By Kobi Bordoley and Matan Diner

Hello Movement this week's Parsha is Parshat Noach. Parshat Noach is actually based off the movie Evan Almighty. This parsha involves Noah, God, a flood, a tower and many other fun things. Here is a good summary and here is the actual text. This week's Parshat Hashavua has been written by the two chillest dudes at Na'aleh, Matan Diner and Kobi Bordoley. For this week we each wrote our own commentary on the parsha.

MATAN:

Parshat Noach can be viewed as god’s second attempt at creating humanity. The first attempt was a failure to god. In the first attempt at creating humanity the “earth [had] become full of robbery” and there for god proclaimed that “I am destroying them from the earth.” Once the flood ceases god’s second attempt to create humanity occurs. He turns to Noah and his children and for their assistance in this endeavor by telling them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

God’s second attempt to create humanity is no more ideal than the first one. Many generations after the death of Noah, the people of the world erect the tower of Babel. This infuriates god. As punishment god “confuse[s] their language, so that one [could] not understand the language of his companion.” Through out the rest of the Torah god would continue to find imperfections and moral decadence in humanity.

God in dealing with the imperfections of humanity completely gives up, destroys humanity and goes back to square one in the creation process. The first time god wipes out humanity with a flood and the second time god destroys the community of the people of the earth through making communication between humans impossible. Both destructions are followed by the repetition of wrongdoings that the previous people of the world had committed.

As a movement we should look at god’s reactions to the imperfections and failings

of humanity as a cautionary tale of how not to deal with shortcomings of our own movement. In movement structures we often are forced to deal with imperfections and shortcomings. This happens in a verity of ways: we run peulot that do not go well or or we run ken events that chanichem do not show up to or we deal with unhealthy mazkiruit-tzevet tensions at machane the list is endless. When these flaws occur it is imperative that we deal with the individual cases and not try to re-create our structures from scratch. God is unable to actually deal with the flaws of humanity because god keeps starting over in creating humanity and does not directly deal with imperfections of humanity. We as a movement can actually deal with the flaws of our structures through dealing with specific cases. While our structures will always have flaws the continual process of fixing them helps work to create a movement closer to our ideal image.

KOBI:

So, you're sitting down with the book of Genesis doing some casual perusing. You read about about how God made all that cool stuff in seven days out of some primordial ooze, (Genesis 1-2.4) and then you continue, and read about how God made man out of dust and then women out of ribs and planted some gardens and was kind of just trying stuff out (Genesis 2.5-26). Wait. What? Did God just create the universe twice, and in really different ways each time? The answer is yes. That's weird. Huh.

But anyways, you keep reading, eventually getting to the flood story, and this week's parsha. So God says it's going to rain for 40 days and 40 nights , and at one point says to bring two of every kind of animal (6.18), but then at a later point says to bring 7 pairs of every animal (7.1-4), and then it actually rains

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