The Rainbow After the Deluge – Rebuilding After the Flood – Noah 5776
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The Rainbow After the Deluge – Rebuilding, After the Flood
Rabbi Steven Morgen, Congregation Beth Yeshurun, Parshat Noah 5776
This past Memorial Day weekend was devastating for so many of our members. Like Tropical Storm Allison, that hit Houston a few short years after my family and I came here, the storm that hit us this past May was not a Hurricane. It just dumped a whole lot of water in a short amount of time. Ten inches of rain in about six hours. So much water, that once again our streets turned into rivers that welled up over the curbs, and in some neighborhoods right up into our homes. Up to several feet of water.
I know of families who had to get up on the counters in their kitchens in order not to be overwhelmed by the deluge. Tragically, we lost two beautiful, kind and caring, enthusiastic elderly members of our community: Shirley and Jack Alter. But there were also hundreds of homes ruined by the flood - and a very large number of them belonged to members of our congregation.
Going out into the devastated streets over the next several days was like walking into a war zone, or some apocalyptic nightmare. Carpets, furniture, smelly, moldy dry wall, wood, and all kinds of personal items were out on the curbs waiting for the city’s waste disposal system to pick them up and carry them off to a dump someplace. Cars that had been parked in the streets or ground floor garages were destroyed.
I visited several homes and saw all kinds of priceless, irreplaceable items now sitting in ruins: precious letters, photos, videos, and other memorabilia. Books – lots of us collect books. All water-logged and destined for the trash heap.
But most heart-rending, was looking into people’s eyes and seeing despair, depression and hopelessness. What do you do when your home lies in ruins? When your stuff is gone – sure it’s “just stuff,” but so much of it can never be replaced. It represents your life – all the memories and experiences with family and friends, taken from you. Just like that.
Over the last few months, many people have managed to rebuild. Learning much more than they ever wanted to know about FEMA regulations, home insurance coverage (or lack of it), city and federal regulations and permitting requirements, it has been a long and arduous process of digging out from the muck. But many more folks are still struggling. They have had to rent a place to live in while still paying a mortgage on a vacant and useless home, waiting to hear if they could rebuild or if they needed to completely level their home and start over. Should they walk away from a home they had lived in for decades and try to find a new place they could afford on the vastly undervalued insurance proceeds they received? Should they hold out with the hope that they could scrape together money to fix the home? So many momentous decisions.
Starting over. It is such a daunting, thing to do.
This week, we read the story of the first human being who had to start over from scratch. Noah. Experiencing the devastation of May gives me new appreciation for the suffering of Noah and his family. And, perhaps the story of Noah can in turn give ushope for our own community.
Imagine Noah, first building this enormous Ark – which took quite a long time to build – and all the while he knows that when he is finished, the world will come to an end. Not just his own home, or his neighborhood, but everything – men, women, children, plants and animals – everything outside the Ark will be gone. Forever.
After about one year on the Ark, the waters of the Flood have subsided, and Noah and his family depart – along with all of those animals he had taken on board. Imagine being cramped up in an Ark for a year with all that noise and smell coming from the animals! Well, Noah gets off the boat, and obviously took a look around at what was left of the world, and we can only imagine the despair and devastation he must have felt. It is no wonder that one of the first things he did was to plant a vineyard, make wine, and get drunk! Wouldn’t you?
So I have come to appreciate more than ever Noah’s sufferings.
But here is the hope. He didn’t quit. He didn’t shake his fist at God and say “Kill me now!” And his family didn’t give up either. Noah and his wife rebuild their lives. Their three sons, along with their three daughters-in-law, have children. And their children have children. And within a few generations, the world is once again inhabited, growing and even flourishing. They plant crops. They build cities. Life goes on better than ever before.
Noah is the Second Adam. Noah’s wife (she doesn’t have a name in the Bible) is the second Eve. The first creation was destroyed. The second creation – after the Flood – is the world we live in.
Rabbi Avi Weiss is a well-known modern Orthodox rabbi whose shul was down the street from where Diane and I lived in Riverdale, New York, when I was in Rabbinical School. A few years ago, Rabbi Weiss gave a sermon about the Orthodox shul in New Orleans which had just been rebuilt after Katrina nearly destroyed the entire city. Rabbi Uri Topolosky was the rabbi of that shul, and it just happens that Rabbi Topolosky and I are friends and colleagues who shared three years of learning together at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Weiss, as I said, gave a sermon on this week’s Torah portion when the Orthodox shul had just been reopened and rededicated after the Katrina flood. And Rabbi Weiss described what he called “the power of the second.” “What is the power of the second?” he asked. This power, Rabbi Weiss asserted is what makes a second effort much more successful than the first. But why should that be so?
Rabbi Weiss answered his own question:
“I believe it has something to do with understanding love. When do you know love is real and will last? Loving when I’ve never been disappointed, never experienced a bump, never had a setback – is untested love. But loving after a disappointment, after a bump, after a setback – is different. If I can love you then, if I’ve not given up on you then, if I resolve to love you no matter what – that is a love which endures forever.
“That’s the power of the second creation story. Noah, after the world was destroyed, despite his hesitation, believed in it enough, loved it enough to rebuild it, [and] that world never ends. As difficult as it was to start anew, that’s precisely what Noah does – he somehow finds the courage to begin a second time.”
Rabbi Weiss also pointed out that in Rabbi Topolosky’s new shul, above the ark that housed the Torah scrolls, was a very unique quotation from the Bible. Many synagogues will quote “Build me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” Or, Shiviti Adonai Le’negditamid“I feel that I am in God’s presence all the time.” But in New Orleans they quoted a verse from the Song of Songs: Mayimrabim lo yoochlulechabotetha’ahava – “Many waters will not be able to extinguish love.”
In 2005, Steven Jobs gave a speech to the graduating class at Stanford University. In that speech he described his extraordinary career that had – to say the least – a few setbacks.
Steve Jobs told those Stanford graduates about the importance of love and loss. Steve found what he loved in life early. At age 20 he and his friend, Steve Wozniak, had started making computers in his parents’ garage. In 10 years Apple Computers was a $2 billion company with 4,000 employees. The Macintosh computer was launched. And a year later – Steve Jobs was fired from his own company! “What had been the focus of my entire adult life,” Steve said, “was gone, and it was devastating.” He could have just left Silicon Valley and hid in some secluded place to nurse his wounds. But he didn’t. He realized that he still loved the computer business. So he decided to start over again. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again… It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Jobs went on to start another computer company called NeXT, and another one named Pixar. And he fell in love with a woman who became his soul mate and wife. And in one of the most amazing and remarkable corporate comebacks of all time, Apple bought NeXT and Steve was brought back to save Apple from disaster. And save it he did. Coming out with a series of new products: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and his last achievement: the “Cloud.” Meanwhile Pixar had created a whole new genre of movies (the computer animated feature film) that began with Toy Story.
“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” Steve said. “It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. … You've got to find what you love. …”
The power of the “Second” as Avi Weiss put it, does indeed have a great deal to do with the power of love.
But I would say that it is not just the power of finding what you love in life, or who you love in life, or that you love life itself and are grateful for having the miraculous experience of living in this world. It is also about loving yourself and having faith in yourself, despite everything that seems wrong, despite the wounds, and bruises and sufferings that are an unfortunate part of life. It is also the power of helping those you love, relying on them for support, and giving them comfort and support whenever they are in need.
When I think about all the people I know who have been affected by the Memorial Day flood, I know that one way they have managed to cope with such devastating loss was that so many people came together to help out. Mormons, Southern Baptists, Boy Scouts and scores of people from across the country. But I am proud to say that the Jewish community also came together to help, to provide support, to offer strong and willing arms. They gave food, water, clothes, furniture, and sometimes just an ear to listen and an open heart to relieve some of the emotional burden.
You don’t need to suffer from a flood to have serious setbacks. So many people may hear difficult news from their doctors about an illness. Or lose a close relative, someone they loved deeply. Or they may have lost their job or had a serious setback in their business.
What gives us the strength to persevere in times like this is love. And a love that is tested by adversity is a true love. A love that will endure forever. That’s the kind of love I hope we can continue to nurture and encourage to grow here at Beth Yeshurun. Because, as it says in the Song of Songs: Mayimrabim lo yoochlulechabotetha’ahava. “Many waters will never be able to extinguish [that kind of] love.”