The Ark We Need

Sermon on Noah 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha of Tucson

This week’s Torah portion of Noah is perhaps the best-known of the entire cycle of readings in the whole year.  You’ve heard it before: an old guy, a boat, animals, a dove, a rainbow.  It’s on a million baby’s quilts, in several comedian’s routines, and it might just be the most famous story in all of human history and certainly the best of the sea tales: right up there with Jonah, Moby Dick, and Finding Nemo.

The interesting part of hearing a story of such overwhelming familiarity is that we typically take it for granted, and usually pay no more than superficial attention to it.  It’s easy to assume that Noah is a child’s story, a fairy tale explaining why we have rainbows or reassuring us that God won’t destroy the world.  A male and female of each species, 40 days and nights of rain, and a covenant, all in one neat, hackneyed package.

But the truth is that Noah is much more than a legend about an Old Man and the Sea.  In the midst of all the storm and fury, the lightning and the thunder, with all the animals, with Noah as the principal actor and God as the motive force, the one character that really stays with me after the flood is, well, the ark.  In essence, this whole narrative has a great deal to tell us, but much of it is embodied in the boat that the stock figures of human beings and animals are afloat in.

At heart, Noach is an unusual lesson about just what an ark is, why we each need one, and why we can’t stay in one forever.

“Build a teivah,” the Torah says, an ark.  It’s a word that’s used rarely in our most sacred text—the next time it figures prominently is at the beginning of Exodus, when the baby Moses floats down the Nile in a much, much smaller one.  An ark is a watercraft of some kind or other, designed to float, water-tight but also designed without any rudder or keel, a boat that goes in whichever direction it is wafted by the water around it.  When you get into an ark, you put your trust in God, all right, because you can’t pilot it anywhere in particular.  As they say in some religious traditions, wherever you go, that’s where you are.  In a teivah you are afloat, and you are also in the control of the good Lord and the vicissitudes of water.

But what constitutes an ark?  In essence, an ark is a refuge, a place of safety and isolation that preserves us from the danger and chaos of the world around us.  When all else is in turmoil, we have a retreat that allows us to live and be without fear.

We here in America had something like this experience on a national scale, right up until September 11, 2001, 20 years ago last month.  America is a fine, large country, and the concerns of the world outside our borders can seem pretty distant from our shores.  It should come as no surprise that through much of American history we often felt like we were on a kind of ark, and that we had no need of engagement with the world beyond, no matter how fouled up it was.  That strain of American isolationism is still present in our society, of course—America First!, you may have heard the phrase—although it has changed somewhat.  Now it is framed by the notion that we simply need to build a high wall around us to keep out the world.

Yet after 9/11 we realized that this ark of ours was something of an illusion, and that we needed to remain engaged in the world around us.  In fact, it was an imperative.  How we best choose to do that is still a matter of great debate.  But the need to be engaged is clear.

In one sense, our whole country was a kind of ark until 9/11… and then, it wasn’t, and we weren’t all in this alone. And even though we have, in various ways, tried to isolate ourselves from this complex world we have been quite unsuccessful in doing so. We are part of the whole of humanity, and our mutual success—even our long-term survival—are very much predicated on understanding and acting with that in mind.

COVID-19 reminded us of this again. You might think that what we needed to do was close all access to the world when the Coronavirus, which came from China, started to spread. But that proved to be completely impossible—and the leaders of the vaccine programs at Moderna and Pfizer are an Israeli Jewish immigrant to the United States and a Thessaloniki Jew from Greece whose family just barely survived the Holocaust before he immigrated here as a child. We are all connected, aren’t we?

The Torah tells us that Noah was righteous in his generation; and the rabbis of the commentaries tell us that being righteous in his generation means he wasn’t really righteous in any larger sense, as Shira has pointed out so beautifully. After all, what kind of a tzadik would hear that God intended to kill all other human beings and not protest or try to save them?
Noah’s non-involvement was a kind of sin, or at the very least a kind of weak form of righteousness.  We need to remain engaged, to seek justice in order to be righteous—and in order to try to create a more just world.

But the lesson of this Shabbat is more complex than just that, for we also need an ark, a place and space that allow us to retreat from the world, to feel safe and secure, to know that the tangled and troubled affairs of the world can be set aside while we gain a measure of peace and tranquility.

We need an ark of our own in this challenging world, in our complicated lives.

Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Symborska, has a beautiful whimsical poem about what goes into each of our Arks:

An endless rain is just beginning

Into the ark, for where else can you go,

Your poems for a single voice,

Private exultations,

Unnecessary talents,

Surplus curiosity,

Short range sorrows and fears,

Eagerness to see all things from all sides…

Play for play’s sake,

And tears of mirth.

As far as the eye can see, there’s water and hazy horizon.

Into the ark, plans for the distant future,

Joy in difference,

Admiration for the better man…

Outworn scruples,

Time to think it over,

And the belief that all this

Will come in handy some day.

For the sake of the children we still are,

Fairy tales have happy endings,

That’s the only finale that will do here, too.

The rain will stop,

The waves will subside,

The clouds will part in the cleared up sky,

And they’ll be once more what clouds overhead ought to be,

Lofty and rather lighthearted

In their likeness to things

Drying in the sun—

Isles of bliss…

What occupies our own arks is, in a sense, the best of who we are, freed of strife and stress, left to own the holiness of time and the beauty of a safe space. 

So, what is your ark?  Where do you go to find your own peaceful place, your vessel of quiet floating on the turbulent seas of life? 

The Jewish ark traditionally is the sanctuary of the Sabbath, and Shabbat is an ark of time.  We can’t really float away from the troubles of the world each week.  But we can remove ourselves from the conflict of daily life in time, as Abraham Joshua Heschel reminded us.  We can find a place and a space for peace, rest and joy.

Shabbat is, at least it can be, a place in time that tumult and tzoris cannot penetrate.  No matter what storms resound outside, no matter how hard the rain, Shabbat, for 24 hours, is our ark.  If we choose to make it so.  If we choose to find our own place of peace and refuge. 

May this Shabbat be an ark for you.  May you find a way to choose to make not only this Sabbath, but each one, a time of holiness and nurturance.

And may you return, in time, to our complicated, messy world with your ideals refreshed, and your commitment to the covenant of God’s holiness renewed.

Shabbat Shalom!