Even God Doesn’t Know the Future -- Parashat Noah 5787

I recently returned from Chicago, where as you may have heard, I went to run my first marathon. So many of you have been encouraging me through the training and supporting my fundraiser for World Central Kitchen, and I’m very grateful for all of that, and for all of you.

First things first, I finished the race, and I'm really proud of myself for that. But I also have to admit that the marathon was not quite what I expected. See, by the time race day came around, I was already pretty confident that I would finish the race. And beyond that, I had a fairly clear picture in my head of what finishing would look like. I imagined myself gliding across the finish line, looking remarkably fresh after twenty-six point two miles. An adoring crowd would shower me with roses. There would be garlands, and people hoisting me onto their shoulders, carrying me triumphantly through the streets. Perhaps the mayor would present me with the keys to the city, as I hoisted my medal triumphantly in the air to a stirring orchestral rendering of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The actual race, as you may have guessed, was somewhat less glorious than all that. For starters it was brutally hot. Isn’t Chicago supposed to be cold? Not this year , apparently. As OutKast sings, “You can plan a pretty picnic but you can’t predict the weather.” It was also way more crowded than I imagined it would be. When I was training it was just me out there. How do you run with 50,000 other people all around you? This was apparently a question I had never considered. Also, too — how could there possibly be 50,000 people who can run a marathon. I think I seriously thought it would just be me and like a dozen other of the most elite middle aged rabbi athletes out there. On race day, I realized I wasn't as special as I imagined I was! Even eating properly and staying hydrated away from home and out of my usual routine turned out to be way more complicated than I expected. It's hard to eat right when you're on vacation -- let alone when you're trying to fuel and hydrate for an endurance sport, especially when there's so much deep dish pizza to be had!

Anyway, as I said -- I finished, and I’m proud of that and of what we raised for World Central Kitchen. But real talk -- I came home deeply disappointed, and honestly, pretty depressed. The race hadn’t been as enjoyable as I’d imagined, and I hadn’t been as fast as I thought my training had prepared me to be. 

Somewhere along the way, what I hoped would happen had become what I expected would happen, as though having put in the work meant I already knew how the story would end. And when the experience didn’t match the picture in my head, the comedown was pretty rough, and it was hard to see any of the bright side.

Most of us, I suspect, know something about that kind of disappointment, whether or not we’ve ever had any desire to run a marathon. We pour ourselves into a relationship, a project, a cause we care about, and develop a picture of what all that care and effort ought to produce. And when it doesn’t turn out that way, it can be hard to know how to keep going. How do we keep investing ourselves in a future we cannot predict?

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Noah, we learn about the great flood God sends to destroy all life, sparing only the world's most righteous person, Noah, along with his family and a menagerie of animals.

The story is laden with disappointment. Before the flood, God sees humanity’s violence and corruption and, according to the Torah, “regrets having created human beings.” 

This, of course, challenges our common conception of God as all-knowing. A God who regrets creating humanity must be a God who did not know how humanity would turn out. And creation has clearly turned out differently from what God expected. In other words, even God doesn’t know the future. If God had known from the beginning exactly how human beings would turn out, there would be nothing for God to discover that could make God regret having created us.

So God tries to create the world anew through Noah and his family and the animals aboard the ark. When the flood waters recede, God tells Noah to release the animals so they can be fruitful and multiply, replenishing the earth. Noah comes out, builds an altar, and slaughters some of those very animals he has just helped preserve, offering them to God.

God smells what the Torah calls a “pleasant smell,” and then says inwardly: “I will never again curse the earth because of humanity, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again strike down every living thing, as I have done.”

Usually we read that "pleasant smell" business as a sign that God is happy with Noah’s offering. Yet what follows sounds to me like dismay. After a world’s worth of death, the person chosen to begin again is killing some of the very creatures he was charged with protecting. The flood has changed the world, but it hasn’t changed the human heart. Even God’s attempt to begin again has not produced the world God envisioned.

Before the flood, human evil was God’s reason to destroy. Now that same inclination becomes God’s reason to promise never again to destroy all life. God sees that human beings possess the same inherent capacity and even impulse for violence as before. But this time, God chooses to stay in relationship with us anyway.

God knows our tendencies and has seen enough of our track record to expect that we will disappoint again. But likely doesn’t mean inevitable. As Maimonides writes in his Laws of Repentance, “Free will is granted to all people. If one desires to turn themselves to the path of good and be righteous, the choice is theirs.”

Our natural inclinations and our past can help explain who we have been; they don’t get to decide who we will become. The choices remain ours, and we can surprise even God. 

This helps explain the covenant that God establishes with Noah and every living creature. After seeing the human tendency to violence endure, God promises never again to destroy all life on earth, at least by flood. God gives that promise a sign: “I have set My bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.” That bow in the clouds is typically understood to refer to a rainbow.

It’s a beautiful image, because rainbows are beautiful. But have you ever stopped to consider why the rainbow is a fitting sign for this particular covenant?

Modern biblical scholar Ronald Hendel explains that ancient peoples understood rainbows as omens, messages revealing to human beings what the gods had planned. In Genesis, the message is addressed to God. “When the bow is in the clouds,” God says, “I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant.” Noah has given God good reason to doubt that humanity’s future will turn out any better than its past; so through the rainbow, God is reminding God to keep faith with this world, however we turn out.

The Hebrew word for rainbow, keshet, more literally refers to an archer’s bow. For the great medieval commentator Ramban, a bow pointing away from the earth, without a string to launch an arrow, is a gesture of peace. God is thus decommissioning and hanging up God’s weapon, promising to respond differently even when we give God reason to be disappointed again.

Even its shape seems fitting: A rainbow is light refracted and reflected through water droplets, and the arc we see is part of a full circle, with neither a beginning nor an end. That’s why we can’t see the end of a rainbow, because in truth a rainbow has no end. So too, even God can’t see how things will end up with us humans. As free creatures, what we will do with our freedom remains ours to decide.

I still wish my marathon had gone a little more like what I had envisioned. I can learn from what happened, and acknowledge how much was beyond my control, without letting the gap between what I expected and what I experienced erase what was good. I finished something difficult, and together we supported the work of feeding people. Those things remain real, even if they didn’t feel the way I imagined they would.

We can be mistaken about the future in the other direction, too, becoming so convinced by our failures, or the cruelty around us, that we conclude there is no point in trying. Once again, we mistake what we expect for what we know.

But if even God doesn’t know the future, then surely we should never give up on the possibility of securing a tomorrow different from our yesterdays.

A better future is not inevitable. But it remains possible, especially when people like you and me commit ourselves to the hard and necessary work of building it. None of us can control every outcome, but our choices help shape what becomes possible.

Let us therefore refuse to surrender to those who tell us that what is is what must be, that what has been is all that ever will be, that tomorrow might as well be yesterday.

Let us hold our expectations with humility and our commitments with strength, giving ourselves and one another room to learn, to change, and to try again.

And let us keep faith with this whole fragile world, with every living creature embraced by God’s covenant, helping make the future more compassionate than the past might lead us to expect.

So may it be God’s will.

Amen.