When I meet with B’nai Mitzvah students, I encourage them to read Torah alongside other ancient stories.
I ask: “Who builds a boat because a great flood is coming, and brings animals aboard to save them?”
They know this one.
“Let’s say his name together. One, two, three!”
“Noah!” they say.
“Gilgamesh!” I say.
The looks I get are priceless.
Then I explain: the Epic of Gilgamesh contains a flood story, too—although its survivor is actually named Utnapishtim.
The interesting question is what Torah does with this shared ancient story. What does our telling teach us about ourselves?
One way to read Noah is as a challenge to civilization’s claims about itself. A society can build cities, accumulate wealth, and develop extraordinary skills while becoming morally corrupt. Progress does not guarantee goodness.
Before the flood, the earth is filled with violence. Human achievement has outpaced human responsibility.
That leaves us with a question Jews have wrestled with for generations: How do we participate in the wider world while retaining the commitments that might help us change it?
Jewish distinctiveness can give us something valuable to contribute. But we have to bring it into the conversation. And we need enough humility to recognize that we have something to learn, too.
That is part of why I am a diasporic Zionist. I believe in a Jewish homeland where we take responsibility for shaping a society, and in vibrant Jewish life throughout the world, where we help shape the societies we share.
Noah enters the ark to preserve life. Eventually, he has to leave it.
Our task, too, is to carry what we cherish into the world—and ask whether our presence makes that world more worthy of the life entrusted to it.