Parashat Noah: In Memory of Loving Parents

Not everything depends on how you act. The world was violent and evil and God destroyed it with a flood, but after the flood God makes a brit (covenant) with all of creation that He will never again bring such a flood over the earth. This brit does not depend on people being good. God now knows that people have an inherent capacity for great evil. He knows they will continue to be evil. He makes His promise despite this knowledge, out of sheer kindness and mercy.

This is the first brit of the Torah and I think it is definitive – it is a one-sided promise by God to be kind. Later britot (covenants) perhaps involve a bit more of a give and take, but always I think there is that essential ingredient of undeserved divine kindness or grace. When God makes a brit with Avraham, He promises him that his children will be like the sky and the earth and that they will inherit this piece of earth and also tells of their future of both suffering and redemption. God does not make this overflow of divine blessing dependent on any actions on Avraham’s part. Yes, he chose Avraham because of his fine character – his faithfulness and divine-like kindness and pursuit of justice-- and God fully expects Avraham to teach his children these values, but the brit is not dependent on anything. As with the post-flood brit, this one is a freely given promise of kindness and blessing.

Of course the 10 commandments, the central brit of the Torah, most assuredly does involve a certain reciprocity. God says He will be our God and we will be His people if we listen and obey His laws and then He spells out what those laws are. But what is interesting here is that the people put God and this new “action-dependent” brit to the test almost immediately with the sin of the Golden Calf. And it turns out that God will be our God and we will be His people even if we mess up, even if we don’t always obey His laws. This brit, too, does not really depend on our actions, but is essentially a promise by God to stick with us. In a way, the law, the Torah, is not so much the terms of the covenant, as it is the gift itself, freely given by God to enhance our lives, much like the gifts of children and land given to Avraham in an earlier brit.

It all goes back to the nature of that first post-flood brit. There, too, it was after an initial pursuit of justice, a cycle of human evil and divine punishment, that God lets us see that alongside this justice the world is also run through freely flowing love and mercy, through the bestowal of gifts which we do not deserve and do not need to earn.

I am not trying to take away from our pursuit of goodness in this life. I think most of us are already engaged in that pursuit. But I think it helps once in a while to remember that love is free, that we don’t have to earn God’s kindness or love, that in fact we have an obligation to feel and appreciate the free nature of the gifts we are continually given.

This week is the yahrtzeit of my father, Moshe Shmuel be Shimon Tuvia HaLevi, z”l. And only a few days ago, my cousins lost their father, my dear uncle in Israel, my sister-in-law lost her father, and a community friend in Atlanta lost his father.

That’s what you lose when you lose a parent – free love. There are not a lot of people in this world who will love you no matter what. Yes, your parents have expectations for you (like God for Avraham and his descendants) and you often feel you come up short. But in the end of the day, the bottom line is – you are loved for free, not in exchange for anything in particular, but simply out of sheer grace, an overflow of the divine heart into the heart of the parent. May the memory of this type of love from our parents help us continue to feel it from them and from God, and cultivate it in our own hearts for our children and those around us. Not everything in life needs to be earned. May their memories be for a blessing.