Parashat Noach starts with a world that has gone completely off the rails. Violence and corruption are everywhere, and the Torah says that “all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth” (Genesis 6:12). In other words, this is not a story about a few bad apples. The whole orchard has gone rotten.
That is probably the most frightening part of the story. Human beings are very good at adjusting to things. If something happens once, we are shocked. If it happens repeatedly, we start calling it normal. Eventually, people can find themselves living inside a moral disaster while still worrying about parking, dinner, and whether someone has replied to the WhatsApp group. We are adaptable creatures. Unfortunately, that includes adapting to things we really should not.
Noach is introduced as “a righteous man, perfect in his generations” (Genesis 6:9), and the rabbis in Sanhedrin 108a immediately start arguing about whether that is actually a compliment. One view says that if Noach could be righteous among such dreadful people, imagine how great he would have been in a better generation. The other says: yes, well, compared with that lot, almost anyone would look good. It is the biblical equivalent of being told you are the best-dressed person at a car boot sale.
The harder question is what Noach actually does with his righteousness. He builds the ark. He follows instructions. He saves his family. What he does not seem to do is argue for the people outside it. Avraham later challenges HaShem over Sodom. Moshe repeatedly argues for Israel. Noach gets the measurements for the ark and appears to get on with the carpentry. There is something admirable in obedience, but there is also something unsettling in silence.
Can we call ourselves good simply because we are not joining in with what everyone else is doing? Or does goodness sometimes require us to become a nuisance?
That is not always comfortable. Nobody particularly wants to be the person who says, “Actually, I think this is wrong,” when everyone else has already agreed, ordered lunch and moved on to Any Other Business. But there are moments when keeping quiet is not neutrality. It is simply the easiest option.
Then, after the flood, humanity gets another chance and promptly decides to build the Tower of Babel. Apparently surviving the destruction of the known world was not enough to cure us of overconfidence.
Everybody speaks the same language. Everybody has the same plan. Everybody works towards the same great project. It sounds wonderfully efficient, right up until you realise that nobody is questioning anything. Midrashic tradition imagines a society where if a brick fell from the tower people mourned the brick, but if a worker fell, nobody cared. The project had become more valuable than the person building it.
That is where Babel becomes more than a strange story about languages. It is about what happens when human beings stop thinking independently. Groups become very dangerous when disagreement is treated as betrayal. We see it in politics, online, in organisations, and sometimes in communities. You can now watch thousands of people repeat exactly the same opinion on social media and congratulate themselves on having “done their own research.”
Noach gives us two opposite failures. Before the flood, everyone does whatever they like and society collapses into violence. At Babel, everyone thinks and acts together, and individuality disappears. Neither works. The Torah seems to be asking for something much harder: people who can think for themselves without deciding that only they matter.
That is probably the real challenge of the parashah. Are we good because we have actually chosen what is right, or because the people around us happen to be worse? Are we prepared to challenge the crowd when it is wrong? And when we build our own little arks of comfort, security and people who agree with us, do we ever look outside?
Noach survives the flood.
The more difficult question is whether any of us would have had the courage to tell the people outside the ark that the rain was coming.