Noah:
Once
Avraham was born, God did not again punish a nation collectively unless the
nation in question had deliberately harmed the Jewish nation. Sins committed by the members of the other
nations against God are stored up in His memory to be requited at the time when
the birth pangs of the Messiah have begun.
Prior to Avraham’s birth, God’s attribute of
Justice punished the generation of Noach and the
generation of the Tower collectively for sins committed against Him.
Levi
Yitzchak of Berditchev (18th Century)
The
story of the
Yitzchak
Arama (15th Century)
God saw
not only the seriousness of their (
Malbim (19th
Century)
After
the Flood, God looks with new, almost inexplicable tolerance on the very
problem of intrinsic evil that had precipitated destruction just a year
before…Man is seen as an evolving being.
God looks at the post Flood generation as a new and more hopeful
infancy. It is true that “evil” is at
its strongest at this stage. But the
prospect of maturity is the reward of an evolutionary view of man. In a sense, Noah is a reborn
Adam.
Aviva Zornberg (Contemporary)
Midway
between Adam and Abraham, after the holocaust of the deluge, the world which
God created gets another chance. A new
page is opened…As if the world was created again at this very moment, this time
in a covenant with mankind, the first covenant is made with all of humanity,
referred to as “Bnai Noah,” children of Noah…Whatever the covenant stipulates
is binding on all human beings, Jews included…While the Torah evolves as the
particular instruction for Israel…it also sets the required condition for those
who seek inclusion in the Noahide covenant of all
human beings. Furthermore, salvation or
“a share in the world to come,” is not limited to the Jews or those who join
them…but is offered to all…The universal message the world got from Judaism
until now was…either in the form of Christian Judaism or Moslem Judaism, both
of which are tainted…
Pinchas
Peli (20th Century)