SERMON—NOAH AND “THE KINGDOM”
Rabbi Jonathan Miller
Temple Emanu-El
Birmingham, Alabama
October 12, 2007—1 Heshvan, 5768
You
gotta love this week’s Torah Portion, Noah.
It has everything a good story has to have. It has animals, rainbows, doves, and a Gilligan’s
Island kind of extended cruise. Noah and
his family set off on a wonderful journey on an ark—a brand new kind of travel
conveyance, and gives all life a new start, a fresh opportunity to regenerate,
to start over again without all the junk that had accumulated over the past ten
generations since the Creation and Adam and Eve. It ends with hope that life will be good and
better and positive and hopeful. The
story begins with gloom and ends with the rainbow. God will no longer destroy the planet by
flood. Actually, He doesn’t have
to. Left to our own devices, we can do a
good enough job of that.
But
more on that later.
The
parsha begins with Noah’s lineage,
and then describes humanity’s sorry plight.
“Vayomer Elohim l’Noach, Kaytz kol
basar ba lifanai ki mal’ah haaretz hamas mipneihem, v’hinneini mashchitam et
ha’aretz—And God said to Noah, The end time of all flesh has come before
me, for the world has filled itself with hamas, and I am fixin’ to
destroy them from the face of the earth.”
What exactly is this thing, this hamas? The word appears
infrequently in the Bible. It means a
lack of justice, corruption, lawlessness, violence; a lack of common decency
and human empathy. It means wildness and
savagery and the ability of human beings to be wantonly cruel. Hamas means the Shoah, and Uganda and
Rawanda and Cambodia and Bosnia and Lebanon and Gaza and the Cultural
Revolution and Stalinism and slavery and school shootings and domestic abuse
and 9/11 and suicide bombers and the tendency that human beings have to be
thugs and to be violent and to be vengeful and to act maliciously toward
others. Hamas is that factor we know to be within us all, and at times we
let that hamas factor emerge and go
unchecked. And no one is the better for hamas, no one. Even if you are right in your cause, hamas gives voice to the human tendency
to be abusive and controlling and mean and nasty and violent. Once hamas
is let loose, sometimes it takes a flood of destruction to control it once
again. That’s what parshat Noah teaches us. Hamas breeds destruction.
Judi
and I took ourselves out to the movies on Monday. We saw the movie, The Kingdom. One of the
pleasures or liabilities of going to a movie as a rabbi is that everything
becomes grist for the preaching mill.
Judi asked me, “How are you going to ‘preach’ this one?” “Watch me,” I said, “there is a ton of stuff
in The Kingdom.”
The Kingdom is about a
terrorist event in Saudi Arabia leveled against western workers in the oil
fields. The event is fiction—in that it
never happened. But it was also true, of
sorts, in that it seemed to be a reasonable portrayal of what could happen in
Saudi Arabia, given that country’s violent history, austere and extreme
Islamicism and anti-western sentiment. I
am going to tell you a little about the movie, but even after I share my
remarks, I would recommend that you see it, but only if it is your kind of
thing.
There
is lots of hamas in The Kingdom. Everything explodes, and explodes
spectacularly. The story feels real
because it has everything you would expect: a spectacular terrorist event,
corrupt officials, banal bureaucrats, and brave law enforcement. Four FBI agents head to Saudi Arabia after
the event to investigate, and are themselves caught up in a whirlwind of
action. I am not telling you anything
that would surprise you about a movie based upon a Saudi Arabian terrorist
incident. So even though the story is
fictitious, it feels real, and it is worth watching. And the action scenes, the shoot ‘em up scenes
are really spectacularly horrifying, realistic, and well done. And if you like these kinds of action movies
(I do), you will enjoy the film. And if
you don’t, stay home.
The
only true surprise comes at the very end of the movie. The only true surprise is the very last line,
which leads to the closing credits. And
this last line left me thinking and left me puzzled. At the end of the movie, two brief scenes
were shown, one right after the other.
In one, the returning FBI agents come home and ask about an encounter
between them, which took place much earlier in the film. “Tell me, what did you whisper to (your
colleague) which settled her down after she learned of the terrorist event?” The FBI agent replied, “Don’t worry, we will
kill them all.” And then the scene
shifts immediately to a Saudi Arabian family in the aftermath of some
spectacular and violet shoot ‘em up.
“Tell me, what did Grandfather whisper in your ear before he died?” The grandson replied, “Don’t worry, we will
kill them all.” And that is the end of
the movie.
“Don’t
worry, we will kill them all.” But of
course, the Islamic extremists are delusional.
They can never kill all of the western Christians and Jews and other
folks who love their freedoms and their way of life. They are just agents of blinding and
disturbing violence. “Don’t worry, we will kill them all” is a fantasy based on
hamas, based on the erroneous
assumption that violence and evil can win over the hearts of human beings, that
the great struggle that is the human soul living in harmony with its opposition
can be subdued through violence. It is a
delusion to believe that yelling and screaming and physical force can transform
the recalcitrant to be loving and kind.
Even the victories along the way only breed continued hatred.
But
the kicker is that this sentiment was shared not only by the bad guys, the
terrorists, but also by the good guys, the folks we were rooting for in the
darkened theater for two hours whom we hope would win in the end and make their
way home to their families and the cherished way of life we lead. “Don’t worry, we will kill them all” is also
the fantasy that we have here in the west.
We believe that with our overwhelming force and know how, that we can
impose a peace on those who hate us, that we can cow into submission those who
would do us evil. That too is
delusional. We will never be able to
kill all those who would do us harm. All
that we can do is protect ourselves from their evil, and hope and pray that the
evil will turn from their sinful ways.
It
would seem that the only real way to defeat our enemies, to turn back the hamas would be to counter them with love
and the willingness to die and suffer martyrdom. But even then, that can be foolhardy. Like the Nazis before them, there is nothing
that the Islamic terrorists would desire more than that they should kill us
all. If we greet with magnanimity those
who rejoice in our deaths, who would revel in their hamas—if we turn the other cheek, they really will find a way to
kill us all. I have no doubt of
this. There will be no handwringing and
no crying and no, “Oh my God, what have we done?” kind of remorse. Instead, the blood on the streets will
encourage the sharks into an even greater feeding frenzy, and the extremists
will revel in their hamas and
celebrate it as a great victory to Allah.
Throughout
the Inquisition, the Catholic prelates ate their meals and drank their wines
while the inquisitors burned the heretics at the stake, after they were
tortured to make their confessions. They
had no qualms of conscience. The Nazi
guards in Auschwitz and Treblinka lead remarkably normal lives. They had socials, celebrated holidays and
went out for picnics with their families and their girlfriends on glorious
sunny days. The Khmer Rouge were not at
all concerned about their fellow countrymen who were imprisoned or starved to
death, and neither were the Hutus who slaughtered the Tutsis. The more hamas,
the better.
.
. . But I am a rabbi and not a film critic or an historian. And I am here to teach Torah and not write an
essay on the issues of the day. So let’s
turn back to the Torah portion. The
world was filled with hamas. And God let loose on the world and
attempted to drown the hamas that He
had permitted in human beings. How did
the hamas get to be imbedded in
humanity? It was only ten generations
from Adam to Noah. And the hamas grew so big that God could not
contain it. He had to destroy it and
bury it under fathoms of ocean water.
And when the waters receded, when the sea made way for the land to
reappear, human beings, indeed all flesh, had the ability to start all over
again, to begin with the covenant of the rainbow and move forward once more.
And what did we create? We created hamas once again. We made hamas
again the operative force in the human endeavor. We have tried to subdue hamas, but we know that it is lurking, even after the flood and the
ark and the animals and the destruction.
Hamas is never destroyed, at
least not until the end of time, not until there is no more of anything.
That
is the meaning of the end of the story.
God tells Noah:
“I
will maintain my covenant with you:
never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and
never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And so we get the rainbow, which is God’s
promise not to destroy us all.
(Frankly,
if we want to destroy all human flesh, we can do it ourselves quite nicely and
we don’t need God’s help.)
The
religious message is this: If God cannot
extinguish the hamas in human beings,
than no outside force can do it. The
only way to defeat hamas, the only
way to assure ourselves that it is not in the end victorious, is for each human
being to conquer it within, to drown it within the passions of the soul. The rainbow is God’s way of saying, ”Never
again, I have had enough!” Each of us
has to create that internal rainbow, that inside, internal covenant with
ourselves, the kind of covenant which God has made with the world. “Enough.
No more violence and no more hatred and no more destruction. We will fight to live. We will not live to fight. It is enough.
There is no pleasure in killing them all.”
That
is all that we can do. It was hard
enough in Noah’s day. It is really hard
to do today.
Shabbat
Shalom
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