One of my favorite things about having children in Jewish Day school is the questions they bring home about the weekly Torah portion. Often, these questions make their way to our Shabbat table, where we try to work through the answers together. Sometimes they’re straightforward, and sometimes they lead us into conversations far more profound than I would have anticipated. One of the questions we recently discussed was: For whom did God create the world? The answer we arrived at was humanity. God Himself has no need for the world. He is complete, lacking nothing. And if the world was created for us, then what an extraordinary gift it was. An entire world filled with everything humanity would need to live, grow, and flourish. God created the world, for us. My kids were delighted at the thought! A whole world, just for them.
But the story we will read this coming Shabbat, in the portion we read, called Noah (Genesis 6:9–11:32), made me think about that gift a little differently. Last week, in the portion called Bereishit, we read that at the conclusion of creation, God looked upon everything He had made and declared:
And yet, just ten generations after Adam, the world God had created and declared good had deteriorated so profoundly that it could no longer continue as it was. Humanity had become consumed by corruption and violence, and God determined that the world as it existed could not be sustained. In Genesis 6:6, the Torah even describes God as regretting that He had made humanity. This is a complicated theological statement, particularly given our understanding of God’s perfection and omniscience, but it emphasizes just how profoundly humanity had departed from the goodness of creation. The Flood was devastating. Nearly all of humanity and the living creatures of the earth were destroyed. But God did not abandon His creation entirely. Noah and his family were preserved, along with the animals that would repopulate the earth.
The world still needed to exist, but under new conditions.
When Noah emerged from the ark, God reaffirmed the continuity of the natural world, introduced new boundaries concerning human life, and established a covenant promising never again to destroy all living things through a flood. There is a rainbow, a covenant. A rebirth. But what I find particularly fascinating is that God did all of this without any indication that human nature itself had fundamentally changed.
After the Flood, when Noah offers sacrifices, God says in His heart:
Of course, this is hardly the first time the Torah confronts us with human wrongdoing. In fact, the first three human beings we encounter who are faced with moral choices all fall short. Adam and Eve disobey God’s command, and when confronted, Adam blames Eve, who in turn blames the serpent. Their son Cain goes even further, murdering his brother Abel and then responding to God’s questioning with, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
What’s particularly striking is that even before Cain commits his terrible act, God warns him that sin is waiting at his door, but that he has the ability to master it:
From the very beginning, humanity possessed both the freedom to choose and the responsibility for those choices. God knew what people were capable of, even when they failed to recognize or take responsibility for their own actions.
But there is something different about the language after the Flood.
In the story of Cain, God addresses an individual, warning him about the temptation to sin and his ability to overcome it. After the Flood, God acknowledges that inclination as part of the human condition itself, while determining the future of the entire world.
And I find that extraordinarily comforting. Not because God has lowered His expectations of us. He still expects greatness from humanity. We have the capacity to cultivate goodness within ourselves, make moral choices, build meaningful lives, and draw closer to Him. But that potential exists alongside free will. The very freedom that allows us to achieve greatness also allows us to fall terribly short of it.
And perhaps that’s what makes the covenant after the Flood so remarkable. God did not eliminate humanity’s capacity for evil, nor did He remove the expectation that we strive toward goodness. He preserved our freedom to choose, while promising that the world would endure despite our imperfections.
I began by thinking about the world as the greatest gift God could give humanity. But the story of Noah has made me appreciate something else about that gift.
The original creation story concludes with God’s declaration that the world is very good. The story of Noah moves forward with an explicit acknowledgment that the people inhabiting that world will not always be good.
And yet God commits to them nonetheless. I keep returning to that original question: For whom did God create the world?
And when I read the covenant after the Flood, I hear something profoundly reassuring in God’s commitment to humanity:
This world is for you. I know exactly who you are. I know what you’re capable of, and I know where you will struggle. I know that you will not always make the right choices, even as I expect you to strive toward goodness.
And this, this is the world I am committing to you.
