podcast #37: Parashat Noach

In this conversation, Shlomo and Elisha discuss the recent war and the role of evil in the world. They talk about the importance of studying Torah and finding comfort in their community during difficult times. They also share a story about a Hamas leader who was treated by an Israeli surgeon, highlighting the difference between those who save lives and those who take lives. They reflect on what truly matters in life, emphasizing the importance of family, values, and community over material possessions. They connect these themes to the biblical story of Noah and the Tower of Babel. The conversation ends with a discussion of the Israeli spirit and the acts of bravery and self-sacrifice witnessed during the war. Shalom Shlomo, and hi to everyone. It is Tuesday, Tuesday morning, 11 o'clock in the morning, and we just finished actually producing the Hebrew podcast, so we are kind of deep into theological discussions and when war is raging all around, sometimes philosophical discussions are helpful, sometimes they're not, but it is important to note it's the second parasha in the book of Bereshit, Parashat Noach, which is a powerful parasha, and we are in the middle of a very bitter war. We're still reeling from the bloodshed of October 7th, a week and a half later, the stories are still coming out, there are still 199 hostages, abductees, among them children and elderly in the hands of Hamas, and here we are, sitting here in Zichon Yaakov, Kilat Vahavta, discussing the parasha. And Elisha, in your drasha, which you wrote some time ago, you hit the nail on the head as if prophecy, and you write these words based on Parashat Noach. What is evil? What is the purpose of all the turmoil in our world, all the pain and destruction? What is the purpose, Elisha? We've just seen evil, which could not be imagined by the mind of man, and 1,300 Israelis slaughtered and over 3,000 injured, filling the hospitals, and 199 who are prisoners. This is an issue that you and we have discussed a lot, the issue of why is there evil in the world? I have to say that my wife and I have been members of the Vahavta congregation for some years, even before we moved to Zichon, and in this terrible time we take great, amazing comfort being with our friends, and praying with them, and dovening with them, and learning with them, and studying, and talking to them, and supporting them. And you, Elisha, as our spiritual leader, have been an amazing source of comfort and understanding, and insight, and strengthening, and strength. But we're concerned. We want to know how you are, and how you, the comforter, Elisha, how you are dealing with this enormous amount of unbelievable evil in the world. Thank you for the kind words. I always feel a little bit embarrassed when I hear them, but I'll ignore it for now. Well, since we discussed it earlier, another answer comes up, a different one than what I mentioned earlier. Studying Torah. Studying Torah connects me, connects people to a higher vibration, a higher place, a higher purpose. And I think that's a key thing right now. When we see evil, evil can be discussed on many levels. It can be discussed just like we mentioned Cain earlier in the Hebrew podcast. Cain was very obsessed with his feelings about evil. It's not fair. He said, it's not fair. How come you heeded to Hevel, to Abel's gift, and not to mine? It's not fair. That's a very low and superficial place to be, and we're all there once in a while. But sometimes, you know, there's a point that parents tell their kids, well, indeed, life is not fair. After they've finished trying to explain, and the kid will not understand, they say, well, you know what? Life just isn't fair, okay? End of story. Let's not talk about it anymore. But then there's another phase as the child grows, as we grow, to realize the statement, it's not fair, is just not a useful statement. And the higher we go in the resolution, which studying Torah allows us to do, the more we understand there is depth even to evil. Evil has a role in the world, and it's hard to bear. I know it's really, really hard to bear. But evil does have a role, and if we can try and grasp what the role of evil may be, perhaps it will be easier to bear this difficult time. I'd like to tell you a little story about how good triumphs over evil, Elisha. The leader of Hamas in Gaza is a man named Yechia Sinwar. Yechia Sinwar was arrested by Israel in 1982 and put in jail, in our jail. He served several months there. He was released. He caused the killing of two Israelis and a number of Palestinians. We caught him in 1988, and he was sent to jail. He spent 22 years in our jail and was released on the Gilad Shalit exchange. We exchanged one soldier, Gilad Shalit, for a thousand prisoners, among them Yechia Sinwar, in 2012. But before that, Elisha, in 2008, Yechia Sinwar, while a prisoner of ours, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was taken to hospital and operated on by an Israeli surgeon, and his life was saved, and the tumor was removed. Elisha, is there any stronger example between the difference between them and us, between those who save lives and those who take lives, and we now have Hamas terrorists in our hospitals after being wounded, who are given the best of treatment, like Israelis, and there's a difference between them and us, a pretty big difference. Wow, Shlomo, I have to say, I was not aware of the story. Thank you for pointing it out. That's really powerful. Yeah, it just says it all. The story really, really does say it all. And I'm sure there are people who may be listening and saying, well, next time, don't operate on him. You should have let the tumor, you know, don't kill him, because we don't believe in the death penalty here in Israel, but let God kill him, you know, let the tumor kill him. But we're so committed to life, we're a people committed to life, that we just can't help ourselves. And I find this beautiful. I find this really beautiful. And, you know, I think that's one great example of studying Torah. You know, what you just told me now is studying Torah. You know, Torah is not just understanding the linguistics of the text. That's very important. But studying Torah is studying life. Life with a capital L, you know, what life is all about. How to live, how to live, and everything to do with life and sanctifying life. And sharing the story is studying Torah. And I wouldn't want to belong to any other people, any other country or religion, following this story. So at difficult, difficult, difficult times such as these, these stories could be infuriating. Why did we save him? But I find it to be a very comforting story, because knowing that we're cleaving to life with a capital L helps me walk in the valley of the shadow of death. I agree, and I want to share another insight. That's something I've learned from this episode, this war, this terrible war. My wife and I have a house. We need insurance. An evaluator came to evaluate our positions. And he went through the house very carefully. He weighed our silver candlesticks and made a detailed list of all our positions and the value of our house. And I looked at him, Alicia, and I told him, this is of no value whatsoever. What we value is our family, our children, our grandchildren, our country, the well-being of our country, our Torah, our community, our friends, those who are not friends. Those are our values. All of this, take it away, and I will be sorry in a millisecond. It's of no importance. It's of no importance. We are getting a very bitter, painful lesson in what really matters in a consumption consumer society where our values seem to be in shopping centers. We are getting a lesson from the Torah and from life that what really matters, what really matters. That's beautiful. Shlomo, that is beautiful. And I think in many ways that's what the Torah is about and specifically what Parashat Noach is about when we're told that the world was filled with evil and how interesting it is that the Hebrew word for evil is, no less, but Hamas. The actual word in the Torah is, ותמלא הארץ חמאס and the world was filled with Hamas, with evil. One day we'll discuss that too. And what is that evil? So it's not very clear what the evil that preceded the flood, what exactly that was. But we do have a sense of it. The second half of the Parashah was Migdal Bavel, the Tower of Babel, where what the humans were concerned with was ego. They walked and they said, well, let's build a tower and make a name for ourselves. That was their grand desire. And they wanted to conquer God in a way and to prevent God from controlling their lives. They will control their lives. God will not. And very interesting because there's an act of ingenuity there. They invent technology. They take clay, they take mud, turn it into clay, burn it into a brick. They are following God's footsteps. They're creating stone, which only God could do until then. Human beings, animals could not do it, still can't. And we were able to do it. And with that great ability, they're now competing with God. Let's make a name for ourselves. And I think that that's what you're referring to when the person came to assess your worth, what you have, your possessions. Most people, that's exactly what they do. They want to make sure that they will be compensated for any damage. And you said, wait, wait, wait, wait. But that's not what's really important. And maybe that's the message that God gives humans when he scatters them. He says, like, don't build castles in the air. Don't build huge malls. Don't cherish and value possessions so much. You need what you need, and that's important. What do you really, really care about? What really, really matters? And indeed, you're absolutely right. This war is reminding us, once again, what matters. And what we can see in the Israeli spirit here, that's revealed here, if there's one, there are a lot, but one ray of light in this darkness, in this seeing this Israeli spirit, is the brotherly love, the love that's coming out of it, people risking their lives, people putting their lives on their line, their most precious possession, their own life, for the sake of others, literally. Whether it's the young man, the groom who's about to get married, who is sitting with his fiancée in their sealed room, and a terrorist throws a hand grenade through the window into that room, and he, in order to save her life, he jumps on the grenade. This is one of so many stories we're exposed to. He obviously dies because he can't survive a grenade, and her life is spared. And that is, he gave up his most important possession, for a possession even greater, for life, as we said earlier, with a capital L. He's continuing to live through her life now, and he is immortalized, his life is immortalized through his act. He's not truly dead. Someone said in a podcast that I heard not too long ago, which I loved, death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Life, there's no opposite to life. Wow, I love that. I agree. I agree with that. You know, Elisha, I have a cousin very far away, in Winnipeg, Canada, in Manitoba. That's a long way away. And he's a good Jewish boy, and follows Israel and loves Israel. And I spoke to him recently, and he told me, you know, Shlomo, he's a very smart business person, and an accountant. He told me, you know, Shlomo, he's been following the events in Israel, and essentially, we in Israel, in the past year, since November 1st last year, almost a year ago, we've created our own modern version of the Tower of Babel, Miqdal Bavel. We have two groups in Israel, one supporting judicial reform, the other opposing it. We scream and yell at each other. We don't listen to each other. We don't communicate with each other. Just like in the Tower of Babel, people screaming at each other, but they don't understand each other. And it took a very, very bitter, very, very astronomical price for us to fix it. And it is fixed. We love each other. We communicate with each other. We support each other now. But good Lord, at what price? The Torah has such wisdom, and Elisha history maybe doesn't exactly repeat itself, but as someone once said, it rhymes. It rhymes. It sure does. Because there's a key element here of how evolution happens. I'm a big fan of evolution. And in one of my drashot on Rosh Hashanah, which I looked at the glazed eyes in the audience, I'm not so sure who was truly listening, if at all. I was. Thank you. Yes, you were. I noticed that. And there are two major theories of evolution. One is Darwin's theory of evolution, which is a brilliant, brilliant theory. It is a theory. And then there's another beautiful explanation of evolution, and that's by Henry Bergson. I think we may have even mentioned him here in the past. I can't remember. But basically what Bergson is saying is that there is a process of evolution, but it's not the survival of the fittest. It is a deep, embedded power, divine power, that seeks to be manifested in the world. And the way it has to operate is through hardship and through acts of evil and through destruction. It's there that the outer, the hard outer shell that prevented any progress from happening, it cracks and something new and better always, always emerges. So, your drashah, Lisa, and often you discuss this in your drashah and shul and your promos in our study, the nature of evil and why the hell we have such evil. And so, Lisa, in desperation, I asked Chat-GPT. Chat-GPT, which is artificial intelligence seems to be our new god. And I often ask Chat-GPT and mostly the answers are not too great. And Chat-GPT always begins by apologizing that its knowledge is only up to September 2021. That's when it flunked school or was kicked out of school or stopped learning. But the answer is really good. Why is there evil in the world? And Chat-GPT says, the question of why there is evil in the world is a classic theological and philosophical problem. It has been the subject of much debate. That's for sure. But, Alicia, here are the six answers. And we can discuss which of them we accept, if any. Okay. First answer, there is evil in the world because we have to have free will. And if we didn't have free will, we wouldn't be free to commit terrible things. Second answer, greater purpose. Evil suffering serves a greater purpose. Mother Teresa won a Nobel Prize and did wonderful things. She believed this. In fact, Alicia, she opposed giving people painkillers because suffering was healing. That was very controversial. Third reason for evil, it's God's divine plan. There's a plan here. And we don't understand it because we're little ants. We're dumb little humans. But there is a reason. We just don't get it. Limits of human understanding, that's limited. So, that's related. Also, dualism. So, some religions even believe there is Satan and God. And there are kind of two gods out there. And they have a little fight. And Satan is the evil. Some Christians seem to believe that. I don't buy that. I don't buy that. So, Alicia, as a rabbi, as a spiritual leader, what do we believe of any of those, if at all? First of all, that's amazing, your dialogue with GPT. That's really, really interesting. Actually, I love all the answers. And there's a lot in each one of them. And you know what? I just want to say something more methodological. It's a great example of what just happened now. When you turn to GPT, and GPT gives answers. And now, are these definitive answers? Even though he gives six different answers. But are these the definitive answers? And as we can see, you asked a beautiful question. So, what do we believe in? And I would say, which one of them speaks to us? So, GPT can give us all kinds of data. But at the end of the day, what's true for us is what resonates with us. Now, something else may resonate with someone else. So, truth has a lot to do with that which resonates. And Maimonides talks about that a lot, that truth is subjective. And what resonates with every generation and generation? And we are in the midst of a sea change, I think, in generational understanding of the world. What's been happening, I would say, since 9-11 to the present, our towers are literally falling down. The foundations of modern Western society since World War II are falling apart. And right now, we're in the midst of the falling apart. We've spoken about that. And we don't know yet what's going to emerge. But what's going to emerge is that which will resonate with us at this point in time. Knowing that 100 years from now, there's going to be new answers. And they're going to be just as true. So, now, beyond the methodology and back to the topic itself, I can say that what resonates with me is the answer we discussed earlier in the Hebrew. The answer that Moshe provides the children of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy, sorry, in the book of Bamidbal, Numbers, the end of the book, right before Deuteronomy, when he lists all the 42 stations of their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. And he asked them, like, why do we need this long journey? We could have taken a much shorter route. God could have just brought us on airplanes, on the wings of eagles, and landed beautifully in the holy city of Jerusalem. We would not have even needed to capture it. Why this long journey? Why these wars? Why this process? Why being born at the age of zero, dying at the age of 120, and going through all kinds of hardships? Why not be born at the age of, let's say, what would you say is the best age? When were you at the prime of your life? Now. Now, beautiful. 80.9. 80.9, okay. So, why not be born at 80.9, you know, somewhere between 80 and 81? Why not? And the beauty is, it's all about evolution, it's all about growing. Yeah, you were going to say? Just interrupting you. Yeah. There's a wonderful short story by Oscar Wilde, The Strange Life of Benjamin Button. He's born old and grows younger until he's a tiny baby and then disappears as an embryo. It's actually F. Scott Fitzgerald, I'm sorry, it's not Oscar Wilde. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the story, The Strange Life of Benjamin Button, and it was a movie. Beautiful, beautiful. So, I think that the grand scheme here, what resonates with me, I'm not saying this is the truth, what resonates with me is that the grand scheme here, and evil is a key player in this grand scheme. The grand scheme is development, growth, evolution. But it's not just growth for the sake of growth. You know, a tree grows, everything grows. Growth, and here I follow the teachings of Ralph Cook and Henry Bergson too, the evolution is the evolution of the good. In order for the good to manifest in the world, in order for goodness to be fully out there and developed, it needs this process of development and evolution. And why does it need that? And back to Moshe, with the children of Israel, he answers them, why this long journey? Because God wished to test you, to put you to the test, to know what's in your heart. Not for God to know what's in our heart, for us to know what's in our heart. One of the tragedies of a spoiled kid is that the kid doesn't know his own powers. He doesn't know that, yes, you can, you can do this and you can do that, because he's been spoiled all of his life, so he's atrophied. And the whole beauty of evolution and growth is that we learn to see the beauty, the beauty that we have inside of us, the love, the power, the ability, etc., that are hidden or concealed inside of us, and they can only come out when they're facing adversity. And that's the role of evil. And how does evil do that? It presents challenge after challenge and pain after pain. So let me expand on that a bit, Alisha, and try a really outlandish idea on you. And this is one that I kind of like. There's a cosmologist, an astrophysicist named Marjorie Penrose, British, won the Nobel Prize in 2020, and he asked a really hard question. And he said, what came before the Big Bang? We know that 13.8 billion years ago, all the universe condensed to a single tiny point, a very tiny point, and then exploded outward, and the universe is still expanding 13.8 billion years later, and we were part of that Big Bang. We were part of that creation. But what came before? And some physicists say time began at that point. I don't think so. I don't think so. And others, like Penrose, say the following. We are all part of a vast divine experiment, Alisha. Before the Big Bang, the universe was created, expanded, stopped expanding, condensed to a single tiny point, Big Bang, and this will happen again. The universe is expanding now at an increasing rate. We know that. Eventually, everything will be entropy in billions and billions of years, and the sun will go dark, and everything will go dark, and then everything will collapse inward again, and the good Lord who is conducting this orchestration is trying experiments to try and create a great, good universe. And it's not working too well so far, and there are some failures and dips and dumps in the road, and there's evil, really bad evil, but that's part of the rule, part of the constraint. The divine spirit, which is all-powerful, is playing by his own rules, which is that he has created free will, and human beings have free will. And so far, maybe it's not working out too well, but sooner or later, he'll get it right. Yeah, yes. Well, okay, I want to say that I have a few comments on Penrose's idea. First of all, he is not the first one to say it. The sages said it. The sages said, you know, HaKadosh Baruch Hu. He creates and destroys worlds, and this is what's happening also in our parasha. God has created the world, and now seeing all the Hamas, that's the word in the Torah, seeing the Hamas in the world, he destroys the world and creates it anew. And the sages say, indeed, there were many worlds before that God created and destroyed, created and destroyed. They believe that this was his chosen world at the end, and Penrose says, no, no, that's just another one of those worlds, and I would agree with him. And next week, we're going to be meeting Abraham, who has a very serious role to play in this new world. But I think that God is not going to get it right. God already has it right. That's the way it works. This is the way it works. As much as we love life and we'd like to live for a long, long time, we don't truly want to live forever. If it meant staying 80.9, then perhaps we would want to live forever. But it's quite amazing that we were born, and then we eventually die, and I believe we're reborn and reborn, just like the universe. It was the Kabbalist who said, that which is above is mirrored below and vice versa. So our own inner world is created and destroyed, created and destroyed. That's why we will forever be reborn. And that is already right. Meaning, goodness is infinite. If it's infinite, then this cosmos is going to be created and destroyed, created and destroyed infinitely in the journey towards the ultimate goodness. That's beautiful. Wow. I'm surprised, Alicia. I didn't think I could sell you that idea. Well, the sages talked about it way before podcasts were invented. I can see that. Thank you, Alicia. You're welcome. So we've come to an end, and thank you. Thank you so much. I learned a lot this morning, and I really needed this little Torah study and kind of going into the bubble of Torah to escape all this evil outside. And just for us all to remember, it is bad. It is evil, no doubt. And let's not whitewash it, but it does serve a purpose. And goodness is fresh. A new goodness is looking for the cracks in the vessel in order to be able to shine. If the world was just complete and there were no cracks in it, like what's happening right now, then goodness could not shine. It simply could not shine. This is a very painful crack right now, very painful. Absolutely, Alicia. If I may close by some small piece of advice to our listeners, I find it incredibly helpful and strengthening and comforting to sit opposite you and discuss things with you. And I urge our listeners to do their own podcast, a virtual one, an unrecorded one. Find someone and talk about these issues and bounce ideas off one another. It's really, really helpful. We need to talk about things, not necessarily to go over again and again the painful things of the past. We don't need to do that. But we need to talk about our understanding, our philosophies, our values about the future. And it's really, really helpful to do that with someone. Yeah, yes. And you know, that's what the sages taught us, you know. Or chavruta or mituta. Either chavruta, study, just like we're doing now, like studying together with someone. Or mituta, or death. Brain death, that is. So yes, find someone to talk, argue with, discuss, and grow and evolve. So may we see much better days. May just huge rays of light kind of shine through these awful cracks right now. And we want to wish strength to those who are the hostages, who are kept somewhere under Gaza, in the tunnels under Gaza, and mostly wish their families just incredible, incredible strength to withstand this horrific, horrific time. And may those who suffered great loss find comfort and solace. Amen, amen. Thank you all for listening. Thank you.