Daring to Parent
Abe and I decide to add a third human to our family in 2016. We set aside our Obama-era disenchantments, and as the Black Lives Matter Movement grows, we remember the People’s Climate March. We speak the Lefty Brooklyn’s language of climate justice and solidarity across borders as if it will repair the world, starting in Crown Heights, where we live (progressive gentrifiers alongside West Indian and Lubavitcher communities). So, when we become parents in March 2017, it’s hard to accept that our chapters of cyclic catastrophe (these political, natural, ethical disasters) have only begun to intensify with a surprise Trump presidency.
My Spring 2019 medieval drama seminar meets on our tiny campus, a cossetted ark atop Clinton Hill. I teach seven young women about poetics, ethics and widening circles of social responsibility before reality rushes in to capsize our priorities on Mondays at 4:40 p.m. One afternoon, a raw, chubby 2-year-old cheek embossed by a ring of fangs fit to crush the forbidden fruit virtually shatters my cellphone screen. My shriek conjures an education professor; this other mother of an only daughter appears, witnesses the inevitable violence of early-childhood biting and offers a hug. Reckless, I bike furiously past natural wine bars and bespoke fashion boutiques to protect my wounded child.
Drashing on the Flood
By October 2024 Shulamit Aziza (“Shami”) is in second grade. Her flesh has healed, although a passing angioma sporadically sets her cheek aglow. We’ve survived a pandemic, a xenophobic insurrection, catastrophic rainstorms and Brooklyn parking wars that push us over the edge of the city into a tony Jersey train town. A year since horrific Hamas massacres bereave Israeli families and end illusions that Israeli militarism will secure peace and prosperity inside the ark, identity crises rive Jewish communities like the once resolutely progressive suburbs around us. If only early childhood biting were the most brutal threat to our children . . .
An email with no subject lands in my inbox. It’s a neighbor and father of daughters our Shami’s age. He’s also the darshan-wrangler for a monthly lay-led service at our Conservative synagogue: Have I got a d’var Torah on Parshat No’akh? I’ll figure it out, make some jokes and get some laughs as I nudge the text.
The thing is, it’s not funny. Parshat No’akh (Genesis 6:9-12:1) is a tale of cyclic catastrophe and Divine regret wedged between Bereishit and Leikh Lekha. Its questions increase and multiply to entangle us as 21st-century humans and as a people called Yisrael (meaning to wrestle Divine power) in particular. God witnesses human violence, regrets his creation and destroys it all: collective punishment by natural disaster exempting the family of Noah, ish Tzadik, a (relatively) righteous man. The 11th-century commentator Rashi cites Midrash Tankhuma, observing how the flood traumatizes even these survivors who reasonably fear raising children on Earth as they wrestle with their responsibilities to future generations. God also wrestles with responsibility to human animals created betzelem Elohim (“in the Divine image”). Soon, Divine regret for destruction supplants regret for creation, and God produces a rainbow to persuade humans to rebuild and reproduce in the wake of annihilation.
Rashi cites Midrash Tankhuma, observing how the flood traumatizes its survivors, who reasonably fear raising children on Earth as they wrestle with their responsibilities to future generations.
Post-diluvian Noah is no righteous ish Tzadik. Cultivating a vineyard consoles the guy who silently abandoned Earth to extermination. Noah, ish ha’adamah, “man of the soil,” drinks wine alone and passes out naked in his tent. Exactly what happens when his son Ham wanders in remains unclear; but in the Torah we’ve been schlepping around, Ham recognizes Dad’s drunken naked humanity (identical to the humanity of those whom Noah ditches when God threatens extinction). Ham consults his brothers, Shem and Yafeth, but they literally turn their backs and look the other way. Noah breaks his silence only to curse Ham’s descendants and bless Shem and Yafeth for their evasions. Curse or no, they share language and rebuild cooperatively until God begins to fear their solidarity and busts their ancient workers’ union with language diversity. Communication fails. Babel falls. Noah’s progeny scatter.
Catastrophe in Our Time
It’s November 2024, and life looks less comical and more precarious than last month. Every single day a catastrophe that exploits human vulnerability crushes innocent children in Azza — as Parshat No’akh names it. I see, yet when I stand to share my words of Torah, I lack courage to name Hind Rajab, Layan Hamadeh, Refaat Alareer. I remember James Baldwin’s 20th-century warning that only “conscious” human solidarity against cyclic catastrophe might avert “historical . . . cosmic vengeance,” but manage just a passing allusion to the African-American spiritual verse, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” that Baldwin cites. God’s rainbow sign is deeply dissatisfying in this context, and I am as deeply afraid to admit what I see. Instead, I stress Noah’s silence, solitary drinking, cursing and responsibility to fellows created b’tzelem Elohim. Who here is the righteous ish tzadik? Who could be the ish ha’adamah, grounded in the soil? What might we build if we admit that we are all born naked and the rest is drag, as the righteous RuPaul reminds us, popularizing the brilliant Judith Butler? Why do we curse those who, like Ham, recognize our shared sacred humanity? When do we receive blessings for looking away from human vulnerability with Shem and Yafeth? How does a righteous man of the soil face collective punishment now?
James Baldwin warned that only “conscious” human solidarity against cyclic catastrophe might avert “historical … cosmic vengeance.”
My evasive drash meets its mark. I rake in hugs, accolades, blessings like Shem and Yafeth. One guy spills his guts about that unnamed wasteland, noting my political d’var Torah without the politics. That week there’s a fresh political disaster: an election returns us to the biting toddler years, or worse. Some voters stay home; others bet siding with a bully will spare them. The powers that be pack us into separate arks, silo us away from shared humanity.
Mrs. Noah Refuses to Board the Ark
And I recall how Mrs. Noah refuses to leave Earth and her community behind to board Mr. Noah’s ark in the medieval plays I teach. Pre-Reformation Christian workers accessed their sacred texts through episodic biblical pageants in 14th- through the 16th-century England. Although clerics forbade scriptural translation from Latin, medieval trade guilds produced annual festivals of vernacular biblical drama in cities like York and Chester until Elizabeth I banned it. Noah’s silent, lonely drinking promises to trap us all drunk, naked, alone in our own tents; but medieval drama’s Mrs. Noah imparts wine, safety and a buoyant hospitality that teaches us to confront catastrophe in community rather than retreat into tribal exclusivity. She ultimately trades collective punishment and patriarchy for collective liberation and feminist solidarity across borders. Can radical hospitality reconstruct ethical responsibility now? Mrs. Noah’s feminist conviviality presents a medieval answer for anyone who wants this world to survive the 21st century.
Can radical hospitality reconstruct ethical responsibility now? Mrs. Noah’s feminist conviviality presents a medieval answer for anyone who wants this world to survive the 21st century.
Influenced by contemporary obsessions with individuality and the nuclear family, my students mistake Mrs. Noah for a selfless martyr; but she sees that her interests exceed her ark, that personal survival hinges on networks of interdependent women, so she harmonizes workers’ solidarity with earthy feminist desire. In the Chester Play of Noah’s Flood, God directs; Noah obeys; his children help. But Mrs. Noah chooses her girlfriends when Noah excludes them from the ark. “For all thy Frenyshe fare / I will not doe after thy reade (direction),” she retorts, critiquing Noah’s Frenchified elitism (“Frenyshe fare”) (ll. 100-101). Medieval aristocrats and clerics dominated Francophile eloquence. Meanwhile, English vernacular drama remained for lay workers like the Chester Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee (guilds who produced this pageant and supplied the local community with fish and water, investing in the natural environment rather than in Latinate languages). Their Mrs. Noah exposes linguistic chauvinism as she rebukes Noah for favoring elite power-hoarders over fellows facing ecological disaster.
Allying with Those Outside the Ark
Arks “close things off, and sometimes they lead you to invest your sympathy in the wrong places,” Jeffery Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates write. Mrs. Noah’s vernacular sensibilities render her an ally to those outside the ark, those who will not look away. Noah misplaces his sympathies hoarding privilege, while she stakes her integrity on the humanity of the dispossessed: they “shall not drowne … / and (if) I may save there life,” Mrs. Noah insists (203-204). When Shem, Ham and Yafeth pull at her, she pulls her girlfriends closer to share wine and a song that confides fear of drowning, trusts community to provide comfort as it has “oftentymes” before, and extols the convivial pleasures of “harte and tonge” that make and keep us human (Chester 230, 234). Mrs. Noah models a civic ethics of hospitality for her children by crossing borders between privileged people and expendable humans.
Remarkably, medieval English workers recognize Mrs. Noah not as a Christian martyr but as a border-crosser, akin to Sarah, Abraham, Yakov, whom Torah names Hebrews, Ivrim (עברים), from the root עבר, meaning to cross over from elsewhere. Mrs. Noah’s conviviality similarly evokes Arab hospitality, culture, people: Ahrub (عرب), from the root ع ر ب, meaning a people on the move: always opening the home, whether it’s a tent or an ark. Her moment between Bereishit and Leikh Lekha knits the beginning of human awareness to the leaving that makes us border-crossers. Parshat No’akh closes by introducing Avram, who becomes ha’Ivri (the border crosser) later in Leikh Lekha before God renames him Avraham and prescribes his circumcision, which Abraham might not have chosen himself.
Mrs. Noah sees that her interests exceed her ark, that personal survival hinges on networks of interdependent women, so she harmonizes workers’ solidarity with earthy feminist desire.
Abraham does choose hospitality himself, though. At the start of Parshat Vayeira, Abraham (still recovering from that non-elective surgery) sees three strangers from his open tent and rushes to share food, water and welcome without hesitation. Bereishit rolls on, revealing that while Noah never talks to God, Abraham and Sarah laugh, question, talk back. Abraham even reminds God that Ivrim do not cross over from elsewhere to let absolute power sweep the innocent away with the wicked. They come to host, to kvetch, to remind the judge of all creation to do justice. In time, a Hebrew called Yakov wrestles God and assumes a new name, signifying our responsibility to challenge absolute power with righteous struggle.
Trusting Absolute Power Is Dangerous
Did medieval English workers really understand Mrs. Noah as a Hebrew Arab, an Arab Jew? Either way, they construe this chronicle of catastrophe as a narrative pattern poised to warn us of danger — not of human corruption — but the danger of investing human trust in any absolute power whether spiritual, political, natural, Divine, even moral. Things look different with language diversity, booze and kvetchy Hebrew chutzpah to question authority available before the flood. Mrs. Noah wasn’t raised to think of herself as a border-crosser, but she figured it out. She emerges as both eesha ha’adamah, “woman of the soil,” and eesha ha-Ivria: she who crosses from over there, defies borders that Noah’s ark would erect, shares wine and warmth, recognizes humanity. Maybe Ham, the cursed middle child, took after her.
I wasn’t raised to think of myself as a Jew — or as an Arab — growing up in a Lebanese family passing mostly as regular Americans in the Ohio Rustbelt. But I figured it out. As Cohen and Yates write, “Noah’s ark is … a narrative transport device that crosses centuries [to testify to] the capacity of things to have worked out differently.”[1]
Mrs. Noah’s earthy, unpretentious humanity revels in hospitable alternatives to complicity in catastrophe akin to the hospitality I learned at home: a culture of sharing what’s yours to stretch warmth and shelter from the storm a little further. This hospitality remains the family value I hold most dearly and model most urgently for my Shami. We didn’t call it Arab hospitality then, but I do now.
Exactly how I got here is a tale for another time. For now, please know that although we can’t always protect our children and their chubby cheeks from early childhood biting or even from wanton famine, from real catastrophic shrapnel beyond every pale, we can teach them to face catastrophe like Mrs. Noah ha-Ivria. We can teach them to love convivially, to be hospitable like Ahrub (عرب), the people on the move, to defend themselves and each other together through solidarity like Ivrim (עברים), meaning to cross over, to cultivate more life on our Earth beyond borders.
[1] Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, Noah’s Arkive, University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
