After a short break from newsletters, we're back to our regular schedule. The reason for the pause is that this year the holidays of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah, the Days of Repentance, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah) fell in such a way that Shabbat followed each one immediately. This made the weeks between holidays short, leaving no time to pause and write a newsletter.
With this parashah, called Noach, begins a series of "regular" Shabbatot, that is, those not directly related to holidays. This leads us to consider something we've discussed many times: in the Torah portion read each week, we should find practical teachings for everyday life. And, as mentioned, this week is the first "regular" week, so to speak, marking the beginning of daily life after the holidays of Tishrei (technically speaking, the first reading was last week, with the parashah Bereshit, but it was like a continuation of Simchat Torah; only now do we enter the "regular" reading cycle).
In this week's parashah, we find a peculiar event that, beyond the details described by our sages, reflects the same situation we find ourselves in: this passage from one moment to another.
The Torah recounts that after the flood, when Noah, his three sons, Noah's wife, and his three daughters-in-law were in the ark for a little over a year, the first thing Noah did was plant a vineyard. After some time passed and the grapes grew, he made wine from them, became drunk, and this led to some transgressions (see Genesis 9:20 and following). The Torah uses the word Vaiachel, "and became worldly," to describe Noah's actions in planting a vineyard and so forth.
Here, then, we find something similar to our passage between the festivals of Tishrei and ordinary daily life: Noah emerged from an ark where his life consisted of feeding animals, without many worries since God had told him he wouldn't die in the flood, his food wouldn't spoil that year, and, basically, everything would be fine. From that situation, he went on to have to work the land to feed himself, repopulate the world, and found a new society—much more serious and complex tasks. It is in this transition between two situations that Noah failed; he "became worldly," unable to adapt and cope with the new reality and the responsibilities that fell to him.
We have just come out of the month of Tishrei, a month full of renewing energies and forces, and we must be careful in the transition to daily life, not to separate these two moments and not to "change" ourselves, but to use the accumulated forces to apply them and sanctify the following months.