Parashat Noaj - English

Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik, 

Kol Shearith Israel Congregation

Panama City, Panama

This week’s parashah is named after Noah, and brings us the well-known story of the flood.  This story, one of the most famous of the entire Bible, is also a children’s favorite.  The image of all kinds of animals sailing in a large ship, under a torrential rain, is engaging.  Even after the downpour, the rainbow shining on the sky as evidence of the covenant between God and humankind offers a multicolored closure to what seems a happy ending (Gen. 9:12-17).

Nevertheless, when the childlike story ends, the Torah returns us to the decadent reality prevailing on earth before the flood.  No sooner had Noah descended from the ark, than he plants a vineyard and gets drunk.  Being in this drunken state, he is humiliated by his son Ham, in a somehow unclear incident:

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.  And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.  And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.  And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his youngest son had done unto him.  And he said: Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.  (Gen. 9:21-15)

The main question arising from this reading forces us to identify Ham’s offense to his father, which makes him (actually, his son Canaan) worthy of such a curse.  Was seeing his father naked so degrading, or did Ham do something else to his father?

In a first reading, we could state that the Torah itself seems inclined to support that Ham’s sin was seeing his father naked, and also his not covering him immediately as did his brothers (vs. 23).  The punctiliousness and promptness of Shem and Japheth in covering Noah’s nakedness prove the sensitiveness of the situation.

However, the seriousness of Ham’s punishment (or rather of his son Canaan) gives us a feeling that something more must have happened.  Reading the text more carefully, we find certain elements that reaffirm this opinion.  Noah himself, when awake, “knew what his youngest son had done unto him”.  What was it that he did?

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 70a) offers two answers to this question, in still another of the discrepancies of Rav and Shmuel (Babylonian Amoraim of the first generation, 3^rd century CE).  The first one maintains that Ham raped Noah.  This reading arises from understanding the expression “saw the nakedness” as an euphemism referring to a sexual relation, as it appears in other Torah passages (for example, in the entire Lev. 18).

The other Talmudic opinion holds that the son castrated his father.  Although there is no reminiscence on the biblical text that may infer such reading (the Talmudic explanation sustains that the punishment fell on Canaan, Ham’s fourth son, because he prevented Noah from having his fourth son), it is clear that several stories concerning close cultures included myths of castration where sons prevented their fathers from continuing to procreate, possibly because they did not want to share their inheritance.

The Hittite myth of the castration of the supreme god Anu on the hands of his son Kumarbi is quoted in the “Hebrew Myths” (Robert Graves and Raphael Patai), as well as the more famous story of Uranus, castrated by his son Cronus, leader of the titans, which forms part of Greek mythology.

Researchers believe that the original story, whether of rape or castration, was sugar-coated, stripping it of the serious misdemeanor but preserving it within the text so as to justify the subjugation of the Canaanites.

Whatever the explanation may be, the story leaves us with a bitter taste.

If the idea of the flood was to recommence the human experience, this unpleasant event is likely to convince us of the impossibility of the task ahead.  It seems to be framed within the statement we read in the previous chapter of the Torah (“I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth”, Gen. 8:21), as well as in the decadence posed by the well-known account of the Tower of Babel, which appears further on in this same parashah (Gen. 11:1-9).

In short, the second divine project has not prospered.  Humanity adds one more failure to its short history.  Plunged in darkness, our parashah gives us a sparkle of hope almost at the end.  Not everything is lost.  What was announced by the stars, as the beautiful song in Ladino says, has become a reality:  “That Avraham Avinu (our patriarch) was due to be born.  Avraham avinu, beloved father, blessed father, light of Israel.”

Shabbat Shalom,

Gustavo