The Flood

THE BIG IDEA

This week marks the flood. The moment that divinity was so horrified by the *violent nature of humanity that God decided to destroy his/her/their own creation. 

Can you imagine creating all life and wiping it out? Do you know how hard it was for me to throw out cake dough that had too much salt?

This week’s Torah Omens invite us to contemplate a world that was so filled with violence and evil that the Creator of all Life decided to destroy the entirety of his/her/their own creation - except Noah, the one person that sensed into the oneness, heard and followed the directions of divinity, and saved each species including his own family.

The flooding waters in the time of Noah, feel to me now, as if the tears of divinity pierced through creation with such force, that the upper and lower waters reunited and washed the heinous nature of being away to the core. An existential clearing I fully support, if it means wiping absolute evil from the earth once and for all. 

This week isn’t about us and them.

This week isn’t even about Torah.

This week is about restoring our basic humanity — first within ourselves, and then within the world at large. 

When we watch shows and movies about glorified killing and terrorism for fun we all make space for a society that has allowed a terrorist government to oppress and indoctrinate it’s own people, use humanitarian support for weapons, and enable a society where a young female Israeli hostage can be chained to the back of a truck and paraded through the streets of Gaza without anyone stopping them, or reporting them, let alone instances cheering them on. 

We are a global society that entertains ourselves with visual images of pain, violence, and torture -even if we don’t do it ourselves. We encourage, with our attention, a consciousness so tolerant and insensitive to brutal imagery, and language, that after an unprovoked slaughter and acts of mass terror on the Southern border of Israel, actual human beings can say “they deserve it.”

This is the week that God makes a covenant with ALL LIFE accepting the evil that is in the human heart from the time of its youth — acknowledging that the desire to violence is so strong, hierarchy is brought into creation. Humans can dominate, kill and eat every creature  - without blood.

HOWEVER, the covenant with ALL LIFE INCLUDES consequences for indiscriminately spilling human blood. 

This week is an essential time to examine all the ways we all contribute to the violence seeking consciousness of our world. When we regain our sensitivity to violence we, as a global consciousness, will be better able to differentiate announced attacks and displacements from unprompted slaughter and hostage taking.

This is a week to build a shelter for your consciousness, build an arc for your soul, and bring everything dear, and holy, and wholesome and good inside with you — and let the rest be washed away. 

The divine tears, like the waters, eventually cease.

And God remembered Noah,

and slowly, slowly,

we come back to earth. 

And if you can’t understand what I am saying, or trying to say, it too shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is also the week of Babel — the confusion of language and the challenge of communicating with one another that we, humanity, also brought upon ourselves.

sigh.

But I don’t want to leave us off on an entirely bad note… guess who comes into the picture this week? Go on… guess….

ps. For those that are looking for signs… after an unseasonably hard rain and a flurry of rocket attacks, a big ol’ rainbow appeared over Highway 1 in Israel. We’ll get through this, the signs are clear.

*the Hebrew word for the violence that was so awful that God destroyed all of creation is Hamas