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October 20, 2017 10:07 am
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It’s Time to Leave Your Comfort Zone

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avatar by Pini Dunner

Opinion

Noah and the ark. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, I visited Buffalo, New York, where I was the keynote speaker at “Buffalo Celebrates Israel” — a joint event organized by 22 evangelical churches in the western New York region to reinforce and celebrate their ongoing support for Israel. The Buffalo event was not the first such event that I’ve addressed, nor was it the first time I’ve encountered the fulsome, unconditional support for Israel that emanates out of the many in the evangelical Christian community.

But this time was somehow different.

This time, my eyes were opened to an aspect of this phenomenon that was not about the dazzling support for Israel among Christian evangelicals — although this remains incredibly refreshing and heartwarming. Rather, as I shared Torah teachings with the many hundreds of people that I encountered there, I was suddenly struck by the self-imposed and ultimately self-defeating limitations of parochialism that are the default safety mode of faith communities — whether they are Jewish or Christian — and how this strategy is failing us.

Let me explain.

This week, we read the Torah portion of Noah, which describes how Noah and his family were rescued from the devastating biblical flood by seeking shelter in the ark, together with all the animals and birds, so that the world could be regenerated once the flood was finally over. This extremely enigmatic narrative contains a proliferation of lessons, and the rabbinic commentaries expound on the many details of the story to draw those lessons out.

The Zohar — which is the sourcebook of Judaism’s most esoteric kabbalistic traditions — records an exchange between God and Noah that took place shortly after the flood had ended. Shocked by the devastation that he observed, Noah broke down and wept.

“Master of the universe,” he cried out, “You are called compassionate — why were you not compassionate for Your creation?”

God’s response to Noah is utterly devastating:

You waited until now to say this? Where were you before the flood? Why did you say nothing when I told you I was planning to flood the world? Or afterwards, when I told you to build an ark? I constantly delayed, thinking to myself, ‘When is Noah going to ask for compassion for the world?’ Only now that the world is destroyed, you finally open your mouth to cry in front of me…?

In Judaism, Noah’s salvation is understood for what it is — a necessary segue to ensure the emergence of an Abraham, an Isaac, and a Jacob, and ultimately their descendants — a nation worthy of divine revelation at Sinai. Although Noah was a righteous man who “walked with God,” he was willfully ignorant of the impact that he could have had — an impact that would have changed the world around him. Such was his self-absorption — that even when all that he knew and cherished was on the brink of destruction, he still did not feel any need to venture beyond his comfort zone so that the annihilation might be averted.

Even the method of Noah’s salvation symbolizes this critique. Rather than giving Noah refuge on some remote island, where he would be spared the ravages of the flood, God instructed him and his family to live in the confined space of a wooden ark — battered by the rains and the wind as the flood raged outside.

As Noah and his family were invited to enter the ark, God implied His displeasure when He said (Gen. 7:1): “Go into the ark, with all your household, for you alone have I found righteous before Me in this generation.”

Rather than singling Noah out for his greatness, God was expressing his bitter disappointment: “You were surrounded by a society that was corrupt and broken, a society that was in desperate need of your positive influence, and yet you had no impact whatsoever. You alone are righteous, and no one else.”

What an indictment of Noah. What a failure of his potential. And so, although God had designated him for survival because of his personal righteousness, his salvation was delivered via the medium of a cramped, unpleasant ark — and involved the suffering of confinement, which reflected his wanton, self-serving indifference.

We might imagine that creating our own community bubbles is the best route to our survival, and that venturing beyond our comfort zones might eventually lead to our decline and total disintegration. The jarring message of Noah’s ark is not that God rescues the righteous from the jaws of destruction, but that being a Noah who survives in an ark is by far the inferior option. Engaging with the wider world — so that those beyond your circle can benefit from interacting with you — must always be the preferred option. And this opens up options that you may never have thought possible.

Our greatest failure as individuals, and as communities, is allowing ourselves to stagnate in the comfort of our parochial echo chambers — in the belief that the world “out there” is beyond our reach. But as I have now personally observed on countless occasions, both within the Jewish world and beyond it, nothing could be further from the truth.

Everyone is within reach. All we need to do is reach out, and to keep at it. There is no need to compromise one’s value system or one’s beliefs in order to engage with those outside of our ark. And rather than that ark being the vehicle of our salvation, it is nothing more than the prison of our own construction, a means of ensuring that we will never be God’s agents of change.

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