Podcast #91: Parashat Noach

The speaker discusses the idea of recuperating from the holidays and being in the middle of a war. They mention the names of soldiers who were killed and the number of children left behind. They also mention a Drashah from a book that discusses the concept of evil and how it relates to current events. The speaker then discusses Parshat Noach and the themes of evil and genealogy. They talk about the importance of knowing where we came from and how we can deal with evil. The speaker also explores the origins of the word "evil" in different languages and suggests a correlation between evil and evolution. They conclude by discussing the Jewish people and their evolution as a cohesive and value-driven society. Good morning Alisha, good morning to our listeners, good morning everyone and we are recuperating, I don't know from what, there is so much to recuperate from, we are certainly recuperating from the holidays, from the high holidays, from the Tishrei holidays, that's it, we are finally after the Chagim, which is a very common idiom in Israel, everything comes to a standstill during the month of Tishrei and everyone says, yeah, after the Chagim, after the Chagim and finally here we are, after the Chagim and yet we are also still in the middle of a war, so after the Chagim but in the middle of a war and every day we are informed of more soldiers who were killed and it's incredibly painful. Yesterday Alisha, the television channel did something unusual, they mentioned the names of the five soldiers who were killed in Lebanon but they also mentioned the number of children they left behind as orphans, 56 children left behind when the father was killed in Lebanon, it was very touching and Alisha, I have chosen to brush up for our Hebrew and English broadcast and from your book and the book was published over a decade ago and the Drashut, the sermons in them come from even before that, something amazing happened here and that is this 10-year-old Drashah or 15-year-old Drashah is incredibly relevant as if it were written yesterday dealing with this 800-ton gorilla in the room, the notion of evil, the evil that we are facing. So to quote your Drashah from your book, your collection, the more the Middle East reality surprises us with newer forms of evil, I'll say that again, the more we question our fundamental truths. Could it be that our entire value system is flawed? What is it with God's world, is he around, is he listening? What is this about Alisha? It's about Drashah that you use in your book and the event that happened that was pure evil, three young men were kidnapped in the West Bank and taken hostage and killed, murdered and it deeply shocked the people of Israel because it was senseless, pure evil. So Alisha, I think this is a theme that we're dealing with now and we will deal with it for quite some time to come, you and I together here in the podcast, what in the world is God thinking? And we're discussing Parshat Noach, the second Parshah in the Torah, by the way it's the longest in terms of psukim, 153 psukim, second longest in words, 1861 words and a great deal of Parshat Noach, the story of Noach, a great deal of it is taken up with genealogy. This person begat that, that person and all the way down the chain and I think there's a reason for that. We human beings, we need to know who we are, we're searching for who we are and that helps us to know who we came from because half of my dreams are from my father. Very short story, Alisha and then I'll shut up, yesterday I was in the dentist's chair, I got a crown on my tooth, dentist did a wonderful job, it's a little uncomfortable, a little bit of pain and as I'm in the chair and she's drilling and messing around in my mouth, I had this vision, I had the vision of my father, my late father, Nachnamendo and I was with him in the hospital at the end of his life and from time to time, a nurse would come in and she would prick his finger or give him some kind of injection and it was painful and he never complained and invariably, Alisha, after the nurse was done, he would look at her and say, thank you, which is a little unusual, a lot of people don't say thank you after they're getting pricked or their finger is pricked and he is who I am, essentially, it occurred to me then, so much of our behavior, maybe that's true of you as well, I'm fortunate to know your dad and boy, there are similarities, Alisha. Yeah, there certainly are similarities and you're right, it's really interesting, you bring so many issues up, you're raising so many issues and just to remind the context of the conversation, Babashat Noach, as you said, and it deals with evil, God is disappointed, God regrets creating the human beings and maybe even the whole world and brings destruction and starts again and then regrets destroying the world on behalf of human beings and promises never to do that again, so there's a question of evil and God's stand on evil and why did God permit evil and why did God create the world in which there is evil and then there's the issue of genealogy, which is really interesting and it's interesting to note that there are exactly ten generations from Adam to Noach and ten generations from Noach to Abraham, which I think is part of the answer to this question, both to genealogy and to evil, that first of all, the first ten generations leading up to Noach, there was no Torah, there was no moral code, we simply were guided by our, I don't know if it's our nature or guided by something or other and that did not work out very well and then came Noach, who, the world was destroyed in his days and he started all over again and evil persisted. The question comes up again, so that didn't work either, destroying everything and restarting, still not working. Ten generations later, the solution comes in the form of Abraham, having a human being who is conscious of God and conscious of a higher calling, of a moral code and it's the beginning of a human moral code in humanity. So maybe the genealogy is important to kind of show us how we evolve, maybe how, continuing what you were saying, we're all, you said you're half the genes are your dad's genes and half of our collective genes are from Adam and half of our collective genes are from Eve or you could say since Eve and Adam were originally one, all of our genes are originally from Adam and Eve. So to know that we have it all inside of us, we have curiosity just like Eve had when she ate from the tree of knowledge. We have jealousy just like Cain had when he killed Abel. We have it all, we have evil inside of us, we have all and the question is then what do we do with it and how do we deal with our evil and Abraham may be the answer to that and Abraham actually appears at the very end of parashat Noach. People think he appears first next week in parashat Leflecha, but no, he, after that one begat, that one begat, begat, begat, Abraham appears, Sarah, his wife Sarai, she's so sorry, is barren and Abraham's father takes them all off on a journey, on a journey to the land of Canaan, to the land of Israel and then the parasha ends and next week we're going to go in depth into the stories of Abraham. So I think there's, on the one hand, know where you came from, know what's in you, you have all these stories inside of you, all these genes inside of you and what are you going to do about it. So I want to talk about this issue of evil Elisha because parashat Noach is incredible, God regrets creating the world, he says it, there is unbridled evil, everything is evil in the world, all the people are evil and God says to himself why did I do this and of course we have to ask that question as well, what's going on here, why in the world would God create evil and I think I have a small explanation Elisha, you tell us, you teach us that you have to explore the words, the meaning in words, the world was created with words. So I looked up the word evil, where does the word evil come from? In English. In English, the word evil, in Hebrew Roa and it has clear meaning in Hebrew but not in English, Elisha the English, most English words come from Latin but not evil, evil is an old German word and it's called Eishel, Eishel, evil, it's a strange origin and it's not a common word, I looked it up in Yiddish, what is the Yiddish word for evil? There is really no word in Yiddish for evil, the translation is Bez but Bez is not evil in Yiddish. What is Bez? Bez is, why are you frowning on me, Bez is like why are you frowning, why are you upset with me, it's not really evil and there is no word in Yiddish for real evil. There is another word Elisha, evolution, you mentioned evolution which is part of genealogy, how we evolved, how I evolved from my father. Think about it Elisha, evolution contains the letters of evil, E-V-I-L, they are in evolution. This is my explanation for the evil that exists in the world. It's the only way that the human race and all living things progress, plants and animals. We progress through the evolutionary mechanism driven by evil, why? Elisha, we have global warming, the seas are warming, there are creatures, living creatures in the sea, they have real trouble with that, the whales are having trouble, they need the cold water and some species are disappearing because they can't deal with it. But some species will thrive, they will evolve because their genes mutate and it adapts them to the warmer water in the ocean. So the evil, global warming is an evil but it's going to create species that are adapted through evolution able to survive the evil and I think that's true of human beings as well. Nietzsche said this, it's been misinterpreted, that which does not kill us makes us stronger. That's literally true according to Darwin and Darwin as I mentioned before, Darwin had a theory of individual evolution, survival of the fittest and then he was attacked for that and he wrote a new book, another book, disregarded largely, about social evolution, communities that are stronger because they are more cohesive, they evolve in order to become stronger and survive challenges around them and that's us Elisha, that's the Jewish people. We are creatures of individual evolution, everybody is, but I think mainly we're creatures of social evolution and it didn't just happen, it was guided by the rabbis, by our sages as you mentioned. So we Jews, we are not just Torah Jews, we are Torah Jews as interpreted by our brilliant sages and evolving society to become more cohesive and more value driven. Okay, very interesting, very, very interesting. Do you know if there is an official correlation between evil and evolution? Absolutely. Every time there is a mutation, it's a mutation that responds to something. If it doesn't respond well, it disappears. What does it respond to? It responds to something bad that happens. The temperature goes up or some other thing, but yes, evolution is a response to evil and it's supposedly random, but really it's not. No, no, it's not random, cannot be random. Okay, so very interesting. So basically what you're suggesting is that perhaps we even need evil to push evolution forward. If evolution is the way that we find solutions to problems, then we need problems in order to evolve, in order to grow. Well said, exactly, exactly. And I think it's a very Jewish statement because I really think that when you look at the evil urge, Yetzir Hara. Yetzir Hara in Jewish text is really interesting. It's very different from Christianity. In Christianity, Yetzir Hara needs to be eradicated, needs to be overcome in every possible way. Sexuality is evil and ideally one should be celibate, ideally. And in Judaism, Yetzir Hara is considered to be the life force. Yetzir Hara is the life force. In other words, evil, the evil urge is the life force that moves everything forward. Exactly. And by the way, in Yiddish, very often you don't say Yetzir Hara. In Yiddish you say Yetzir, the inclination. In other words, it stands alone and without a judgment. And Yetzir is not even necessarily inclination. Yetzir is creativity. Yetzir comes from the word Yetziratiyut, creativity. So creativity comes from this evil. We don't even have to say any more evil, just say creativity. And here we are actually speaking about how evil sets growth into motion. I have a little scientific finding, Elisha. This happened just this week and it's relevant to Parshat Noach. It's relevant to genealogy. So Elisha, in the process of creation, all living things, all vertebrates, all living animals procreate with sperm and ovum. The ovum is the egg and the sperm is the cell that fertilizes it. And there is a question that has puzzled scientists for many generations and many decades. The cell has a very tough wall. Human cells have a tough wall. They don't just let anything in, because if they did, we'd be dead. Like the COVID virus has a big spike as a spear, and it spikes the cell to get inside and reproduce. So how does it happen that sperm, these little wiggly sperm, they have big heads and a little tiny wiggly tail, that's the motor. How does it happen that the sperm gets into the ovum to fertilize it? And we never understood that until now. And it was cracked this week by scientists. It was cracked by using technology called AlphaFold. And AlphaFold comes from a strange place, Elisha. Most science is done in university labs. This science was done in Google. Google has a company called DeepMind. It was a startup. And DeepMind uses artificial intelligence to understand the structure of proteins. So scientists in Vienna used DeepMind and AlphaFold to figure out the structure of proteins on the head of the sperm. Because what happens is the sperm reaches the ovum, and the proteins interact with protein in the cell wall of the ovum, and it's like a key to a lock. And the key of these proteins opens the lock, and the ovum says, come on in, guys. Let's get to work. So what are these proteins? And they discovered these three proteins. They work together. They combine together. And there are the key to the lock of the protein on the wall of the cell of the ovum. And the sperm gets into the ovum. It becomes a zygote, which is a fertilized ovum. And then the little ovum travels up to the uterus and begins its life as a human being. What's interesting, Elisha, the proteins in a zebrafish, that's a fish with striped body, are the same as the proteins in a human being. So in a sense, all life, the genealogy of all life is based on the same three proteins. I think that's absolutely astonishing. If only we understood how much we are part of life on the planet, and how similar we are. Maybe we'd stop mistreating our planet so much. Yeah, yeah. So that's really interesting. The proteins are, the communications between the proteins, just in general, even, I would say that there's this intense communication going on in the universe that we're not aware of at all. I'll give you an example. Today, when I was walking the dog early, early, early this morning, I was listening to a podcast. It happened to be a scientific podcast about the connection of how does the sunlight create photosynthesis? How does that actually work? And because we knew for years that's what the sun does. But we didn't know how. How does the biology respond to sunlight? And to cut a very long story short, because I don't think I would even be able to explain what I heard. There is actual communication going on there, communication with the infrared light. And this communication is life enhancing. And the way life came out of the water, out into the open, we always thought it was oxygen. Oxygen actually started from the bottom of the ocean, with the sun actually producing photosynthesis with plants inside the oceans. And they created the oxygen. When there was enough oxygen in the air, animals could start, or organisms could start rising from the water out into the earth. And it's all about communication. So here, those proteins are communicating with one another. Here is the sun communicating with the cell. And it's all about communication. And one of the, I think the most important things in this part of the show, and maybe that's what also connects to evil and genealogy, is when is there communication, when is there no communication? We have at the very end of Parashat Noach, we're totally jumping right now, but at the very end of Parashat Noach, a little bit before Abraham comes into the scene, there's a story of the Tower of Babel. The tower where everybody spoke the same language, communicated beautifully. They built this tower, maybe to overtake, to overrun God and the world. And God, in response, it's a mythical story, God scatters humanity and confuses their languages so they can actually learn how to communicate with one another. So just like the sperm communicates with the egg, with the ovum, just like everything is in the form of communication. And maybe evil, maybe another definition of evil, you know, coming from our conversation, is when communication fails. When communication fails, that's a state of evil. And the solution, why does evil show up? It's kind of telling us, guys, you're not communicating. The communication here, the lines of communication have failed. You need to start communicating. There are many ways of communicating, it doesn't have to be only words. It could be in many, many different ways. But we need to renew communication and the flow of interaction between all the parts in the cosmos. And maybe that's how evil, being a lack of communication, driving evolution forward by saying, well guys, how are you going to communicate here in order to make this world a better place? And then we learn how to communicate, the world becomes better, we stop communicating again for a bunch of different reasons. Evil becomes rampant again, and it says, okay, you need to find a new way of communicating, etc. etc. etc. Exactly. And Alicia, these are such exciting times in terms of science. Let me give an example. We were very excited some years ago by genomics. And now it's possible to take the genes of any creature and decode them and list them exactly and map them and study them. But now we've gone one layer deeper, Alicia, because DNA, the genes, each gene, its function is to stimulate expression of a protein. And it's the protein that drives our behavior, like I mentioned with the sperm fertilizing the egg. And now we've gone from genomics to proteomics. And there's been a huge breakthrough in proteomics led by AlphaFold, the AI software that can figure out the structure of a protein. It's a complicated molecule. If we know the structure of it, we can figure out what it does. If we figure out what it does, we can duplicate it or use it and understand actually what drives you and me, because we're behavior, our behavior is driven by these proteins. So the Nobel Prize was awarded to people who figured out how to use AlphaFold. And now we can figure out the structure of proteins and get to the absolute core of behavior and of life itself. Okay, but here I'm going to disagree somewhat. This is not getting us to the core. So now we know that it's not the genes. It's the proteins. Then there's going to be the next frontier. The next generation is going to figure out it's not the protein. It's the X, whatever it may be. And maybe it all eventually does boil down to this infinite, infinite energy we call God that's, you know, running the show and taking on a form. And the form that it's taking that we discover right now is protein. Before that we discovered with the genes, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So right now we just took a step forward in discovering, oh, so there's protein. Hmm, interesting. What drives the protein? How does the protein work? What is the communication there that is actually clear? I think in quantum, in quantum mechanics and quantum physics, one of the most incredible things is, is how does communication, how does communication take place between two entities that don't even touch one another and have no connection to one another? I think the most, like the most incredible example could be when certain apes in Great Britain, apparently they're apes in Great Britain, I think probably in a zoo or in a lab or something, when they start behaving in a certain way and a whole new behavior. And sure enough, at the same time, apes in Australia start behaving in a similar way. Like how did that happen? Could it be a coincidence? Is there a communication, an unseen and immeasurable communication that's going on? And that's the quantum, that's the quantum leap. And I think eventually we'll discover that between the protein of the sperm and the protein of the ovum, for example, there's communication going on. And then we're going to start asking, well, what is communication? How does the quantum leap work? That's fascinating. I'm especially fascinated, as you are Alicia, by quantum mechanics because that is the smallest of the small of the small in terms of life. And what you described is called entanglement. There are two neurons, one in an ape in Britain and one in Australia. And essentially they're the same thing. Not only are they connected, they are the same thing. How does that work? Australia is 7,000 miles away from the United Kingdom. It's fascinating. Alicia, I want to talk about Noach, the protagonist of the Parsha. And there's a huge problem related by Noach, and you're well aware of it. The Torah says, listen to this description of Noach. He is described in superlatives, Alicia, that no other figure in the Torah gets from God, not even Moshe, and certainly not Abraham. Perfect tzaddik, a perfect righteous man who walked with God. Moshe talked with God. Noach walked with God. Noach was absolutely faithful and obedient to God, built an ark. What? Built an ark? He did it. He did it. And yet, Alicia, he's not the father of our people, and he ends up as a drunkard raising grapes in the vineyard and getting drunk and terrible things happen. What in the world? We need to explain how is it that this great righteous man did not lead the people, was not chosen to lead the people, and in fact Abraham, as you mentioned, appears at the end of the Parshah, and there's a reason. Because Abraham is the founder of the Jewish people, and not Noach. Why? Why in the world? Right. And Noach is considered to be the founder of humanity. So those who, the name Noach is for all those who are not Gentiles, in other words. Although that's not very accurate, but there's a word that you missed, I don't know if on purpose or not, but it says that he was Noach Itzadikah Bedolotav in his generation. In his generation, everything is relative. Right, so the Sages say that compared to his generation, he was a very righteous man. But even if we give him more credit than that, I think it's a really good question. You're right, he walked with God. He walked with God, and indeed such an incredible person who obeys God. So there are a bunch of different interpretations that the Sages have given us over the years. One of them is that he, unlike Abraham, he does nothing to save the rest of humanity. He just builds an ark as he's instructed. He gathers the animals that he's instructed to gather, and he sails off into the future. And he doesn't preach to people and say, guys, listen, you know, there's a terrible calamity about to happen. You've got to repent. He doesn't even make an attempt. He doesn't argue with God. He doesn't argue with human beings. He just, he walks with God, i.e. he fulfills God's commandments and orders. But he has no engagement. And I think what's special about the Jewish people, we're called Yisrael. Yisrael, those who fought with God. Those who struggled with God. Those who wrestled with God. Or in other words, we don't just like walk with God. Sometimes I wish we did. If we could just like fight a little bit less, and just like walk with God, and we'd be so obedient, so cute, and so sweet. We'd be, you know, we'd almost be Scandinavian. And, you know, hopefully I'm not hurting anyone's feelings right now. Sometimes I wish we were a little bit less argumentative, and a little bit less wrestling people. But Abraham wrestled. Abraham, on the one hand, he walked. God said, walk, and he started walking. On the other hand, he argued, argued with God. And Noach doesn't do that. So if you go back to communication, and I'm really, I'm really high on communication right now. Noach doesn't, Noach receives communication with God. He doesn't communicate back. And maybe part of being drunk and going astray is when you don't put a fight. If you just, in other words, in nature, that's what happens. You know, a flower, you know, a seed sprouts, it grows, turns into a plant, a flower, then it goes back to seed. And that's what happens to Noach. Noach rises, and he does what he does, and then he goes back to seed. He becomes drunk and eventually dies. And Abraham takes humanity a step further and says, yes, we're part of nature. We're certainly part of it. We're made of nature. We're all natural organisms. But nevertheless, we have given another faculty, another faculty of of improving ourselves, improving nature. We can really be partners with evolution. We can help evolution. And until, you know, until the scientific revolution, evolution was relatively slow. Since the scientific revolution, I think evolution has really, really gone like haywires, and sometimes even scary. But in other words, what scientists are doing, we both really love science, even though I don't understand that much about science. We love the way that human beings wrestle with nature, wrestle with God. God, you bother all these diseases. We will find a cure for these diseases. And we're going to lengthen the life of the human being and life expectancy. So maybe Abraham is that much greater because he was willing to wrestle, not just wrestle with God, you know, it's just a word, but wrestle with that which was given. Here's the given. Now we're saying, okay, got it, I understand. Let's see, how can we improve that which was given? How can I make it even better? Exactly, Avishai. So following up on that thought, this is what Rabbi Sachs explains about Noah, why he wasn't the leader of the Jewish people as well as father of humanity. I quote, Noah is a classic case of someone who is righteous, but who is not a leader. He is not a leader, and a leader is someone who wrestles, who struggles, and who questions. And he said, this is related to an op-ed I read this morning in the New York Times. It's by a writer named David French. He's an evangelical Christian and a Republican, lifelong Republican, and deeply disappointed with his fellow Republicans. And I think in one paragraph explains what's going on in America, but not intentionally, what's going on in Israel. He explains that there are two ways you can define yourself, politically, ideologically, religiously. One way is to define whom do you hate. And our neighbors, Alisha, they define themselves in that fashion. They hate the Jews. Not Israelis, they hate the Jews. And it's interesting because there is conflict within Islam between Sunnis and Shias and Wahhabis and Sufis. And you know this well, you studied it in college. But even Sinwar, who was a Sunni, identified with the Shia desperate fanatical hate of the Jews. And associated with that. So whom do you hate? And I'm afraid that many Republicans define themselves by hating the Democrats, who are destroying the country. We have this in Israel as well. Whom do you hate? And there are groups who define themselves by hating those who took the settlers out of Gaza, for example. There's another way. There's another way. And that is, define yourself by whom you love. They are hafta, and that's what we do. They are hafta. You communicate. If you hate someone, you don't communicate with them. Good evidence. Maybe Noah hated the evil going around, right? But he didn't communicate with it. Whom do you love? We love the people, including the people we disagree with, and including the people who may not be too fond of us. And in the end, in evolution, Alisha, that will triumph, because that's a more powerful force in social evolution, to love humanity, than this deep fanatical hatred. So there's some comfort in this, that in this terrible crisis that we're in, in this awful evil. Ten years ago, more than ten years ago, you wrote about the evil of kidnapping three young men, killing them. And good heavens, a year ago, we saw evil of many orders of magnitude worse than that, and we're still struggling with it. But maybe this is a part of this evolution. And evolution is a really messy process, Alisha. It is messy and painful. Painful is not even a word for it. But look at the bigger picture. There is a goal. We're moving ahead, hard to believe. We are moving ahead, even though it really, really hurts at this moment here in Israel. I'm afraid we in Israel understand the West doesn't get it. They do not get it, what we're facing here, as they can't conceive of a system in which our neighbors simply are driven by irrational hatred. In the West, everything is rational. There's a reason for everything. Not in the Middle East. Yeah, yeah. We have to end, although there's a lot to say about what you just said. Yes, rational, not rational. It's all very, very interesting. But I love a lovely conclusion about what you focus on. Who do you hate, or who do you love, and who do you hope to love one day? It's really unfortunate that right now, I hate my enemy right now. But I don't want to hate my enemy. I do want to have respect for them. And ultimately, I really want to love. And maybe we can end with, you know, you said, the sentence is, and we talk about evil, comes from the word, your evil. Your own evil. So love, learn to love your own evil. And then you'll start discovering God again. Well said. Well said. Amen. Amen. Amen. So have a really good week, everyone. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for listening. And next podcast, I'm going to be in the States, actually. So we're going to somehow do the podcast long distance. I'll do it by Zoom. By Zoom. God willing. Cool. Link road, everyone. Bye, everybody.