Your Good Choice, A Beautiful Sight - Noach 5787

What’s the story with the rainbow?  After the Great Flood, Hashem made a covenant with Noach and all his descendants to never again bring a flood that would destroy all humankind in the world. The covenant included that the seasons would never cease. 

As a sign of the covenant, Hashem said (Bereshit 9:12,13): “This is the sign of the covenant, which I am placing between Me and between you, and between every living soul that is with you, for everlasting generations.  My rainbow I have placed in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Myself and the earth.”  

For many years I wondered about this.  What happened before the flood?  A rainbow is a natural phenomenon that happens when the sun’s rays are refracted by the clouds.  In Bereshit we learned that Hashem created the universe together with all of the laws of nature.  So what happened when the sun’s rays shone through the clouds before the Great Flood?  Did Hashem change the sun?  Or its rays?  Or the clouds?  Or the colors of the rainbow?

One day I was standing at a legendary “Farbrengen” - Chassidic gathering - with the Rebbe.  Thousands of people would attend the Farbrengens and listen to the Rebbe’s brilliant talks on topics ranging from deep Torah expositions, to world affairs, and guidance on matters relating to outreach, love for a fellow, and many aspects of life as a Jew and life in the world in general.  Every Farbrengen was a life experience, often truly transformative.  I remember when the Rebbe addressed this question, and to use a common phrase, I was blown away by the answer.

. 

Let’s go on a bit of a journey.  Why did Hashem need to bring a flood?  If the purpose was to wipe out all of humanity except Noach and his family, why not just have everyone die?  Why put Noach to all the trouble to build an ark, and why go through all the trouble of having the entire world flooded for a year?  Chassidus explains that the point here was to purify the world,  Hashem decreed that waters purify.  When a person is fully submerged in a Mikvah, they become ritually “Tahor” - loosely translated as pure.  A Mikvah must contain a certain amount of water as a minimum.  That amount is described in Talmud as 40 “Se’ah”. (A Se’ah is the name for a certain measure.) While the flood lasted for a year, the initial rain lasted 40 days, corresponding to 40 Se’ah.

The world needed purification because it had become hopelessly defiled by the evil of its inhabitants.  What happened was that when Hashem created the world, He completely concealed Himself.  He did this in order to have a world in which humans have free choice, because the purpose of all of Creation is for us humans to make the world a home for Hashem.  If we could see Hashem, there would be no way that we could go against His will, and the purpose is fulfilled only when we do the right thing out of our own choice.  So Hashem completely concealed Himself in order to have this world, including the potential for evil, come into existence,

The problem is that with completely free choice and no Divine revelation, evil was able to develop to the point where it was complete and unmitigated.  There was a righteous person in each generation, but the evil was so “thick” that they just stayed to themselves and no goodness could penetrate the evil.  

Now there needed to be balance, so that goodness and light should be able to permeate the world in order to fulfil its mission.  There needed to be some light in the darkness for humans to overcome evil and transform the darkness to light.  So Hashem bathed the world in purifying waters.  After the flood Hashem’s light could be accessed within the physical world and the process of leading the world to redemption could start.  In the next generation Avraham stood up to evil and succeeded, and eventually the Torah was given and the mundane can now become holy.

The physical world reflects the spiritual worlds from which it is sourced.  Just as spiritually the light and goodness could not penetrate the darkness and evil, the same phenomenon happened on Earth.  The sun's rays were not able to penetrate the clouds.  Just as evil and righteousness could not mix, there was no such thing as a partly cloudy day.  Either it was completely overcast, or the sky was cloudless.  The sun never shone through the clouds.  

After the purification of the world by the flood, there could now be a mixture.  The darkness of the clouds was not necessarily so thick that it was impenetrable, and it was now possible for the sun to shine through the clouds, creating a rainbow.  So more than just an incidental “sign” or reminder, the rainbow was actually an outcome of the covenant. Now that the world was fixable, there would never again be a situation where the entire world is so irredeemably evil.

I find this very comforting.  There seems to be so much darkness and evil in full view of the entire world.  The rainbow reminds us that we have the ability to bring light into the darkness, and every Mitzvah dispels much evil.