What the Dove Said

Parshas Bereshis took us from the six days of creation through Adam and Chava's sin, which brought death into the world, and Kayin killing Hevel. Then came the generations after them, and a slow slide away from Hashem.

Idolatry began with Enosh, which is why that generation is called Dor Enosh. It started out innocently, even with good intentions, but anything that isn't one hundred percent true veers off. People slowly forgot that Hashem created the world. In Enosh's days the ocean broke its bounds and flooded a third of the world, and from there humanity went down, all the way to the Great Flood.

Noach had two names. The world called him Noach, but his true name, known only to those close to him, was Menachem, "comforter". It was kept secret because there were masters of black magic then, who could have used their powers against the child if they knew his destiny (Yalkut 42).

The parsha opens: Noach was a righteous man, faultless in his generation. What does "in his generation" mean? Picture being called the most righteous person in Brickell. Does it mean that even in Brickell you're still a good person? Or that you're the best of a bad lot, because everyone else is running after their tail?

The commentators bring both readings (Sanhedrin 108a; Rashi on 6:9). Either way he was a great man in his own generation, and had he lived among better people, they would have influenced him and he would have been even greater.

The generation was full of immorality. People did whatever they pleased and took whoever they pleased, someone else's wife, daughter or sister. But what sealed the decree was chamas.

Chamas is not plain theft; that is gezel or geneivah. It is robbery that has become the social standard: the way business is done and the way people deal with each other is stealing, and everyone is trying to squeeze as much money as he can out of everyone else. It wasn't only the act of stealing. It was the normal way of life.

It started from the top. The Torah says the earth was full of chamas "from their faces", and the "face" of a community is its leaders and nobles. They were worse than anyone, and everyone else learned from them: if the greatest of our generation are doing it, so will we. Even the judges were crooked. A crooked leadership made a crooked society (Me'am Loez).

What it looked like: a farmer brings his fruit to the market to make an honest living. People come by, ask the price, and start tasting while they haggle. They give some to their kids. By the time they're done they've eaten a whole basket, and then the price isn't right and they walk away. The ones who did buy paid with counterfeit money (Bereishis Rabbah 31:5). That was a normal day in the marketplace.

Noach was told to build the ark 120 years before the flood. Why did it take so long? So that people would see him and ask, "What is this man doing?" The building itself was a warning that this was serious.

A side lesson: there is something called leitzanus, stripping a thing of its value by making fun of it. The Torah is precious, so we don't make comics of it or memes about it. In the same way you don't make fun of your parents, you don't make fun of the people of the Torah.

A good question (Ariel M.): if Noach's whole mission was public, 120 years of telling the world it would end unless people started living by values, why did he need a hidden name? It's a question to look into. The commentator who says he had a secret name still has to answer it.

One answer (Sarah Y.): maybe in a sense Noach stayed too hidden. He did his own work but didn't take it on himself to plead with people, and later in life he ends up drunk, which some explain as grief that he hadn't done enough to help others. Had he truly gone out to the world, he would have been in danger, and so he needed the hidden name.

The contrast is Moshe. At the end of Moshe's life he met the great men of every generation, and Noach said to him, "I'm greater than you. I survived the flood." Moshe answered, "Yes, you survived, but you survived alone. Why didn't you save your generation? I gave my very soul and saved all Israel" (Devarim Rabbah 11:3). Moshe carried the Jewish people through the golden calf and the desert and brought them to the Land of Israel. Noach built the ark, but he didn't go out and change the world.

The same contrast holds with Avraham, who went out and changed the world, while Noach saved eight people, himself included. The words show it: Noach walked with God, and Avraham walked ahead of Him (Rashi on 6:9). They came to Hashem from two different places. Avraham's way was through his own intelligence, discovering Hashem.

Hashem saved Og, the giant. Before the flood there were giants, descended from angels who fell to earth, and Og was one of them: his grandfather was Shamchazai (Niddah 61a).

There are two views of how he survived. He walked alongside the ark, where the water was cool, or he sat on its roof and Noach passed him food through the window (Targum Yonasan; Zevachim 113b). Og didn't deserve to escape the flood, but Hashem kept him alive so that later the world would know His greatness (Zevachim 113b).

Before the flood, Og had been with Cham's wife, and she became pregnant. To hide it and make the child look like his own, Cham was with his wife in the ark, though it was forbidden. The son born was Sichon (Maharsha, Niddah; Bachya, Chukas), who with Og became one of the two kings on the borders of the Land of Israel whom the Jewish people conquered after forty years in the desert.

If you don't follow the view that the child was Sichon, you could say it was Canaan. That may be why Noach cursed Canaan and not Cham himself.

Noach had to bring in a male and a female of every species in the world, and of the kosher species, seven males and seven females. How? By a miracle. Every creation has an angel in charge of it, even a blade of grass, an angel saying, "Grow, grow" (Bereishis Rabbah 10:6). Only four species have no angel, because Hashem oversees them Himself: the lulav, the esrog, the hadasim and the aravos (Me'am Loez). There is Kabbalah behind it, connected to Sukkos. The angels brought all the animals to the ark.

Then the flood was held back seven days so that Mesushelach could be properly mourned (Sanhedrin 108b). In those days Noach was out until the last minute trying to save people, and they made fun of him. Then Hashem had him go into the ark and sealed it.

Masses of people tried to break into the ark or overturn it. Lions came, surrounded the ark and tore many of them apart (Me'am Loez). It was a wild scene.

It rained forty days and forty nights. The springs of the deep burst up, many of them boiling hot, and the floodgates of heaven opened. After the forty days of rain, the water surged for another 150 days, and then it went down. The water stood fifteen cubits above the highest mountains.

Noach was in the ark a full year: 365 days, a solar year, though the Jewish calendar goes by the moon. Why a solar year? The people of the flood were so proud of their powers that they boasted they could keep the sun from rising, so their punishment was measured by the sun (Me'am Loez).

Much later, Shem told Avraham's servant Eliezer what went on in the ark. Every animal eats at a different time, and Noach had to take care of every one of them, like a zookeeper: different animals, different times, the cages to clean. Noach and his sons worked around the clock for the whole year (Sanhedrin 108b).

One bird, the phoenix, hid in a corner. Noach asked why it wasn't asking for food, and it said, "I see how hard you're working. I didn't want to bother you." Noach blessed it that it should never die (Sanhedrin 108b). That may mean it lives forever, or that its species will never become extinct.

There's a law that you feed your animals before you eat yourself (Berachos 40a). Once Noach came late to feed the lion, and it bit his foot and crippled him for life (Tanchuma, Noach 9).

Toward the end of the year Noach sent out the raven. Why the raven? He didn't like it, because it had mated in the ark. Three had relations in the ark: Cham, the raven and the dog, each with its own kind (Sanhedrin 108b).

Before the flood many species interbred, just as the people did. Only animals that had never interbred were let into the ark (Me'am Loez). Some say the dinosaurs were such mixtures. Others say the fossils come from the worlds Hashem built and destroyed before this one, as the Kabbalah teaches (Bereishis Rabbah 3:7).

All three were punished. The raven has to mate through its beak, and the dog stays stuck to its mate afterward, which looks ridiculous and is embarrassing (Sanhedrin 108b).

The raven protested: "There are seven of every kosher bird. Why send me? You don't care about me?" Noach answered that he didn't, since it had mated in the ark. It flew back and forth, found a corpse and began to devour it, and Noach wouldn't let it back in. Hashem told him to take it back, because it would be needed later: when Eliyahu HaNavi was hiding from King Achav, the ravens brought him food from Yehoshafat's table (Me'am Loez).

A side point about birds: the Torah lists the birds that aren't kosher, but we don't know exactly what falls under each one. So we eat only birds that we have a tradition are kosher.

Noach waited seven days and sent out the dove, a kosher bird, giving it better conditions. It came back, since there was no place to land. He waited another seven days, and this time the dove came back with an olive leaf.

Where did it find an olive tree? In the Land of Israel, which the flood never covered (Bereishis Rabbah 33:6). Its people didn't drown. They died from the heat of the boiling water, which turned the world into a furnace (Zevachim 113b).

An olive leaf is bitter, and the dove was sending a message: "Better my food be bitter like an olive and come from Hashem than sweet as honey and come from a person" (Sanhedrin 108b; Eruvin 18b).

That is how Noach knew the water had gone down. Had the dove still depended on him, it would never have been so brazen with him; it would have been a little nicer. After a whole year, Noach understood that the dove didn't need him anymore (Zevach HaShelamim).

Noach and his family left the ark and saw the whole world destroyed. They had three fears (Abarbanel). The animals far outnumbered them and would eat them. There was no food. And there was no authority, no police and no government, so people would kill each other, as Kayin killed Hevel.

Hashem answered each one. For food, they could now eat meat, which had been forbidden until then. For the killing, Hashem Himself would be the authority, and whoever kills a person will answer to Him. And the animals would fear people.

That's why the lizards run away when you walk outside. When a person acts like a person, the animals fear him. Once he becomes subhuman and stops acting like a person, they have the power to attack (Shabbos 151b). So someone attacked by an animal usually has to restore his tzuras adam, his humanity. The lion bit Noach in the ark, before this promise was given.

The first thing Noach did was plant a vineyard. It grew so fast because he planted a vine from Gan Eden (Targum Yonasan). He made wine, got drunk, and lay uncovered in the tent.

Cham came in and saw his father, or some say Cham's son Canaan saw him first. Cham found it amusing, and he made a calculation. Adam had two sons, and one killed the other. Noach already had three, and with any more there would be war. So Cham castrated his father (Bereishis Rabbah 36:5; Sanhedrin 70a).

Cham told his brothers. Shem and Yefes walked in backward with a garment and covered their father. When Noach woke from his wine he knew what Cham had done, since Cham had already been with his wife in the ark (Me'am Loez).

Then Noach cursed Canaan, Cham's son, to be a slave of slaves. Why Canaan and not Cham? Hashem had already blessed Noach and his sons when they left the ark, so Noach could not curse Cham (Bereishis Rabbah 36:7). Also, Canaan was already born. A curse on Cham alone would reach only the children born after it, so Noach cursed Canaan, and the curse reached Cham's line (Ramban on 9:18).

Next the Torah lists the seventy nations that came from Noach's sons. The whole world spoke one language, and they built the Tower of Bavel.

The flood came in the year 1656 from creation, so they decided it must be a cycle, with a flood every 1656 years, like an ice age (Rashi on 11:1; Bereishis Rabbah 38:1). They built a tower to save themselves from the next one and to fight God, so to speak. Calling the flood a natural event and building a tower to prove it was a way of denying that Hashem has any power in the world, instead of working on themselves and seeing the purpose of their existence.

Then come the ten generations to Avraham, and Avraham is born.