40 Days + 40 Nights
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Parashat Noach
1.
It caught my eye this year
40 days and 40 nights
It caught my eye
Why hadn’t I ever noticed it before?
God predicts — and delivers — a flood for 40 days and 40 nights
To wipe clean the corrupt world and start over again
Yes, we are back in the story of Noach and his ark and the flood
And I know that usually I remind us not to think of ourselves as God
But this year
Given the options of the characters in the story
I am less curious about Noach, the rule follower
And more curious about God
And interestingly, Torah seems to say more about the inner life of God than Noach too
I got to study with my teacher Avivah Zornberg this week
Who offered that when God decides to destroy the world, to flood it
It says in Torah:
וַיִּתְעַצֵּ֖ב אֶל־לִבּֽוֹ
God regretted, literally the reflexive of sadness, made god’s self sad / b’libo / in the divine heart
And Rashi points out that this same root / this word
עִצְּבוֹנֵ֣ךְ / your sadness, yearnings
Is what God says to Eve when she is being punished, being kicked out of the garden (Gen. 3:16)
God says she will have the physical pain of childbirth
But Rashi offers, that the repetition of this word in the same verse
Is to refer to the emotional challenges of raising children.
That is to say, the emotional hurt in the heart when we create anything we don’t control.
וַיִּתְעַצֵּ֖ב אֶל־לִבּֽוֹ
It hurt in God’s heart
And in fact, Rashi offers that this kind of hurt it when something we have made does not go the way you want it to, something that changed from good to not. (See Rashi to 6:6)
In Da’at Zkenim (to 6:6) it says
…This idea is like from one who [is baking] and says to himself when the dough did not rise: “It was I who made the recipe, therefore it is I who must accept the blame if the product is unsatisfactory…”
וַיִּתְעַצֵּ֖ב אֶל־לִבּֽוֹ
We can see why God maybe just wants to start again in the story of Noach
Maybe God is blaming god’s own self
Maybe God just wants to give up
Maybe we can relate to this feeling of deeply wanting a fresh start
2.
But this brings me to my question this shabbat
Because this shabbat I don’t think we are much like Noach
Docile and following orders, virtually silent and building the ark and collecting the animals and waiting while the world is flooded, waiting for God to tell us to come out
I don’t think we are like Noach
I think
Looking around at our country
We are more like God
Upset and even distraught at our collective creation
Hurting in the heart
Maybe even wishing we could just somehow start again
And this leads me to my question
Because it seems strange to me, I began to wonder
Why does it take God 40 days and 40 nights to flood the world?
In other words, you’re telling me that God created the entire world in seven days but it took forty days to flood it?
Anyone who has ever been around a construction project knows the demo is the fastest part
And it even seems that the flooding and destruction lasts longer than 40 days and 40 nights — up to a whole year
Why does the destruction take so long?
Not only that
Remember: 40 days and 40 nights is a very significant number for us
This increment of time — 40 days and 40 nights — only happens one other time in the whole five books of Torah, famously, when Moshe goes up Sinai to receive Torah
And it is repeated a lot of times so we don’t forget: 40 days and 40 nights
Now you might point out that the transmission of Torah ALSO takes longer than the creation of the whole world
But something there seems to make sense
The story of God giving Torah on Sinai is, after all, the story of something divine entering human hands and hearts
Maybe, says the tradition
Maybe Moses needed all that time to absorb Torah
Maybe Moses needed to learn Torah with God during the 40 days so that Moses could dream about it and integrate it during the 40 nights.
Or it is even possible, according to one famous midrash
That God, so involved with this creation of the Torah
Starts spending all those days “putting crowns on the letters” / typographic flourishes
Tying ribbons, as it were, on the packages
Putting secrets inside for each one of us to seek and find
Making the opportunities for us to see those crowns in the future and make meaning from them
You see, even with just a little looking we start to get a picture of what was happening on Mount Sinai and why a lot of time was needed. And it is not unintuitive, this is the creation of Torah we’re talking about, after all!
But a destruction that takes so long? Seems suspect.
And a destruction that required the exact amount of time that it took to bring Torah into the world?
I cannot believe it is a coincidence.
3.
While it is possible it just takes a long time to accumulate that much rain
and those days were intended to change the physical world
While we understand that after the flood
The world is truly, in some ways, different — it is certainly less populated
I do not think this is the reason for the 40 days and 40 nights
And while it is possible that the 40 days is for Noach
There is a tradition that Noach needs all that time to think of others, albeit animals, outside himself
And it is true
Noach who says almost nothing and volunteers almost nothing in the beginning, at the end, does build an alter when he gets off the ark without anyone telling him to
Still I do not think this is the reason for the 40 days and 40 nights
Because, in fact, it seems that God is the only one who undergoes significant transformation
See once the flood is over and Noach builds that alter
God says…
אֶל־לִבּ֗וֹ /
God says, same word, God says in God’s heart
לֹֽא־אֹ֠סִף לְקַלֵּ֨ל ע֤וֹד אֶת־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙
“I won’t destroy the earth ever again.”
The inner conversation God is having in God’s heart,
The one that was started in the beginning before the flood
is reflected here, is continuing
But now, instead of there being an inner pain that can only be met by destruction
By a “starting over”
There is instead a promise to stay with whatever happens
And God will make good on this promise right away because, importantly,
The ink on the promise barely dry
Like not even one verse later
Noach himself plants a vineyard, gets drunk and engages in lets just say problematic behavior
Pretty much along the same lines of the stuff, albeit on a much larger scale, that made God want to destroy the world to begin with
But this time God does not destroy
God does not start the world again
The world keeps going in its very imperfect, problematic way
God’s beautiful and now newly blemished creation remains intact
So now perhaps we understand
That the 40 days and 40 nights are not for destroying the earth
Floods don’t take that long to do great damage
And God can make a lot of rain at once if God wants to
And the 40 days and 40 nights are not even for Noach
Or, we could say that if it is for Noach, the rehabilitation doesn’t really take
And I don’t even think the animals needed the 40 days and 40 nights
They are the only innocent beings in the whole story, beginning to end
It is clear — we are only left with one other who needed the 40 days and 40 nights:
It was God
And so I looked in the midrash for what God was doing all that time
(And I could always look more, if you find something, please send it to me)
But I could not find a single commentary on what God did
Why did God prolong it so long?
Longer than the creation of the whole earth?
And why did it take the exact same amount of time as it took to write our Torah?
And since there was no midrash that I could find I will just suggest
Something I learned from Kitchen-ite Leah McKenney who brought up this possibility of God’s growth at her bat mitzvah
That first, God needed time to move away from this whole destroying worlds again and again concept
This, “I’m in total control or I wreck it” thing
God had to realize that this way of doing business was not working
Maybe that took some time, that took some divine humility
God had to understand that the only way the world could work moving forward
Would be for God to accept that things would go often wrong as a by product of free will and freedom
And then further, importantly, because we are talking about God here
God needed to create a way so that even when things would invariably go wrong, neither party would leave nor destroy the other.
And we know: It is hard to create a covenant
It is hard to create something,
anything that involves other people
It is hard to create something that doesn’t have an escape hatch
What took 40 days and 40 nights?
God had to create and fill out the idea of a brit, a covenant.
And God seals this covenant
Famously with a rainbow (you remember the rainbow, I know it)
But what is interesting see
What you’ll notice
Is that the covenant and rainbow don’t really seem to be primarily for Noach,
who, as usual, doesn’t say anything
We know the rainbow is not primarily for Noach b/c
When God talks about this covenant, it seems to be to bind God, in public, to the continuation of the world, to us. The emphasis of the requirement is on God.
God says
Here is this rainbow —
And when I make it
זָכַרְתִּ֣י אֶת־בְּרִיתִ֗י
I will remember MY covenant!
In other words it is a reminder from God to God
A divine memo to divine self!
And God says almost the same thing a verse later — I will see it and I will remember the covenant.
See the idea of covenant, of not starting over, is such a new and holy idea that God has to create ways to remind God’s self:
“Do not start again. Remember, you promised. Stay.”
What took 40 days and 40 nights?
God was understanding what a covenant would be, not just for us, but for God.
What took 40 days and 40 nights?
Letting go of control, even divine control
What took 40 days and 40 nights?
It was nothing less than a new way of being together in the world.
5.
Last, of course, we try to be like God
So here too, maybe in these times
When so many factions seem bent on purity and destruction in so many dangerous ways
When the trials for acceptance only seem to grow in their complexity
When it is easy to fall into a mindset,
no matter where we are on the political spectrum,
of giving up on large segments of the country
Maybe this shabbat we would do well to imitate God —
Who went so far as to create divine reminders so that, no matter how bad things got, destruction was no longer an option.
And you may remember that the blessing for when we see a rainbow is not — as you might imagine —
“How colorful are your works, Adonai”
“How glorious are your creations,” but rather
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יהוה אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶך הָעולָם
Blessed are you holy one, royal one of the universe
זוכֵר הַבְּרִית
Who remembers the covenant (!)
(not that we remember, you, God remember!)
וְנֶאֱמָן בִּבְרִיתו וְקַיָּם בְּמַאֲמָרו.
And is faithful to the covenant
And keeps [your] promise
So, too, when we see a rainbow, we remember that just as God needs a reminder to keep promises and covenants
Just as God will not destroy nor leave again
So we must constantly remind ourselves and each other
Not to destroy one another, not to leave
But rather to protect, and to forgive
And when we are able to do this
To stay together
Even in the face of great adversity like a pandemic
Even in the face of forces that seem larger than us, that seem bent on our destruction
It says in the tradition that we not only will we see a rainbow
But that we might become a rainbow
That certain tzaddikim in certain generations become rainbows for their generation
Embodying the staying power, the covenant, the brit and the beauty
Embodying the effort it took by none other than God to create a way beyond destruction — the way of a binding holy promise
An idea so holy it took God 40 days and 40 nights to bring it into our world.
