Time to Land
Leaving Noah's Ark
“The waters swelled and increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark drifted upon the waters. When the waters had swelled much more upon the earth, all the highest mountains everywhere under the sky were covered.” (Genesis 7:18-19)
“Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth...On the sea, fields cannot be planted and firm lines cannot be engraved. Ships that sail across the sea leave no trace…On the open sea, there were no limits, no boundaries, no consecrated sites, no sacred orientations, no law, and no property.” (Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth)
The Torah begins with God creating the world. But it is in the subsequent parasha, Noach—which we read this week—that God spares the world. Each parasha embodies a meaning of the phrase popularized by the Beatles “Let It Be.” In Bereishit, “Letting the world be” means wishing it into existence. In Noach, “Letting the world be” means leaving it alone; allowing it to continue.
In Hegelian terms, the God of Creation is a God who posits a thesis (“let there be”), while the God of Noach is a God who posits an antithesis (“let there not be”)—only to overcome it. The God of Noach is the negator of negation, the one who says No to God’s own nay-saying. If Bereishit teaches us the generative power of creativity, Noach teaches us the generative power of restraint. The God of Bereishit is an author, while the God of Noach is an editor. The God of Bereishit “ships” quickly. The God of Noach stands back in reflection and judges the work. At the end of Noach, the world remains, but it is a world that is fashioned through subtraction. Our post-diluvian world is an “erasure poem.”
If Genesis is about executing a plan, realizing a vision, Noach is about accepting things as they are. Nothing changes in the state of the world before and after the flood. Human nature remains corrupt. After the Flood, we read about Noah planting a vineyard and getting drunk; Ham degrading him in some unspeakable way; the rebellion of the Tower of Babel builders. What changes is God’s attitude. The God of Bereishit is an idealist; the God of Noach is a realist.
Why destroy or nearly destroy the world with water, specifically? Sure, literary and historical reasons prescribe it. The waters of the flood correspond to the primordial waters of the deep that God holds back in Bereishit to make dry land. And flood narratives were ubiquitous in ancient Near Eastern cultures to the extent that most scholars believe a giant flood to have been a real, historical event. Yet even if these reasons did not hold, there would be good poetic and phenomenological reasons for God to threaten the world with a flood, specifically. Carl Schmitt’s classic work on the history and theory of international relations, The Nomos of the Earth, helps us see what some of these might be.
For Schmitt, the original meaning of the Greek word nomos, which we translate as law or custom was “land appropriation.” In the ancient world, the sea was considered a place that belonged to no one and that could not be appropriated. As he shows, even piracy—which we take to be a moral outrage—was once upon a time simply the law of the lawless sea: “The word pirate comes from the Greek peiran, meaning to test, to try, to risk. None of Homer's heroes would have been ashamed to have been the son of such a daring adventurer, who tries his luck as a pirate.”
Schmitt says that the meaning of the sea as a place of neutrality, free of law, changed with the advent of the discovery of the “New World,” then with the rise of Britain as a naval superpower, and then again with the rise of global consciousness (as embodied in the satellite image of the earth) and the ascendance of airplanes—all of these were steps on the way to the realization of international law, which we might think of as a way of mastering the unruliness of the sea. Presciently, Schmitt anticipates that space travel, and say, the conquest of Mars, would likewise alter our fundamental relationship to the ancient conflict between land and sea. Fundamentally, the meaning of the sea today is not what it was. And yet, in the libertarian ideal of “sea-steading” remains the kernel of an ancient belief that the sea is a place free of ordinary norms and state interference.
Schmitt’s thesis is that our relationship to law is rooted in our relationship to place and space. “Order” is unthinkable without “orientation.” Consider the metaphor of “the underground” resistance. As surveillance tracks the surface of the earth from above, the only way to avoid it is to burrow. We need not be literal about this. Dostoevksy and Kafka imagine the underground as a place to hide from the impositions of mainstream society. Privacy and publicity are functions of space and how we divide it. What do the people do when the flood comes? They congregate at mountain summits. Why do they build a tower after the flood? Not just to keep watch over public opinion—as many commentators suggest—but to have an insurance policy (albeit a foolhardy one) against another flood.
By drowning earth in water, God erases the possibility for human beings to fight over land, possessions, rights. A flooded earth is the image not just of a place without agriculture and civilization, but a place without legal boundaries, without a sense of mine and yours. It is the image of a utopia, literally a “no-place,” as well as the zone where for the longest time people experienced “a state of exception.” Noah, his family, and his animals are pirates with nothing to plunder. They stare out through their one window at an abyss. What happens on Noah’s ark stays on Noah’s ark.
The existence of land is synonymous with conflict over who owns what. Human conflict derives from scarcity of resources (the economic argument) as well as from scarcity of recognition (the psychological argument). Ownership is about access to resources as well as status. In the ancient world, nobody can own the sea. Just as nobody can own the desert (Midbar). The passage of Noah through the deluge anticipates the nomadic passage of the Israelites through the desert, as both are zones where the laws of civilization are suspended. Of course, the Israelites did have some civilization in the desert—they had an army, a Tabernacle, a court, rituals, so the analogy doesn’t hold perfectly. The reason is that dry, arid, difficult land is still land. It is still firm. But the sea moves and rocks. To do nothing on the sea is to be tossed about.
On my speculative Midrashic reading, God attempts to “solve” the problem of human corruption not by destroying humanity, but by destroying earth, that is, land. Noah and his family are to start a new world on the sea. In a world of sea-faring, perhaps things will be better (just as today, some imagine that life on Mars or on a space-ship might be preferable to the decadence of our planet). But the destruction of land, and with it, the destruction of law and property, proves unsustainable, undesirable, claustrophobic. So the abeyance of the flood waters and the return of Noah and his family to dry land marks God’s allowance of the law, God’s allowance of property, in spite of the fact that they are unable to prevent human conflict. God prefers some place, even if it’s rife with problems, to no place.
Noah must leave the ark in much the same way that George Clooney’s character must stop flying in the film Up in the Air. The sea is pure optionality, a haven from the frustrations of actuality. But nothing happens at sea, and nothing endures in the air. Noah from his ark, and George Clooney from his airplane look down at us suckers, us “normies,” in our sclerotic smallness. But the sad joke is on them as they take themselves out of the human condition, thinking that they have made a life by becoming drop-outs.
The person who lives on a plane or a boat so as to avoid dry land, the person who prefers the theoretical freedom of optionality to the difficult freedom of decision and commitment, is a monk. We don’t realize this because our image of the ascetic is one who refrains from consuming, not one who hyper-consumes. But the so called “techno-optimist” who looks to the sea or the air to replace the earth, who looks to technology—a new ark—to escape is not a builder, but a hacker.
There are times and circumstances where the best we can do is hide on an ark. There are cultures in which some feel, as Rod Dreher does, that one must choose “the Benedictine option.” Or if you prefer the secularist version of Dreher, you can follow Foucault and live a life of “critique.” But whether one chooses the ark in the form of religious piety or political resistance or technological innovation or alternative living, the lesson of Noah is that we should not idealize the ark. The ark is a contextually necessary, but ultimately insufficient measure. The sea is no permanent place to live. Neutrality, lawlessness, disorder, have their use, but the good life enjoined by the Torah is to be lived in the tension between land and sea (or, in our times, between land, sea, and air).
If the flood is anarchy (too much disorder) and the Tower of Babel is totalitarianism (too much order), our challenge is to find the balance. As the flood recedes, God creates the world a second time, not by creating new people, but by asking them to land.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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