Into the Ark

By Rav Erez Nir

"And G-d said to Noah, the end of all living flesh has come before me, for the land is filled with violence through them and behold I will destroy them with the earth. Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; with rooms you shall make the ark, and you shall pitch it within and without with pitch." (From this week's Torah portion, Noah, Genesis 6:13-14).

This week's Torah portion, Noah, describes a terrible breakdown of humanity; total bankruptcy of all G-d's expectations and aspirations for man, leading to the destruction of the earth.

Reality and the world will always be whatever we make of them and however we perceive them. But the reality that we produce can jail us inside it and not allow us to change and certainly not to change it. In the Torah portion of Noah we discover that sometimes we have to cut off our connection to reality and enter the isolated ark, where we can reconnect to our original dreams.

It is we who have created today's reality in Israel. It is a reality of a Sisyphean and goal-less battle for survival; a reality devoid of an inspiring past and barren of any significant future to which to aspire; it is a reality divested of spirit and dreams. We are so enslaved within this reality that we cannot even strive to create a different situation. To exit this vicious cycle we must liberate ourselves from the current events that strangle us and create a new consciousness; the consciousness of tomorrow, a Jewish consciousness with a past and a future from which we can emerge refreshed, when the flood waters subside.

Shabbat Shalom