At the end of parshat Bereishit it says ‘Hashem saw that the wickedness of Man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination, of every thought, in the heart of Man was only evil always. And Hashem regretted that He had made Man on the earth, and He was pained in His heart.’
How can Hashem regret something? Doesn’t regret mean I made a mistake before? If so, how can a perfect god regret something?!
So we need to define the regret the Torah is talking about here. To give an example that makes it clear: You buy from IKEA a new bed. You already paid for it, and they just have to deliver it. When they do deliver, they deliver a table instead of a bed. You say: “I didn’t buy this!” They didnt give you what you actually bought in the beginning!
This is the regret that Hashem has when He sees how low the generation of Noach had sunk. He says: This isn’t the world I intended to create at all! A few verses later (6:12) Hashem says the reason why He is going to destroy everything in the world: And God saw the earth and behold it was corrupted, for ALL FLESH had corrupted its way upon the earth. All flesh. Even the animals in someway had veered away from the vision Hashem had when He created the world. And so Hashem decided He had to start over, and He would start over from Noah, who was the one person who still lived in a way that was in line with that initial intention in the creation of the world.
Hashem put Noah in a tevah – an ark – with every living creature in the world. In that ark the creation – the way it was supposed to be – was maintained while the rest of the world was destroyed and from this small remnant of the ‘real’ world, the world the way it is supposed to be, life would start anew.
A tevah, an ark, is something that you safeguard things in. Either people, or utensils. Its a big storage box. It is not coincidence that in Ivrit, the language Hashem created and then used to create the world, the word “tevah” also means a “word”. Words can safeguard ideas just as the Ark safeguarded Noah. Unless an idea is put into words it is lost.
At the end of the flood Hashem promised never to destroy mankind again in a flood. But there was still a 40 day flood in Israel every year at the time of the original flood until King Solomon asked Hashem for it to stop. But even then, the flood never really ended. We still live in a world that often veers completely away from that initial perfect vision that Hashem had for His creation when He created it. Not only that, but it tries to pull us away with it. The only thing that will save us is our tevah. Noah’s tevah was an ark. Our tevah is a word. It is the words of Torah. These are the tevot – the words – that Hashem has given us to safeguard ourselves from the continuing flood around us. If we enclothe ourselves in these words, in our ark, nothing can harm us. Just as Noah was safe and cosy in the ark and unthreatened by the dangerous waters around him, so too will we be!
Shabbat Shalom!
