Noach 2026

Hunter Rook - 10/17/26
Parshah: Noach

We all know the story of Noah and the flood. It is painted on nursery walls. We have a little toy set here. I think we know it too well. We’re not scared of it anymore.

This portion is when everyone enters the ark, Genesis 7:1–16.

I grew up in southeast Texas where hurricanes are a way of life. I know the feeling of having your preparations ready and buckling in for the storm. You think you are prepared as best you can be but there is always uncertainty. The rain starts to fall. This part is exciting. The wind blows. You feel awe of this storm system that is bigger than you, but at the same time you know every storm eventually runs out of water. You will be okay.

But then, after the storm passes, you have the aftermath. Did you know it wasn’t just 40 days of rain but another 150 of flooding? That is where it’s gets tough. The power is out, the roads are closed, you start to get cabin fever. My family played cards by kerosene lamp. Probably Noah’s family did something similar. What else could you do?

I remember the freeways like parking lots before Hurricane Rita, and swimming to my bus stop, water up to my waist, to go to school after tropical storm Allison. Everyone who lives in a warm river valley knows flooding. It is part of the earths breath, the water cycle that brings life but also great destruction. What better metaphor for the divine? Yhvh was a storm god. He is described as “sitting at the flood” like it is a throne. Chaos and creation are his domain. And this is an apocalypse story. And this is a creation story.

It’s interesting and much has been said about the ubiquity of flood myths across cultures from Mayans to aboriginal Australians, there are hundreds. It’s an old story we carried with us out of Africa and keep telling over and over. Why? What does a flood story do for us? Why hold on to it even when we live in places not prone to flooding?

I don’t think this kind of story is literally true. We don’t see evidence for a worldwide flood in the fossil record. But it does capture a truth of human experience. And it has a lesson for us. We are blind to it though, raised with it too much. Too watered down (hah). Too sanitized. We forget the horror. The fear. This is not a cute animal tale for children. This is a story about the end of the world!

Imagine for a second you get back from the grocery store and you see fire trucks at your house. It’s a total loss. All your things, gone. While you’re standing there you get a phone call. The person closest to you has suddenly died unexpectedly. You feel unmoored by your grief and shock. It’s too much loss to process at once. Then your cat gets run over by the ambulance.

Then you wake up. It was all just a dream. How do you feel? Relief, gratitude, hope. These are the feelings we are meant to come away with. This is a horror story. Like a zombie movie or a slasher pic. Everybody dies. It’s awful. We skip over that part too fast. No wonder Noach drinks. He’s lost all of his friends and community.

But life continues on. And there is hope in that.

Ok. …

I want to talk about dinosaurs for a minute. Because you know what you see when you dig, anywhere on the earth, deep enough? A black line of iridium about this thick (Hunter makes a “C” with their hand). we have a real life worldwide extinction event, and it wasn’t a flood. It sounds mythological: an asteroid 9 miles wide- that’s the distance from ft Bragg to Mendocino. The energy of millions of atomic bombs. Worldwide volcanoes that blocked out the sun for decades and shockwaves that domino into tsunamis mudslides and yes, floods. 66 million years ago.

Below that line you have dinosaurs and an incredibly diverse life of plants and insects. Above it… not so much. It’s a climate disaster of a scale that is hard to imagine. Longer than 40 days and forty nights. 99.9999% of living beings died. 3 out of every four plant and animal species went extinct.

Our current climate situation is also dire. I don’t mean to undersell that. While we buy firewood for El Niño winters and listen to wildfire app notifications all summer, watch record droughts and record blizzards. We know that, like Noah’s countrymen, we are partially to blame. Our behavior directly influences the weather. Wild that the same folks who are digging in the mountains of Turkey for a literal boat can’t take the more direct lesson from Tanakh: when it comes to the environment, our actions matter.

I’m not naive enough to think that separating our recycling or remembering our reusable grocery bags is going to stop climate change. But I do these things anyway. As pirkei avot says, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it." We need to wake up as a species to the evil we do everywhere: it is a global problem fueled by consumerism and capitalism and, ironically, fossil fuels.

Back to dinosaurs.

What gives me hope is the creation after destruction. It’s going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better. We need to endure the flood. Like the addict who has to hit rock bottom before embracing their recovery, I don’t think humanity can learn this lesson by stories alone.

But stories help. They remind us of the rainbow that comes after, the dawn after the night of the dead, while we are still here in the thick of it. They remind us that every storm eventually runs out of water, and one day this one will, too. I think that’s why we cling to our flood stories. My takeaway from the story of the K-T boundary is that, while individual beings may die and individual species may disappear… Life, itself, is resilient.

Is that not what we are here today to celebrate? The breath of life is still flowing today. In each of us. We are alive. Gd makes this promise with not just humans but all animals and plants: the entire earthly community of life. We came back from the brink of destruction to a world of so much life and beauty and diversity. We have pandas and redwood trees and kelp and 20,000 kinds of beetles. It is a beautiful world.

So yeah, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But, it will get better, with or without us.

Life is resilient.

There is hope.