I once shared Shabbat with a friend who had also invited several environmentalists. Someone raised a question to the group: What was or is your greatest environmental sin? I sat in the corner with a friend, bonding over our embarrassment at our lack of environmental vigilance and amused by their earnestness. 

Later, we went with our host to the kitchen to bring out the dessert. One of us opened a cabinet and witnessed a shocking display of Styrofoam plates and plastic cutlery. We all laughed, and our host immediately went in to the others to confess her sin.

I am not sharing this to make fun of environmentalists and their failings. In fact, I left very much inspired by their passion for the Earth and their ability to look at their own roles in harming the environment instead of simply pointing fingers at others. I became a little bit more mindful of my own impact on the environment. 

And yet, my first response was to alleviate my discomfort by poking fun at the environmentalists because people who predict doom and the destruction of the world are not so easy to be around.

Perhaps Noah of this week’s Torah portion knew this and that is why he was silent and did not inform others of the imminent destruction of the world. Or perhaps, as a rabbinic midrash imagines, he tried, but he may as well have said nothing because his warnings fell on deaf ears. We do not know but, certainly, our tradition is troubled deeply by Noah’s silence.

What caused God’s destruction of the world and what was this evil that Noah could not speak? Our tradition has a number of theories: violence, sexual assault, idolatry, robbery. 

One Midrash in Aggadat Bereishit (ch. 4) describes in this way what happens when these sins reach the highest level of depravity: At the beginning of the flood when the waters started rising up, the people pressed their own children upon the rising waters in order to dam them up. The Midrash comments with a verse from Job: “The womb did not remember it was her child.”

This image reveals a people who were willing to destroy their own children, their own future, to save themselves. Our rabbis taught that in each generation there is something of the generation of the flood. In our generation, how do we put our children — our future, their future — in jeopardy in order to do much less than save ourselves?

God tells Noah of God’s intention to bring a disaster that will destroy the Earth and all flesh. There are many who understand the great flood as simply the continuation of a process that is already underway, begun by humankind itself. What are the ways in which we are the agents of putting all flesh at risk of ultimate destruction? 

A landmark report that came out this week from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals even more dire consequences than previously understood — and much sooner than expected. Nations will need to take unprecedented actions now to cut carbon emissions over the next decade, which is all the time we have to stem catastrophe and devastation, the report says. (Read about the report online at https://nyti.ms/2C187a6).

Will we hear this news and continue to act like the generation of the flood as the waters are rising, putting ourselves and certainly our children at great risk from spiraling devastation? 

Rabbi Moshe Alshekh (16th c. Sefat) taught that we are considered the descendants of Abraham rather than Noah because Noah built the ark “board by board and nail by nail for 120 years, and it never crossed his mind that there might be a way to avert God’s decree and save the world from destruction.” He was what is known in Yiddish as a “tzaddik in peltz. a righteous man in a fur coat” who warms himself while everyone else freezes. (Torah Gems, Volume 1, edited by Aharon Yaakov Greenberg, p. 58-59). 

Will we act like Noah and keep only our own family safe from the coming catastrophe? Or will we act like Noah once he was on the ark, caring for all life on that day and night, feeding the creatures and tending to all of their needs as steward, caretaker of all that remained of the world, securing the future for all life?

Rabbi Tracy Nathan is Senior Educator and Director of Melton at the Center for Jewish Learning at Jewish Federation of St. Louis. She is also Secretary of the Executive Committee of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association, which coordinates the weekly d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.