah calls Noach 

איש צדיק תמים .... "a righteous man, perfect"

How does a guy go from being a איש צדיק תמים  to a איש האדמה

in less than two months? What happened?

Answer:

Much ink has been spilled trying to figure out what precisely happened in such a short time ... and the Baalei Mussar have different explanations.....everyone seems to agree that Noach changed, and it wasn't for the better.

My understanding is the following:

There are two different type of people that survive destruction...

There are those who having witnessed and survived a catastrophe  literally lose it .... they lose their faith, their courage, their ambition and cannot move on, always looking back on how the world seemed before the destruction. .... 

should they even decide to somehow continue, they no longer have the enthusiasm and ambition they once had, and the memories of the destruction is always on their mind....they become a shell of themselves,

Many of those who survived the Holocaust were from this group, they lost their faith in humanity and in their G-D. 

But they lost more than faith.... they lost all trust in humanity...

If civilized people can become animals in a matter of weeks....if people who were in the arts, who were educated, who were doctors and nurses could take their neighbors to torture them, to rape and murder them, for no reason .... if good civilized neighbors who they trusted with their very lives can take innocent babies and toddlers and shoot them to death.... 

then what hope is there to carry on? Who can they trust?

and so they basically gave up....

I am not judging them ...

There is another group of people that survive and witness atrocities, this group become stronger for it ....they move forward and even though it never leaves their conscience, they ride above it and decide based on their faith and values, that they have an obligation to rebuild their lives, they continue to believe that not all humans are capable of murder....they continue to trust .... and based on that trust, they move forward .....

My father, z"l whose yurzeit is today was from this group. He lost a wife and children and yet he chose to rebuild his life from those very ashes, and didn't wait too long to marry in the DP camps of Germany ...

If you should look back in Jewish History, you will find that the majority of Jews were from this second group .... 

Unfortunately, Noach couldn't handle it ... he must have missed his family, his friends and even though the generation was a bad one, this was all he knew ..and even though, unlike the Holocaust victims, he had been told that this would happen 120 years before it actually occurred ...but when it actually happened he went into shock and when he emerged from the ark to see total annihilation, complete destruction and devastation, he needed to drown his troubles in liquor..

וישאר אך נח ... "and he became just Noach" no longer the איש צדיק

Noach lived 350 years after the flood, yet there is no mention of him again ... he seems to have disappeared ..

Avraham Aveenu actually knew Noach; Avraham was 58 years old when Noach died ... and yet nowhere is it mentioned that they had any relationship ...

I am sure that Avraham who was a "people person" would have sought him out if there was any hope that he could learn anything from him ...

Noach just disappeared and became a hermit ...

We live now in a different sort of destruction ... a plague .. a virus that doesn't seem to go away ...

We need to choose which category we want to belong to...

KINDLY SUPPORT OUR BLOG BY BROWSING THE ADS

THANKS SO MUCH, IT MEANS A LOT ESPECIALLY IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES!