By ADINA GOODMAN
The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.
-Demian, Herman Hesse
At the beginning of the Parsha, God explains his motivations for destroying the world: “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth” (Genesis 6:13).
It is interesting to note the specific language God uses in this pronouncement. He declares that the world is filled with “chamas,” or lawlessness. This language implies that the world contains a certain law, a certain standard, and that man has done something to mess with this world order. Since a system is as strong as its weakest unit, we must dispose of the piece that’s setting everything off the right track. There seems to be a very specific inculpation of man here – the world was fine until he came around and put everything off-balance and below God's standard.
Even once the flood is over and Noah offers a sacrifice, God maintains his view on man, saying “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth” (8:21).
It seems superfluously strange, then, that only verses later, God blesses Noah and his sons to “Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of [man] shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky” (9:1-3). Here, God uses parallel but opposite language as compared to His speech when declaring His destruction of the world. Whereas earlier He wants to “put an end to all flesh” because the “earth is filled with lawlessness because of [man],” He is now blessing Noah to “fill the earth.”
From a wholly peshat reading of the story, it seems as if God wants to bring the world back to its optimal state and start over. But then He sees that man is still around and still acting lamentably. Instead of destroying the world again in a never-ending cycle, however, God blesses man, telling him to multiply – to produce more humanity and fill the world with it. Not only that, but God proclaims that other creatures will fear man, only adding to man's immense power and influence over the world.
Another quote from Hesse may shed a light on God’s seemingly transformed approach to man as imperfect: “Whether you and I and a few other will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day, otherwise we just aren’t serious. Don’t forget that!”
As humans, we cannot recreate the world. Even if we had Godly powers, we can see from the Noah story that the world would become imperfect again quite quickly. However, we can renew ourselves each day, as Hesse’s character suggests. This idea is the same as the one driving Gandhi’s entreaty to “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Perhaps this self-renewal idea can be extended even to God and His decision not to re-destroy man, but to encourage his reproduction. Jewish mystics describe a godliness inherent in all people. From that understanding of man, we may interpret God’s blessing to Noah as His promotion of the idea that improving the world begins with oneself. God’s recreation of the world left it imperfect, but by endowing man with the power to reflect and improve, He is in a way “being [or allowing] the change” He wishes to see in the world. God nurtures the development of man, trusting in this fleshy extension of Himself to renew himself and leave the world better.
That God did not re-destroy the world but instead blessed man to reproduce and multiply might be the ultimate pep-talk or empowering idea. God is, in effect, commanding us to destroy "chamas" and recreate our own world.
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