Basic Decency - the First Covenant

Shabbat No’ach, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This week we chant No’ach, of course, one of the most famous of all Torah portions and the original great sea story of a truly ancient mariner.  At the end of the mabul, the flood, when Noah gets to leave the ark and go out on dry land, God gives a promise, the very first berit, the first covenant or contract that in Jewish tradition God makes with humanity.  The Creator vows never again to destroy the earth by water—we are able to do so, by the way, through, say, global warming, but not God—and we human beings are entered into a compact with seven specific rules. 

This Noahide covenant, the prime rainbow connection, has seven specific rules in it.  Mind you, these are not rules for Jews, or in the formal sense of the term mitzvot: they are the basic rules for civilized societies of any kind, of any religion or nation or peoplehood, the foundational laws that define whether a system, a culture, is good or evil.

While it can be a bit complex looking just at the literal text to discern where there seven rules are commanded, there is general agreement among rabbis and scholars that these are what God has Noah, on behalf of all humanity—after all, we may all be descended from Adam but we are also, according to the Tanakh, the Bible, also all descended from Noah—there is general agreement on the seven.  They are:

1.   Do not murder.

2.   Do not steal.

3.   Do not commit acts of forcible sexual violation.

4.   Do not cut the limbs off of a living animal, let alone a living human.

5.   Do not blaspheme.

6.   No idolatry.

7.   Have courts of justice.

These, it seems to me, are pretty basic rules that define whether people are ethical or unethical, moral or amoral, good or bad.  Please note, again, this has nothing to do with whether people are worshipping the right god, or keeping a Sabbath, or even whether they are giving enough to charity.  They simply are there to teach us how to know who is good and who just flat out is not.

Because in the Torah there is never an assumption that we will live in some bland, universally observant society or civilization.  There is always provision made for interacting with people and groups and nations and civilizations that think differently than we do.  And some of those will be good and deserving of respect and understanding.  Unfortunately, some will not.

Most of these rules seem so basic and essential, and we can scarcely argue about them: don’t murder, steal, rape, abuse animals; some are perhaps less obvious—do not attack the foundations of this code by claiming it has no moral source, that would be blasphemy; do not worship idolatrous gods that undercut the basic morality of this code.  And one, establish courts of justice, is there to make certain that the other six are maintained.

It is this B’nai No’ach covenant, this contract with God that we are glad to observe in the larger world, and that we should expect of any society or group with which we interact.

And yet—and yet, some societies fail to manage even this basic code.  We know that the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas intentionally, repeatedly and viciously violated the first four of these commandments two weeks ago and continues to do so.  We know that there has not been a judicial system worthy of the name in the 18 years Hamas has controlled Gaza, nor in the 27 years that the Palestinian Authority has controlled the West Bank.

It is in this context that I want to share with you part of a letter I received today from Rabbi Naamah Kelman, who heads Hebrew Union College’s Israel Rabbinic Program.  She writes, from Jerusalem,

The civilian mobilization has been extraordinary — I dare say, a Jewish miracle. Within hours, many key partners of the protest movement morphed to create city-wide situation rooms, local centers for relief, rescue, and recovery that are providing missing military equipment, accessories, food, clothing, and more for the reserves. These centers are working to support the tens of thousands of evacuees from the South and the North who are being sheltered in hotels and private homes. You will find Israelis of every stripe showing up at these centers. The sense of unity of purpose is inspiring, particularly after close to nine months of tension and conflict among us. We are called an am k'shai oref, a “stiff-necked people,” but oref is the modern Hebrew for homefront. We have proved again what it means to be a stubborn homefront while keeping our humanity in the face of this chaos. Something new is being born here, with all of you. I pray we can maintain this sense of shared purpose and hope so that we can write a new social contract that includes all Israelis: ultra-Orthodox, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze alike — and we must find Palestinian partners to live with us in peace.

I have received many emails and texts like Naamah’s affirming examples of this all across Israeli society.  Secular, chilonim of course, which is most of Israel, and Modern Orthodox Jews, which is most of the Orthodox Jews in Israel, but also chareidim—who, like Chabad people, refuse to serve in the Israeli military—nonetheless coming forward to help care for the wounded, to prepare food and clothing items for those whose homes were destroyed by the Palestinian terrorists or who have been forced to evacuate by the rockets of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.  Israeli society is a polyglot mix of a vast array of Jews who have different cultural and personal observances and even beliefs, and of Druze and Arabs and people from many nations who live in modern, civilized country.  And who have come together, when attacked, as we could only have dreamed would happen.

And perhaps that’s because of a shared understanding of what it means to be a basically good person, as defined here in No’ach.   

The goal of these Noahide laws has always been to allow people of different belief systems, different ethnicities and cultures, different backgrounds and hopes and dreams to live together in peace.  It allows diverse societies to reach across the boundaries of their differences to work towards a common goal.  It is that these real and even meaningful differentiations do not prevent us from achieving good in our civilization when called upon to do so.

It is perhaps something that our US House of Representatives needs to learn…

On this Shabbat No’ach, may we reinforce the lessons we have learned from this dramatic portion, and from our traumatic present, and grow to accept and understand others for their underlying goodness.  May we celebrate these differences, but base our larger actions on our foundational, covenantal similarity.

We are all human.  We all can seek to create goodness in our society and in our world.