The Rainbow and the Ribbon: Beginning Again©

Rabbi David Baum

Delivered on Parashat Noah, 2025/5786

Before we begin our Torah reading this morning, I wanted to share a story of this Torah cover that's in back of us right here, and the mitzvah that Audrey, the mother of our bar mitzvah boy, performed to turn it into a beautiful memorial to October 7th, 2023, and the two years that followed. Because it was here during Simchat Torah when we learned about the massacre. And after that day, we started wearing yellow ribbons; we started wearing dog tags as a sign of solidarity and to remember the hostages, reminders of those who were taken from us.

Now, Audrey ordered ribbons for everyone in the room, and the most amazing thing happened: she can't use them because the hostages were freed, Baruch Hashem, thank God. So I asked her to do something else with it. We started a project where she said, "How do we memorialize this?" And so we said, we have an old Torah cover that we no longer use for the High Holidays, and we said, "We're gonna put the pins that we wore on them." And so Audrey took it home, and she put, as you could see, the ribbons in a sign of one big ribbon.

The cover here; it's more than fabric. It's actually testimony.

It's what it means to live the day after. It's a reminder that our story does not end with tragedy. The Jewish story never ends with tragedy. Yes, there's a lot of it, but it's how we respond. That is the Jewish way. It's turning suffering into holiness.

Next week, or after this service, I'm gonna put the Torah away back in the ark — the Torah cover — where it's gonna stay until next Simchat Torah. And that is the essence of this week's parsha, Parshat Noah. Last week, Bereshit told the story of creation but also of collapse — of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel. And this week, we begin again with a new Adam, Noah, the man who found favor in God's eyes, as we're about to read. The flood — the mabul — destroys the world, but it actually doesn't destroy the possibility of renewal.

The Torah could have ended with this chapter — it would have been a much shorter book. But God said, "No, no, I can't give up on this idea of creation. I gotta do it again." And so He does. So God does with humanity. Noah's story begins where the book of Bereshit left off, in the long line of Adam's descendants. We read at the end of Bereshit all these people, the line that comes from Adam. There's something extraordinary that people miss, though: Noah is the 10th generation from Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve.

So, we don't really talk about Seth, but he is that third son. Now, after he's born,130 years after the death of Abel, and after Cain is banished. The question is: why 130 years? The Midrash, as cited by Rabbi Louis Ginzberg in The Legends of the Jews, states that Adam's love for Eve after their long separation (they had been apart for 130 years) was even stronger than before. When they came back together, they were more mature, more rooted in compassion and forgiveness. Seth was born not of innocence but of experience. It wasn't perfection like Eden — it was pain, the pain of exile.

And from Seth's line comes Enosh, and the Torah tells us that men began to call upon the name of God. That's when people began to believe that there was something greater than themselves. And it was in Seth's time, the Midrash says, that prayer began — that humanity learned how to speak to God again.

And ten generations later comes Noah. And Noah, too, is born into a world of violence and chaos. But through Noah, we find a new beginning. In a sense, Noah's great dream — or Seth's great dream — is fulfilled the next day, the day after, through his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. Seth rebuilt humanity after one brother killed another, and Noah rebuilt humanity after the flood washed away everything.

Both stand as quiet reminders that creation is not a one-time event. As we said in our Shacharit service, God renews creation every day, every second of the day. That's what it means to be human. It's what it means to be a Jew.

When Noah steps off the ark, what's the first thing he does? He plants a vineyard. He puts his hands into the ground. Noah, the man of Earth, plants again. He takes the soil that's been covered by destruction, and he turns it into growth. He creates life from death. And then God sets a rainbow in the sky — the first sign of a covenant, the first sign of divine promise that destruction will not happen again. The rainbow was a way of God saying, "I will remember. I'll never let chaos again reign unchecked. But I need your help. I can't do it alone, humanity — I need your help."

And that is the charge: when we see a rainbow in the sky, it's about protecting life, creating order, rebuilding the world.

We're standing in that same place today: the space between what was and what can be; between the floodwaters, the planting of the vineyard; between the destruction and the covenant.

We are, in a very real way, the children of Seth: we come from those who have learned to love again after loss, who taught humanity to pray again after they could find no words. And we are also the children of Noah: those who learned how to build again, who learned that the covenant is never broken.

And so when we look at this Torah cover next year, and those yellow ribbons now transformed, we see the continuation of that story. We see what happens when pain becomes purpose, when captivity becomes compassion, when the act of covering the Torah becomes a reminder that holiness can emerge even from the darkest of places.

And this Torah right here is a reminder of that. We're going to read from today's kosher Holocaust Torah. It was rescued by the Memorial Trust Foundation in the United Kingdom. It was damaged and then brought back to its status years later, and it's been loaned to us. And so we read this on our b’nai mitzvah to teach us that we can rebuild, we can repair, and we can live as the children of Seth and Noah.

I want to wish you all a Shabbat shalom.