SERMON PARASHAT NOAH - 5 Cheshvan 5787 | October 16, 2026
SERMON PARASHAT NOAH
October 16, 2026 | 5 Cheshvan 5787
Rabbi David Edleson | Temple Sinai | South Burlington, Vermont
WE ARE ALL ON NOAH’S ARK
This week’s Torah portion is Noah, where we read about the famous flood and the Ark. The ark is much in the news these days if you spend time on Instagram; there is an excavation in Turkey near Mt. Ararat on what some are claiming is Noah’s ark.
Now since Joshua is doing his d’var Torah on Noah, I want to be careful not to step on his material, but I do want to consider Noah and the flood in a different way than Joshua is.
Perhaps Noah, like other ancient stories of a great flood, is a kind of mythic memory from the end of the last ice age, when all that ice melted.
We know here in America, that some of the most dramatic landscapes in the Western United states were created by great floods as the last ice age ended.
Enormous seas of melted water would be held by an ice dam, and when it collapsed, unimaginable volumes of water would pour out, many times the volume of the Amazon River. This created the Badlands in South Dakota and shaped the entire Pacific Northwest. So maybe Noah is a remnant of an ancient human memory.
Or perhaps it is simply about being human, and feeling adrift, overwhelmed, rudderless, and alone in a vast universe. Perhaps it is about the fragility of life and the profound desire we have to find solid ground to stand on where we don’t feel so adrift.
One of the morning prayers we call the Miracles of Every Day, includes this one:
Baruch Atah Adonai, roka ha’aretz al hamayim.
Blessed are you who makes solid ground amidst the waters.
We are grateful to feel the earth beneath our feet to remind us that we are not as adrift as we sometimes feel.
(As a person who gets terribly seasick, even crossing Lake Champlain, I have a special appreciation for solid ground. This was exacerbated by a father who was a Scoutmaster for the Sea Scouts, and who had me on boats as often as possible.)
This morning, Cantor Sinacore sent me a video that made me cry – not a surprise to people who know me, and it was about Noah.
It was an interview with the Israeli singer, Netta Barzilai, who was the winner of Eurovision in 2018. She was talking about the background of a song that perhaps Cantor will sing next year when we read Noah, but in introducing the song, Netta was reflecting on how after October 7th, she couldn’t feel she was on solid ground. All she would wear was black sweats and doing anything fun and joyful felt wrong.
Then Netta was asked to sing at the memorial service for a young sparkly woman who was killed at the NOVA festival, and the mother of the young woman asked Netta to wear something sparkly since her daughter loved that about Netta. Netta struggled with it, but she realized that staying stuck was not helpful.
She said:
I have to believe, as in nature, that we too will have days of quiet after we have lost everything. We don’t have a choice. We have to ask ourselves: How we can create land when we have water up to here? (points to her ears) We can create land, and we’ll wait for the dove together.
That idea that we, together, create the solid ground we stand on in the midst of the flood all around us is such a beautiful modern midrash on Noah.
This is made even more powerful when we remember that the Hamas called the attacks of November 7th, Al Aqsa Flood.
We have to ask ourselves: How we can create land when we have water up to here? We can create land, and we’ll wait for the dove together.
Or maybe Noah is much more cosmic than that. The story of Noah is in many ways a story of the undoing of creation.
The first thing we read in the Torah is that when God began to create the universe, everything was a swirling dark chaotic infinite ocean a place where life could not exist.
So in our story, God begins to organize the chaos, first making light to see what she was doing. God sets boundaries on the water, pushing them up and down to carve out an area where this earth and life on it could flourish.
In this picture of the universe, above us were endless waters, held up by the firmament, which they imagined as a dome of hammered metal; below were endless waters held at bay by land. Both had gates that could open or close to bring rain or to allow springs to come up through the earth. We lived in the small area amidst the endless ocean. The story of Noah is the story of God undoing the creation of this area we live in and letting all the waters return.
Modern physicists tell us that the early universe was a swirling chaos, an endless sea of energy and after a short burst of energy, the universe went dark for a very long time.
It could easily have been that light never returned, that it was most likely that matter and anti-matter could have cancelled each other out, but instead small variations, almost imperceptible, began to set boundaries where matter could come into being, and from that matter came the first stars. Let there be light.
And we know now that our star, the Sun, carves out a small bubble in space by what we call the solar wind, and that this wind keeps the most hostile aspects of the universe at bay: it creates a bubble that holds back the chaos so that life can exist here on this tiny blue ball we call home.
Modern physics also tells us that our entire universe is shaped by a force and a substance that we can’t see or even interact with, but it is that invisible formless stuff that shapes our entire universe, creating stars and galaxies, and the fabric of the universe. Larger forces that we can’t perceive carve out a place orderly enough, solid enough for us to come into being and ask questions about how we got here.
Reflecting on a photo that NASA’s Voyager took looking back at the earth, which was just a tiny blue dot in a vast dark ocean of space, Carl Sagan said:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
At the end of the flood, once Noah is back on dry land, God promises never to destroy the earth again. The rainbow is put in the sky as a permanent celestial reminder of that promise.
God did not promise that humans would not find a way to destroy the earth, and it is telling the story of the Tower of Babel immediately follows the flood.
Maybe instead of seeing how high we can build our towers, we would be better off remembering that this earth, this pale blue dot, this miracle we live on, is itself Noah’s ark, floating in a vast uncertain quantum ocean, and together with larger forces we can’t perceive, we create the dry land to stand on. We will wait for the dove together.
Shabbat Shalom
