DOES IT MATTER HOW WE LIVE?

Our tradition tells us, “Remember three things and you shall not fall into sin. Know what there is above you: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your deeds are written in a book.”

This is what is behind the scenes in Parashat Noach, the seeing eye, the hearing ear, and God’s observations of a man named Noah and his generation.

Torah gives us its assessment of Noah’s character:

 “Noah found favor in ADONAI’s eyes” (Genesis 6:8)

“Noah was a righteous man, He was blameless among his generation. Noah continually walked with God”(6: 9)

The text sees Noah in his generation. This was a bad generation; in fact it was the worst generation. God speaks of it in absolute terms

“⁵ Then Adonai saw that the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil all the time. ⁶ So Adonai regretted that He made humankind on the earth, and His heart was deeply pained. ” (6:5-6).

“The earth was ruined before God, and the earth was filled with violence . . . It was ruined because  all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth” (6:11-12). 

But it is in such a context that Noah walks with God.

Does God call us to walk righteously with him in the wicked contexts of our day?

That will be the center of our considerations.   

But first, let’s look briefly at a woman whose life answered YES to this question.  The following report found at https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122161719464751363&set=a.122100171596751363

Consider Marion, who was born in 1920 in Amsterdam. Her father Jacob was a liberal judge who educated her in tolerance and anti-racism in the years in which the shadow of Nazism was looming over Europe. In May 1940 the Germans occupied the Netherlands; a few months later the girl was arrested for violating the curfew with some friends. Some of them had transcribed BBC messages without her knowledge.

Tortured for a long time, Marion remained in prison for 7 months. In the spring of 1942 the woman witnessed a violent roundup of Jewish children. “I was shocked and in tears - she would write - and I understood that my commitment to saving them was more important than anything else I could do”.

So she began to collaborate with the Dutch Resistance. She brought food and clothes to those hiding from the Nazis, falsified documents and ration cards and provided them to the fugitives along with basic necessities. But her specialty was what they called the "mission of misfortune" in jargon: she falsely declared herself the unmarried mother of a child to hide his Jewish identity, and registered him as her own child, then hid him in the homes of non-Jews. Thanks to this trick, repeated dozens of times, in the end more than 150 Jews were saved directly by Marion, most of them children.

Then for three years she hid the family of Fred Polak, a famous Jewish philosopher, in the staff quarters of a friend's villa in Huizen. Over time, the Polaks had trained themselves to slide under the floorboards in 17 seconds, and to stop the child from crying they gave him sleeping pills. In 1944, yet another inspection by the Nazis led by a Dutchman yielded no results; the latter, however, usually returned half an hour later to the places visited.

That time too, as often happened, the refugees came out of hiding, only to be discovered by the Dutch Nazi collaborator. Marion had no choice but to shoot him, to protect the family whom he was going to betray to the Nazis,,  and Marion herself. His body, hidden in a coffin that already contained another body, was never discovered, and the entire Polak family was saved.

After the war, Marion worked in the UN camps for displaced persons, then married the American Tony Pritchard and moved to New York State, where she graduated and worked as a psychoanalyst and social worker for children. In 1981 she received the honor of “Righteous Among the Nations”.

She died on December 11, 2016 at the age of 96.  

How God dealt with Noah in our parasha provides ample reason to believe that, in meeting her Maker after 96 years of life among us, Marion was rewarded for the righteous choices she made in her own context. HaShem rewarded Noah in three ways:

• ADONAI saved him and his family from the Flood.
• He made a covenant with him,
• Through him and his family, he repopulated the earth.

Torah characteristically drives Noah’s virtue home to us by how it says what it says: 

“Noah did according to all that God commanded him; he did so exactly”. (22). And also: “You only do I perceive as righteous before Me in this generation” 7:1). “Noah did all just as ADONAI commanded him”

(7:4-5).

Noah was bright and shining redemptive contrast to the wicked world, the dark domain, around him. So was Marion. And, if we would be called righteous by God, so must we.

Here are the lessons we explored today from the Torah’s portrait of righteous Noah and his wicked generation:

1. We have a choice in how we live
2. God rewards virtue and punishes evil
3. We can be righteous even in a contrary culture
4. To avoid the judgment of God and to experience his favor, we must make the effort to live righteously in our context
5. We can only make righteous choices in our generation if we are willing to see and name the wickedness around us. (This is hardest of all).

Righteous living has an irreducible situational element. It involves a right response to the darkness of our day. This is not to be confused with some sort of conventional or culturally learned patterned checklist. Often that can be mere respectability. Righteousness is always related to the darkness of the day which it exposes and illumines. And the darkness does not overcome it.

When Marion was a girl, there were plenty of Christians in WWII Holland and throughout Europe who chose to not really see the evil taking place on their doorsteps.

They were not prepared to see it, to deal with it, or to take the risks of righteousness in a wicked world.

We, together with all our respectable Messianic or Christian cronies face the same danger day by day, situation by situation, the danger of choosing not to know, not to care, the choice to not get involved. Instead we choose facile justifications for tolerating the wickedness not simply of society at large, but of people we know.

But we can only make righteous choices in our generation if we are willing to see our generation as it is, and name its wickedness.

May God have mercy on our souls.   

What the Lord requires of us is to seek justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God in a wicked generation.

Take with you these three admonitions.

• Name the darkness.
• Reject blindness. When we refuse to distinguish light from darkness, we train and condition ourselves to be morally and spiritually blind.
• Shine the light.