The Noah story is probably the best known of the Bible. The animals went in two by two, the heroic Noah saves his family on the ark. They survive a world flood and get the world started again after it had been destroyed due to its wickedness.
It begins in Genesis Chapter 6, but a good few verses into the chapter, verse 9. If you go back just a few verses in Chapter 6 there is probably one of the least known stories in the Bible – the story of the giants who roamed the earth impressed by the women of the time.
We never read it in Reform Synagogues because it comes at the end of what many would consider the boring bit of the portion Bereshit: “And Mahalaleel lived sixty five years, and begat Jared; And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters; And all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred and ninety five years; and he died. And Jared lived a hundred and sixty two years, and he begat Enoch”; you get the idea? It’s the counting of the ten generations between Adam and Noah, not interesting enough to read, it would appear.
Then there are four very odd verses just before we hear the final verses of Bereshit which set up the Noah story, where God sees that the actions of humankind have become too evil for the world to continue. “It came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful; and they took as wives all those whom they chose. And the Eternal said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for he also is flesh; so his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. There were Nefilim in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men of old, men of renown.” That’s what it says in our Torah!
Part of the purpose of this four-verse story is an etiology – an explanation for an observed phenomenon – we don’t have people living for hundreds of years – why not? Why are we not so incredibly long living as the earliest generations of the Torah? Essentially because God couldn’t put up with striving with anyone of us for more than 120 years, and so we are mortal with a limited life span – the life span of Moses is the limit as the Torah leaves the legend of multi-centenarians behind.
The story of the sons of God does not re-appear in the Bible – there must have been a bigger story in the past which has disappeared from our tradition. It is one of several stubs of narrative that are left in the Torah but not taken any further. But one aspect of these four verses does come back again. That is the Nefilim.
Who or what were Nefilim? Again some kind of legendary being that clearly has a bigger back story that we don’t get told in the Torah. That left the field open to the Midrashim to work out what they were. In Genesis Rabbah (26:7) they are described as extreme giants. So large that the diameter of one of their thigh bone was 18 cubits – twenty-four feet or eight metres. We can assume that the reason, at least biblically why we don’t see Nefilim any more on earth is because they would have been wiped out by the flood that Noah rode out with his family on the ark. But they actually appear one more time in the Torah – at least they seem to – unless that was an exaggeration.
It is when the spies whom Moses sends to spy out the Land of Israel, two years into the Exodus, return and tell the Children of Israel that they have no chance of coming into the Promised Land – at least ten out of twelve of them do. They say, among the horrors of the fortified land recorded in the Book of Numbers (13:32ff): “We are not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we….The land is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature….And there we saw the Nefilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight.”
Well, maybe they didn’t really see Nefilim but you get the message. The result is that the Israelites turn back to the wilderness for another 38 years and the whole generation fails to make it to the Promised Land apart from the more confident Joshua and Caleb.
It is all too easy for people collectively to feel that a task, a change, is just too big for us to manage. To feel like grasshoppers before Nefilim. But you don’t have to feel like that, indeed for the world to change it is imperative that you do not.
Consider Noah. The person who realizes that the earth is doomed. He is the last person in the Torah with a lifespan beyond three hundred years so he had a long time to think about about it. Noah lived for 950 years according to the Torah – he was 600 years old when went into ark. It meant, according to Midrash Tanchmua (Noach) that when God said to him “make an ark of wood” he had the time to grow the trees from seed.
Tanchuma says that he easily had 120 years to grow a grove of cedars and that, while they were growing and people asked him what he was growing them for, he told them that if we do not all change our ways there is going to be destruction. He told them too when they asked him why he was cutting his trees down. He kept warning people about how we all must change our ways, during the years that it took to build the enormous ark large enough to take all of the animal species, and during the months it took to gather two specimens of each of them. But no-one would listen apart from his own close family. The task of change was just too great.
So the waters rose, the world flooded and that was the end of human society until Noah re-established it in today’s flawed form, the one man who did not feel like a grasshopper against the challenge, the one man righteous in his generation. Incidentally, the Tanchuma Midrash on Noah attributed to third century Rabbis Huna and Jose is repeated almost word for word in the Koran where Noah is presented as a prophet forever warning people about their behaviour until it is too late.
And this is where we are now. All of the political chaos of the past weeks has taken our eyes off climate change, the need to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees for the survival of humanity, the need to preserve bio diversity while up to 50,000 species of flora and fauna go extinct yearly, of recognizing the obscenity of pouring over 5 million tons of plastic into the world’s oceans every year (Science 13/2/15 pp 768-771), demands for change from each one of us. Our new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is not even going to COP 27 the annual worldwide climate change conference which starts next Sunday even though the UK hosted this conference last year – he has it would seem too much else on his mind.
But the crisis of climate change demands that each of us is righteous in our generation in reducing our use of the earth’s resources, changing our consuming behaviour, altering our transport means and our energy use in our homes and work to reduce our carbon footprint. It requires us not to feel like grasshoppers before the Nefilim of the environmental degradation of the whole world.
That is the message of the Kiddush we will enjoy on November 12, AJEX Shabbat on the last weekend of COP 27 will also be EcoShabbat. Even our Synagogue community is nowhere near making enough changes to be an exemplar of the world preserving behaviour needed in 2022. Around the Kiddush hall on that Shabbat you will see that the we will highlight a number of issues in our Kiddush. We are part of Eco Synagogue with many other Shuls because Synagogues should be inspirers of great Jewish values. Today the value of Bal Taschit, preserving the world, should be at the fore.
Rabbi Greg Alexander of Cape Town, a city only now recovering from an extraordinary drought, teaches: the colourful drawings we were asked to produce at school of animals two-by-two-ing into a big boat with a bearded Noah cheerfully welcoming belies the fact that a world was about to be destroyed. The dimensions of the ark are not of a nicely prowed boat but rather of a floating platform half as wide as it was long. So the portion of Noah reminds us that this can happen – we can lose the world we live in and we could find ourselves virtually out of control of this loss. The world needs every one of us to be a Noah bravely taking action before the challenge.
