The first bit of the Torah I translated was the story of Noah. The dramatic events of the Flood and all the heroic moments of the making of the Ark are followed by the extraordinary episode of Noah’s nakedness. Noah gets drunk – drunk with joy – and his son Ham sees him naked in his tent and tells his brothers.
What does that tell us about our relation-ship with our parents? What obligations do we have to them? What’s required of us? We’re told that when Ham told his brothers, Shem and Japhet, what had happened to Noah, they walked backwards towards their father, with a shawl to cover him… What does that say to us?
What’s crucial to the end of the story is what happens in the beginning. There’s the way that other people ridiculed Noah for doing what he was told to do in building the Ark. He gives up everything to do that. Then there’s the destruction of the world in the Flood, and the last man, Noah, to repopulate the world, gets drunk with joy after it’s all over. He gets drunk to celebrate his deliverance.
If you have spent time with Holocaust survivors, as I have, you know what it means to have a sense of delight. You can only have it if you have faced destruction. Celebration has a divine mandate. For instance, during a period of mourning, in Jewish law you must observe certain rules – not listening to music or dancing, for instance – except if you’ve booked a celebration, such as a Bar Mitzvah or wedding.
That celebration takes precedence. Now the thing about Ham is that he looks at the delight that made Noah drunk, and he sees his father’s nakedness, and he laughs at him. That’s his offence. The parts of Genesis that have stuck with me aren’t the great moments of drama like the Creation, though they are beautiful and important; it’s the smaller things, to do with how we relate to other people.
Take the episode of Cain and Abel. That story is to do with the fact of our important, primordial jealousy. Our first impulse is jealousy. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” There are so many lessons we can learn from that. It applies to William and Harry, and it applies to all of us. We’re confronted with our own homicidal impulses. We have to understand that we are capable of homicide. The story of Cain and Abel means you know this impulse within you. And as a lawyer, unless you understand that completeness of humanity, you can’t defend people in a criminal trial.
Then there’s the wonderful occasion where Abraham bargains with God. Judaism arose in the tradition of Abraham that we share with other faiths. And when Abraham learns that God proposes to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, he negotiates with him: if there is only one just man, will you save the city? That’s something a lawyer can appreciate.
But the crucial episode with Abraham isn’t the one we all think. We all assume it’s the appalling moment when Abraham prepares to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, to God. There’s too much focus on that, I think. The really important moment for Abraham is when three strangers – three angels? – appear before his tent at Mamre.
There’s nothing dramatic there – no flood, no sacrifice – but he washes the strangers’ feet. That’s how God decided on him. What matters: how you treat the stranger. And St Paul deals with that in his letter to the Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
That’s the thing about Genesis; it’s full of what you might call banal interactions. The important thing isn’t really whether you’d sacrifice your only son; it’s would I put up a stranger? That’s when you fast forward to the Holocaust. I often feel the impulse to assess people I meet in this way: are you a rescuer, a bystander or a perpetrator? And the first moments of awareness of which of them you are is to do with one thing: a willingness to share a home.
I understand when I make TV programmes that we all want drama. But that’s not really where faith is. As for the making of the world in Genesis, what is most potent is the seventh day of Creation, when God rested. The Shabbat has a central place in the order of creation and indeed in the ordering of the Ten Commandments. They are ordered in order of importance: “I am the Lord your God”… and after that there’s Shabbat, the day of rest.
It’s all there in Genesis.
Rob Rinder is a barrister, broadcaster and columnist. In addition to Judge Rinder (the ITV reality-based arbitration show), he has made BAFTA award-winning series on the Holocaust. He is presenter of Amazing Hotels of the World and has several BBC series on religion and culture coming out in 2024
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