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 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 to charity.  They simply are there to teach us how to know who is essentially 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, such as pretending that you, yourself, are above moral codes and laws.  And one of these Noahide rules, 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 years ago, and now in a period of cease fire they are continuing to do so without Israeli intervention.  We know that there has never been a judicial system worthy of the name in the 20 years Hamas controlled Gaza, nor in the 29 years that the Palestinian Authority mostly controlled the West Bank. 

I want to go back to the least referable of these Noahide laws for a moment.  It’s easy to understand the commandment against committing murder, of course, and the laws against theft and rape and torturing animals.  It’s harder to relate to a law against blasphemy, isn’t it? 

I wonder if we should understand blasphemy a little differently than our ancestors did.  Because in our own contemporary world, restraints on the use of language in public forums—particularly on social media, on the internet, on the air, but really, in nearly every form of public expression—the use of language has been untethered from any restraint.  People attack their opponents in the harshest and often most vicious ways, using insults that used to be consigned to the lowest aspects of human interaction at all levels of society.  That kind of degradation of speech, it seems to me, is a new form of blasphemy.  It is a way of causing the divisions in our society to become chasms, of using language to destroy others and to humiliate and damage.  Isn’t that blasphemous by any reasonable definition? 

You see, 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 nonetheless live together in peace.  They allow diverse societies to reach across the boundaries of their differences to work towards a common goal.  The mishpetai b’nai Noach, the laws of the children of Noah—that is, the laws that apply to all of us human beings—are designed not to divide us, but to allow us to unite on the grounds of common decency.  It means that the real and even meaningful differentiations do not prevent us from achieving good in our civilizations when called upon to do so.

That principal is something that our US Congress apparently needs to learn… as does the entire governmental structure these days.

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.