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✷ To be read on October 25⎮3 Cheshvan ✷

 In Noach ("Noah"), God deems humankind corrupt and decides to destroy the existing social world with a flood. God commands Noah to build an ark and to fill this ark with his family and select animals. When the 40 day and nights of rain come to an end, the world has been transformed into a sea. Noah sends a dove to determine that the waters have receded. Once on dry land, Noah makes an animal sacrifice to God. The covenant is established under the symbolic arc of the rainbow....

In an interesting turn, Noah becomes a vintner, drinks excessively from his product, and condemns the son Ham, who discovers him asleep in his drunken and disrobed state. Noah's children bear children and generations pass. 

Humankind shares in a single language and uses its communicative power to construct a tower so high it will reach to the heavens. God condemns this hubris and confounds the speech of humankind; a multiplicity of languages come into being. Years later, humans will still find themselves confounded by their difference as well as consumed by the desire to create a city armed with the annihilative powers of heaven.

Before the parsha concludes, we meet Abraham and Sarai. Confounded by the effort to make sense of this parsha as a whole? In her D'var, Carol Ochs focuses on the use and abuse of language for life, stitching a connective thematic thread between creation, the destructive flood, and the tower of Babel.