Shabbat Greetings
This week’s Torah portion, Noach (Genesis 6:9 – 11:32), begins with one of the Torah’s starkest descriptions of a society in crisis: “The earth became corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.” (6:11) The Hebrew words are striking: vatishacheit ha’aretz- the earth had become corrupted and vatimalei ha’aretz chamas –the earth was filled with chamas, violence. What does it mean for a society to become so corrupted that the Torah describes it as deserving destruction?
The rabbis offer different understandings of what was happening in the generation of the Flood. One particularly important tradition focuses on chamas – violence, injustice, and the violation of other people’s rights. The problem was not simply that individuals had private moral failings. Something had gone wrong in the society itself. (Bereishit Rabba 31:5)
That raises an uncomfortable question for us: How do we recognize evil when it is present in our own midst? It is tempting to think that the answer is obvious. We look at the world around us and identify the people, movements, or societies that we believe are responsible for evil. But Noach challenges us to be more introspective. The Torah does not tell us only to identify the wickedness of others. It asks us to examine the world in which we live and our own role within it. As we can guess, this becomes especially difficult because people do not always agree about what constitutes evil.
Two people can look at the same society, the same conflict, or the same historical events and see very different forms of injustice. Each may believe that the other side is failing to recognize something morally obvious. Our political identities, experiences, communities, and histories shape what we notice and what we consider most urgent.
That does not mean that morality is simply subjective. There are acts whose moral character can be recognized without requiring us to settle every larger political disagreement. One such line is the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians.
Whatever political cause someone claims to represent, intentionally murdering civilians, taking hostages, or using terror against a civilian population cannot be justified simply by invoking a political objective. Terrorist violence is evil precisely because it treats human beings not as individuals possessing inherent dignity, but as instruments or targets.
We should be able to say that clearly while still acknowledging that people may disagree profoundly about the larger conflicts in which terrorism occurs, about the causes of those conflicts, about proportionality, about responsibility, and about what justice requires afterward. That distinction matters.
If we label everything done by the people we oppose as “evil,” the word eventually loses its meaning. But if our desire to understand competing perspectives prevents us from condemning deliberate attacks on innocent people, we have also lost something important. This is one lesson we can take from Noach.
The Torah tells us that the earth was filled with chamas. Noach lived in a world where violence had become so pervasive that it was no longer merely an individual transgression. It had become part of the fabric of society. Our challenge is not to imagine that we are the people who can easily identify the evil of everyone else. Our challenge is to cultivate the moral clarity necessary to recognize genuine evil wherever it exists, even when it is committed by individuals or groups whose broader cause we may support. Doing so requires the courage to condemn wrongdoing when necessary, even when that condemnation conflicts with our political beliefs, communal loyalties, or personal sympathies.
At the same time, we should be humble enough to recognize that reasonable people can disagree about many of the world’s most complicated political questions. We can disagree about policies, borders, governments, wars, historical responsibility, and the proper response to injustice without pretending that every disagreement is a battle between good people and evil people. Noach therefore gives us two responsibilities.
The first is moral clarity: there are acts that cross a fundamental human boundary, and the deliberate targeting of innocent people is one of them. The second is moral humility: recognizing evil does not give us permission to assume that everyone who disagrees with us is evil.
After the Flood, God establishes a covenant not only with Noah, but with all humanity. The rainbow becomes a symbol of that covenant and a reminder of the sanctity and value of human life. Today, the message for us is that our society does not need less moral conviction. It needs moral conviction accompanied by humility. We should be willing to say, clearly and without qualification, that terrorism and the intentional killing of innocent civilians are evil. But we should also resist the temptation to turn every political disagreement into a struggle between the righteous and the wicked.
The generation of Noah teaches us what can happen when violence fills the earth. Our task is to make sure that, in recognizing the evil around us, we do not become blind to the humanity of those with whom we disagree. May we have the courage to recognize evil, the wisdom to distinguish it from disagreement, and the humility to examine our own communities as carefully as we examine everyone else’s.
SHABBAT SHALOM