The Accountability of Never Again
For so many of us, Parashat Noach brings us back to our primary school years in Sunday School, as we sang songs about the animals entering the ark two by two—a kind of Disneyfied version of an Iron Age Dr. Doolittle. As we get older, we begin to understand the darker, more troubling elements of this story. A world filled with “chamas” or violence has quickly descended into chaos—ironically, a level of human chaos amidst the physical order that God wrought from the primordial chaos. Though framed as a punishment, God literally “re-creates” the world by bringing together the waters separated in those first acts of Creation. Noah and his family seed the re-creation of the world, and a rainbow appears in the sky. Rather than merely an aesthetically beautiful conclusion to a dramatic epic, the rainbow symbolizes the moral responsibility incumbent on humanity to secure the well being of a world God will now leave to its own devices. God intones the first “Never Again”—withdrawing from responsibility for the fate of Creation moving forward. In our current moment of an awareness of our climate crisis, yet a lack of will amongst many to respond to it, the panoply of colors in that skyward spectacle resound in our collective conscience, beseeching us to repair the world as both an act of gratitude to God and an act of love toward our grandchildren.