Parashat Noach Genesis 6:9−11:32

Haftarah Isaiah 54:1-55:5

Dear TBE Community,

What readers sometimes skip over in certain chapters of Torah are the lines of genealogy. They don’t seem to carry much narrative, they may feel tucked in, like an unnecessary detour or delay, a cliffhanger at best. But like the credits crawling over the screen after the movie, these lines list the names of the people who make the entire story happen. They are all listed there for a reason, some more prominent or significant than others. And sometimes they give us a hint at what will come next, which personality from the long list will emerge as particularly significant. They are indeed a cliffhanger, a sneak preview.

Between Parashat Noah and Parashat Lech Lecha, the listing of generations does even more: It moves the Torah’s focus from a universalist to a particular Jewish lens. Ten generations after Noah, the man who made sure that all life on earth could continue, another man is born, the figure who will become the father of Judaism:

And this is the lineage of Terah: Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran begot Lot. And Haran died in the lifetime of Terah his father in the land of his birth, Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took themselves wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah, daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. And Sarai was barren, she had no child. And Terah took Abram his son and Lot son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son Abram, and he set out with them from Ur of the Chaldees toward the land of Canaan, and they came to Haran and settled there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran (Genesis 11:27-32).

Abram is of course Abraham, and Sarai, Sarah, the first pair of “avoteinu ve’imoteinu,” (fathers and mothers, ancestors.) These few verses contain a lot of information that sometimes falls through the cracks. It is here, in the end of Parashat Noah, that the journey from Mesopotamia to the Land of Canaan begins: Already Abraham’s father wanted to go to the land but then settled along the way. It is his son who continues the original itinerary.

In fact, this family continues the journey that began with Noah and Noah’s sons: At a fork where two roads diverged, the descendants of Shem took the path less traveled: From Shinar – the southern Mesopotamian region where the Tower of Babel was built and that also comprised the city of Ur – they began moving up the Euphrates, slowly climbing up the eastern half of the fertile crescent.

Abraham’s and Sarah’s journey toward Judaism doesn’t begin out of nowhere suddenly and neatly at the beginning of chapter 12 in Genesis. Their journey began many, many generations ago, with the expulsion from paradise, followed by the flood and the building of the tower as well as the dispersion of all humans across the earth.

Judaism values the communal recollection of names and is very aware of how the most current generation is always an inheritor of the past, wisdom, narrative – as well as a link to the future.

In Torah Study this week we began reading Mishnah Pirkei Avot. The tractate famously begins with a different type of genealogies, the genealogy of Torah interpreters:

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah (Mishna Pirkei Avot 1:1).

Whether or not one believes in the divine origin of Torah, those who engage in the study of it, in whatever capacity and to whatever degree, continue something that began ungraspable long ago. Jews have been called the “People of the Book,” and while that generally had a positive ring to it, the Russian intellectual and cultural Zionist thinker, Asher Zvi Ginsberg, better known by his pen name Ahad HaAm (One of the People), preferred to think of the Jewish people as a “literary people” – a people that knew their book well, but that owned and shaped the book’s transmission and interpretation from generation to generation. Or, as Rabbi Gordon Tucker writes, a people that embraced an “ongoing process of cultural renewal, engaging in a re-definition of its values and goals in response to the ever-changing circumstances of life.”

In continuing a journey that was begun before them, this is exactly what Abraham and Sarah did, the founding ancestors of Judaism, who emerge not suddenly in Parashat Lech Lecha, but at the end of Parashat Noah; Abraham and Sarah, whose long list of ancestors goes back to the flood, goes back to the garden. 

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch