Noah, Law, and the Chiastic Structure of Reality

Parashat Noah has been taken by our sages as the beginning of human legislation. In fact, the Talmud offers two different derivations of “Noachide Law”—laws which are meant to be binding on all human beings. Noachide Law is “natural law”, the sort of rules that are required for human beings to live together in peace.  Hints of such law are provided by the Covenant of Noah, in which God promises physical stability to allow human beings to fulfill their destinies.

But despite the Talmud’s attribution of law to Noah, our parashah doesn’t mention law per se. Instead, Noah is given two very fundamental rules:

This is followed by:

There is in this a hint of the way actions necessarily provoke a reaction, a sense that this is built into the universe—just as it is built into the text. Modern readers might understand this as “karma”. However, what the Noachide law is making explicit is that for human beings, karma will henceforth be wrought by other human beings. The generation of the flood did not take responsibility for their own actions; there was no judge and no judgment in the human realm. From now on, humans will need to provide their own checks and balances.

But more, by making the rule universal, the commandment to Noah makes it clear that no human being is “more equal” than others. While in the past, family members might have avenged the murder of one of their own, from now on, they are obligated to do the same even for strangers. Law is thus the extension of “family rules” into the universal realm; we are to treat all human beings as if they were our family. 

The image of God or the image of judges?

Significantly, this responsibility is introduced by the phrase “for in the Image of God” (tselem Elohim) God made man”. This is so not only because the murder victim is in the image of God, but also because the avenger of the murder is in the image of God, ie, is God’s representative on earth.

Other animals can live perfectly well with instinct to guide them. Only human beings, with their inestimable potential for good or harm, need the conscious constraint of law. What was implicit in the creation stories—that the evolving human being is a creature apart—is now made explicit and conscious. We know we are different. We know we are a danger to ourselves and to all of creation. Now we are given the means to do something about it. Significantly, this means that we must now act as God’s representatives (indeed, this is one of the meaning of tselem elohim) as agents of karma. And we must do so in full awareness. The inner workings of the karmic universe have become conscious of themselves, and they are us!

Where in last week’s parashah, the “image of God” sparked wonder and speculation, here the phrase acquires legal teeth. To the extent that we live outside of instinct, we must provide our own replacement for it in the form of law, culture, and community norms.  One can see this as the corollary to God’s promising stability in nature. God promises that the natural order will remain in balance, with season following season. Now humans must ensure that their society also stays in balance. They will need to keep man’s wild side from breaking loose and destroying the world.  If God is to forfeit the solution of erasing all life because of man’s wrongs, man must step in to make sure that justice is done, and balance is preserved.

The Genesis of Justice

And so, the first steps out of nature and into human history begin. Later still, the Torah will “institutionalize” and soften this primitive first law, and will build a framework for channeling human wildness into constructive paths.

In her book Punishment & Freedom, Devora Steinmetz notes that the punishment of murder is the one place where Torah law seems to intersect Noachide Law. This is illustrated by the fact that the punishment for murder in halakhah is hereg, death by sword, which is assigned to almost no other crime.

Killing by sword is a social act: the assignment of this form of execution to the crime of murder both underscores the reciprocal nature of the punishment for a murderer and emphasizes that that punishment is in the hands of human society. Execution by sword, like the assignment of the role of executioner to the go’el haddam (ed. avenger of blood), suggests that the court incorporates rather than supersedes the social response to murder. While it is the court’s job to regulate this response, to acquit the inadvertent homicide and to convict the intentional murderer, the judicial response to murder, at the end of the process, reverts back to the primordial notion that “he who spills the blood of a human being, by a human being shall his blood be spilled”.

The notion that the Torah comes to “regulate” the natural response of passion is a very fruitful idea, in particular when dealing with issues where our moral sense recoils. For example, the Sotah (the woman suspected by her husband of adultery), the Yaffat Toar (the beautiful woman taken in battle), the Ben Sorer More (the rebellious son). In all of these cases, the Torah seems to be saying: “You want revenge? You want to slake your lust? Your need to control? Sure, but not so fast! There are procedures that must be satisfied first!”

And in the course of fulfilling the required bureaucratic requirements, tempers cool, lust subsides, sanity prevails.

Do we still need such procedures? A look at the news in our region attests to the adage that a stream returns to its natural course. Just as 70 years ago Europe proved to us that the veneer of civilization is thin indeed, the Middle East too seems fated to periods of violent upheaval.

Yes, we still need legal rulings to channel human barbarism and cruelty into the fragile sanity of bureaucratic procedure. And yes, we still require such procedures to be backed by Divine sanction. We need to know that in following the saner course, we aren’t simply giving in to the temptings of our own cowardice or—dare we say it—of a wimpy compassion. Rather, we have the higher order of heaven and earth at our back when we choose mercy over cruelty, forgiveness over revenge. I am convinced that if evolution itself could be given a voice, it would applaud such choices in the voice of the Torah itself.

Perhaps it already has!