Shabbat Noach - 5786

Shabbat Noach - 5786

Rabbi Hal Miller

  And the earth had become corrupt before God, and the earth had become filled with robbery.

  [Bereishit 6:11]

Our verse gives the reasons God brought about the Flood, shachat and chamas. What are these, and why are they so important that the world had to be destroyed for them?

Shachat could mean wastage, destruction or corruption. All three of those are serious flaws in the world. Certainly today there is massive waste of resource, much destruction throughout the world, yet God has not seen fit by those to repeat in any fashion His wiping clean the slate of the world. Thus, the meaning of the word in our verse has to be corruption. According to Rashi, citing the Gemara in Sanhedrin [57a], this means sexual immorality and idolatry. Rav Hirsch defines it as "the overthrow of a good condition and the impeding of progress and the changing into the opposite of anything meant to thrive and prosper." But we see much of this in the world yet today as well, so why was it then a trigger for God to act? Kol Dodi defines the difference that existed then: "Corrupt before God implies that only in His eyes was the world corrupt. In the eyes of men, seemingly everything was proper." Thus it was not just simple corruption, but to the point that people completely lost their ability to separate right from wrong.

Most commentators concentrate on the second word, chamas, as does verse 6:13. We are certainly familiar with this word in today's world, and its primary meaning is the same in Hebrew and Arabic, violence. But again, there has been massive violence since the Flood without bringing about another destruction of the world, so we must look for an alternative definition. The most commonly accepted one for our verse is robbery, but this seems like a relatively tame sin to bring about such destruction. What is behind this?

Ramban translates chamas as injustice, specifically in terms of robbery and fraud. The sexual immorality and idolatry of shachat are what he calls "private sins", but the injustice of chamas is a public sin and "it is a law that is intuitively understood and they had no need for a prophet to warn about it." Sanhedrin [108a] says that this is the reason the decree was sealed. Rav Soloveitchik notes the words "before God" and says it means that this is open rebellion. Rav Hirsch defines chamas as "underhanded dealing by cunning, astute dishonesty, craftily keeping within the letter of the law".

But why would all this necessitate a destruction of the world? Why could there not have been some punishment, some wake-up call that would convince people to abandon their rebellious ways and return to God? Rav Shlomo Gantzfried writes, "when sinners are convinced that theirs is a valid way of living, no amount of rebuke will be effective", meaning that God could see there was no wake-up call or punishment that would convince people to change since they were already convinced that they were doing the right thing.

We could also look at our verse as a timeline. Immorality and idolatry, even in the privacy of people's homes, leads to the breakdown of society, which leads to people justifying their behavior in ways that would have shocked them before such a breakdown. We see this around us in this world now, wherever we look there are acts of open rebellion against God and His Torah, and we are pressured to accept those bad acts as 'normal' or 'right'. To break this downward slide and refuse to accept that rebellion is the responsibility of each one of us.