[Avodah] Birds & Fish in the Mabul

[Chana Luntz]

I wrote:
>> The position I have been consistently arguing is that kol haaretz and
>> kol hashamayim are terms that are most logically to be understood in the
>> way that Noach and the other members of the dor hamabul would have
>> understood them (and did understand them, or refused to believe them). That
>> excludes anything completely out of their ken, like planets and galaxies from
>> either definition, but also Australia and England and other places that to
>> them did not exist. If you asked the dor hamabul for a definition of kol
>> haaretz, you would not get any references to Australia.

And RLL replied:
> But again, it's the narrative that says the whole world is going to be
> flooded.  If you take that to mean "the whole world that we knew about
> at the time", you might as well do the same thing with Genesis 1:1 and
> say Hashem only created the Middle East.  It stands to reason that the
> word is used the same way in both places.

No, there were no people around at the time of Genesis 1:1, so following the
same set of reasoning (ie contextualising the language to the time to which
it refers), with the only entities around at that time being (at most) the
angels, one might expect the language of Genesis 1:1 et seq to be either
unique to Hashem (sod amuk, see Ramban below) or be that of the angels
(isn't that the point of "na'aseh adam b'tzelmenu"?)

But more deeply, the moral messages of Breishis and the mabul are different.
I refer you back to Rashi and the Rambam:

Here is Rashi on the subject - first Rashi on the Torah:

"Rabbi Yitzchak said it was not necessary to begin the Torah except from
"hachodesh haze l'chem" because this is the first mitzvah that Israel was
commanded and what was the reason that  that it opens with breishis  because
of [Tehillim 111:6] "the power of his deeds he has made known to his people
to give to them the inheritance of nations" - because if the nations of the
world will say to Yisroel, you are robbers, because you conquered the lands
of the seven nations, they can say to them: all the land is HKBH's, he
created it and gives it to whoever seems right in his eyes, it was his will
to give it to them, and his will to take it from them and give it to us."

And the Ramban takes up the theme, after quoting this Rashi:

"And one could ask on this that there was a great need to begin the Torah
with Breishis bara Elokim because this is the root of emunah  and one who
does not believe in this and who believes that the world has always existed
is kofer b'ikar and has no Torah at all.  And the answer is because ma'aseh
breishis is a very deep secret [sod amuk] and cannot  be understood from the
verses and its depths cannot be known except from the kabala from Moshe
Rabbanu from the mouth of the Almighty and those who know it are obligated
to conceal it therefore Rabbi Yitzchak said that there was no need to begin
the Torah from Breishis bara.  And the story as to what was created on the
first day and what was created on the second day and the rest of the days
and the long account of the creation of Adam and Chava and their sin and
punishment and the story of gan eden and the expulsion of Adam from it
because all of this cannot be totally understood from the text and even more
so the story of the dor hamabul and the haflaga there isn't any great need
for them and for those who believe in the Torah it would be enough without
them and they would believe in the principle which is written in the aseres
hadibros "ki sheshes yamim asa hashem es hashamayim v'es ha'aretz es hayam
v'es kol asher bam, v'yinach b'yom hashvi'i". And the rest would be known to
yechidim that was transmitted from Moshe rabbanu with rest of the Torah she
baal peh and [therefore] Rabbi Yitzchak gave a reason for this that the
Torah began with Bereishis bara Elokim and told the whole story of creation
until the formation of Adam and how he gave him rulership over the work of
his hands and all things under his feet, and how gan eden which was the
choicest of the places that were created in this world was made to be his
dwelling place until his sin caused his expulsion from there and when the
dor hamabul sinned they were expelled from the world in total and the
righteous one amongst them only was saved, him and his children.  And when
his descendants sinned this caused them to be scattered in the places and
dispersed in the lands and they seized for themselves places for their
families in their nations as they were able, so that it is proper that where
a nation adds to its sins that it should be destroyed from its place and
another nation should come to inherit its land because this is the judgement
of Hashem in relation to land from the beginning and even more so in
relation to that which it told that Canaan was cursed to be sold as a slave
forever and it was not fitting that he should inherit the choicest places
but rather it should be inherited by His servants, the descendents of his
loved one as it is written "and he gave to them the lands of the nations and
they inherited the work of the peoples that they might keep his laws and his
Torah - that is to say he expels from there those who rebel against him and
puts there his servants who that they know by serving him that they will
inherit and if they sin against him the land will vomit them out as it did
to the nation that was before them ... ""


The moral message of Breishis is - I am Hashem who created everything,
including things well beyond your ken, so don't go objecting when I choose
to give a small piece of land to the Jews.

The moral message of the mabul is that of crime and punishment.  If you make
the punishment not fit the crime, indeed be disproportionate to the crime,
then you are alleging a Judge who does not do justly.  In an attempt to
expand on the gadulus of Hashem, by saying he flooded the whole planet, in
effect, it seems to me, people are diminishing the yashrus and tzidkus of
Hashem (and even there, if they really want to magnify the gadlus, they
should say that the planets too were flooded, why stop at one small
planet!).  It stops being a measured response (in which Hashem saves all
those who were indeed righteous even though they were less than a community,
amounting only to 8, and destroys those who were not while giving the wicked
time to repent while Noach is building the ark) and becomes a fit of pique,
in which vast areas of land are flooded due to the actions in (relatively
speaking) quite a small corner of it, those vast areas including many that
could not, due to the technology of the time, have been accessed by the
people or animals involved in the crimes.  Ultimately therefore it seems to
me a moral question, as to how one relates to HaShem once one realises the
physical realities (truth is, most people don't, they have an image of the
dor hamabul spread out all over the world, like we have today, and clearly
were that to be the case, then the appropriate punishment would be to flood
the whole world.  But given the numbers of people we are clearly talking
about, that cannot have been the case, and once that is realised, on some
level you end up having to choose between gadlus and yashrus).

> Lisa

Regards
Chana