Sermon: Shabbat Noach – The Rainbow as Symbol

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 2 November 2024

So here’s the story, slightly revised. God tells Noah to build an ark. Make it with 7 levels, make each level watertight and fill each level with water. That done, get fish but not just any fish – only carp – and fill each chamber with carp. Noah is puzzled but does as God commands. Finally he comes to realise that what God has asked him to do is to build a multi-storey carp ark.

More seriously, some 15 years ago, our son lived in Rotterdam. On one visit we took the ferry up the river Maas to Dordrecht. A few kilometres out of town, in the middle of the countryside, we could see an enormous bulk at the water’s edge. Getting closer it turned out to be the early-stage of a full-scale reconstruction, using the Biblical dimensions, of Noah’s Ark by a Dutch builder, Johan Huibers. It’s 120 metres long and nearly 30 high. Finished in 2012, so Wikipedia tells me, it now has models of animals in it.

We all know the story of Noah’s Ark: “the animals went in two by two” and the rainbow. These early Biblical stories – like Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark and so on – should carry a health-warning, like the one on plastic bags: “this story is dangerous for little children.” You see, as kids we hear, perforce, a children’s version of the story, and end up thinking – not surprisingly – that all the stories in the Bible are like that: OK for kids, but to be rejected as childish once we grow up.

Yet, from Roman times onwards, people speculated about the Ark. The first edition of Encylopaedia Britannica in 1771 described it as factual. The Bible says it came to rest on Mount Ararat on the present-day Turkish-Armenian border. Expeditions have been mounted to the area to find its remains. The most-recent was in 2010. The spokesman for that expedition is quoted as saying, “it’s not 100% that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think 99.9% that this is it.”

What I’m going to say now might disappoint some of you, but there was no Noah, no Ark, no Flood. It’s a myth, but a myth in the deep and real sense of the word: a story which says something about the human condition, the world we live in, the relationship between one human being and another, and, the relationship between human beings and God.

Many ancient cultures had a flood story, the oldest one dating from the 19thC BCE. They come from all over the world: from Mesopotamia, Assyria, India, Mexico, the Incas, the Hopi Native Americans of New Mexico and, of course, the Bible. Most share certain common elements: a flood; a command to build a boat that will save just a few people and animals; the boat coming to rest on a mountain; birds being sent out to see if there is dry land; the family finally emerging and human life beginning again.

While it’s interesting that there are so many similar versions; even more interesting is where they differ.

In the Biblical account God brings the Flood because of the violence and corruption of human beings. In the Babylonian myth, the flood comes because human beings are making too much noise and disturbing the gods. In the Bible Noah is selected because he is considered to be a righteous man; in Babylonia, no reason is given for why the hero is chosen. And only in the Biblical account does God make a promise never again to destroy the world by flood.

And then there is the rainbow – an element unique to the Biblical myth: the sign of God’s covenant with humanity, God’s promise never again to destroy the world by flood.

When Noah emerges from the Ark, God repeats the command given to Adam and Eve: p’ru ur’vu ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Genesis 9:1) But this time leaves out one key word: v’chiv’shu’hah ‘and subdue it.’ Given what happened first time around, God is, perhaps, a bit more wary about giving such power to human beings.

For centuries v’chiv’shu’hah ‘and subdue it’ was understood to mean: we have absolute dominion and control over the natural world and can do what we want with it, as if we were somehow apart from the natural order of things, over and above nature.

Interestingly, a midrash from 2000 years ago has God warning Adam and Eve in the Garden: “Take care of this world, for if you destroy it, there is nobody after you to come and put it right.” Quite an insight for 2000 years ago!

Barely a week goes by now without some environmental or climatic event in the news: a whole year’s rain falling in just a few hours in Valencia this week with horrendous results; electric cars featuring in Wednesday’s budget; ongoing issues about pollution in our rivers and so on and so on.

Only within the last generation or so have most people come to see that resources are not unlimited, and appreciated how we can do damage to our environment that cannot be repaired.

There have always been a few lone voices in the wilderness warning us. Rachel Carson, was one of them, with her classic book Silent Spring, published in the late 1950’s. Most were dismissed as scaremongering cranks.

In 1966, NASA published that photo of planet Earth floating in space, the first time we could see the whole earth. Perhaps only then did we begin to really appreciate the fragility of our little planet, a tiny speck of life floating in a vast cosmos way beyond our comprehension. Only then, maybe, could we come to a deeper awareness of how everything is interconnected, of delicate balances at work in nature, of the ease with which that balance can be disturbed.

So the rainbow has come to be the symbol of hope for a better world.

Peasants fighting against the feudal system in 16thC Germany used a rainbow flag; in the Revolutionary War against Britain, Thomas Paine (he of ‘the Rights of Man’) suggested neutral ships fly a rainbow flag; in 1925, the International Co-operative movement adopted the rainbow as its symbol. It was Greenpeace’s symbol in their campaigns against whaling, seal hunting, nuclear testing and nuclear waste dumping. Their boat, Rainbow Warrior, was sunk by French secret services agents in New Zealand in 1985. In a way, Greenpeace turned the meaning of the rainbow upside down. In the Torah it’s the sign of the promise that the world will never be totally destroyed. Greenpeace used it as a warning: the world might well be destroyed again, but this time our actions, not God’s, will be responsible.

When God tells Adam and Eve to populate the earth v’chiv’shu’hah ‘and subdue it,’ there’s no doubt that the “it” refers to the earth. We have come to realise in our generation that what needs to be subdued is not out there – not the earth – but something inside us, in our minds and hearts.

The rainbow is a marvellous symbol. It’s a nothing, really. It only exists on our retina as interpreted by our brain. Without form or substance, it’s a mere optical illusion. I still find something magical, mystical even, about this completely insubstantial thing which is yet totally engrossing and captivating, no matter how often I see it.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, political activist, one of America’s leading Jewish thinkers, suggested long ago that we need a principle of relationship between peoples:

A kind of all-embracing covenant, he wrote, that recognises the differences between peoples, even their overlapping similarities and conflicts. Like the rainbow itself, it must be made of many colours that melt together, but can also be seen as distinct and different. A covenant that says what it means to have a just and loving relationship among us all, what it means for all the colours to glow and arch in harmony, so that none of them oppresses or drowns out the others. (Godwrestling, Shocken New York 1978, p165)

Since the 1970s, the rainbow has become the symbol of the LGBTQ+ community speaking of diversity, inclusiveness, tolerance, hope, yearning.

And most recently, of course, the rainbow became the symbol, during the pandemic, of solidarity with key workers, an expression of hope in very difficult times.

Noah is not Jewish. He represents the universal human being, stripped of labels. He is you and I. I imagine Noah, the survivor of the first global environmental catastrophe, emerging from the Ark into a world bereft of human beings. He sees the rainbow and is reminded of how close things came to there being no survivors at all.

That rainbow has to serve as a reminder to us also, of the possibility, more close and real perhaps than ever before, of a destruction that will be brought about by the work of our own hands. That is the warning of the rainbow.

We have to subdue it. But not the world, not other human beings – but ourselves. When we can better control our passions and urges, then maybe we will have begun to create that better world, which is, after all, the promise of the rainbow.