“Noach was a righteous man; he was perfect in his generations.”
(Bereishit/Genesis 6:9)
Our Sages debate whether or not Noach would have been
considered a tzadik, a righteous man, had he lived in a generation other
than the sinful one that exists before G-d wipes out the world with a flood. Regardless,
surrounded by corrupt and unethical people, Noach lives a moral, upright life
and G-d chooses Noach, his wife Naama, and their sons and daughters-in-law to
be the progenitors of a new world.
Naama is a direct descendant of the murderous Cain. Her father
Lemech typifies the generation of the flood by having two wives, one for
procreation and the other for recreation. Despite her less than righteous roots,
Naama, too, is chosen to survive the flood.
It is a common misconception that all of the descendants of
Cain perish in the flood. The children of Noach and Naama are the descendants
of Cain on their mother’s side. Since all of humanity comes from them, this
means that all of us have in us a little bit of Cain.
Writes Rabbi Yaacov Haber on torahlab.org: “We often feel
guilty about our deep inner struggles. We idealize our spiritual heroes as
perfectly righteous men and women. We assume that they are not even capable of having
the thoughts we are thinking.”
“This is not so. Our ancestors and role models were not made
of plastic. They were men and women who inherited the forces of Seth [Shet, Noach’s
progenitor, son of Adam and Chava] and the forces of Cain. They struggled…To
struggle is to be human.”
Rabbi Ari Kahn on aish.com writes: “We learn from Naama that
despite the violent, oppressive nature of the surrounding society, despite the
extremely challenging family history, despite the genetic and genealogical challenges
with which we are born, we are all capable of making choices for our own lives…G-d
does not despair of our capacity to rise above, to connect with the divine breath
with which He has endowed each and every one of us.”
As parents raising children in a less than perfect world, we
must struggle against the pressures to conform to the negative values and
attitudes that pervade our society. We must strive to be tzadikim, righteous
people, in our own generation, and teach our children to make choices that are firmly
rooted in Torah values.
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