In the first chapters of Genesis, God creates the world and all the creatures in it, including the first human beings. Adam and Eve are installed in the Garden of Eden, where all their needs are met simply and easily. God seems content with Creation, even optimistic.
It seems that things did not go as planned. By chapter 3, the first humans have eaten the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from the Garden. By chapter 4, Cain kills his brother Abel and murder comes into the world. Two chapters and 10 generations later, God is fed up:
And YHVH saw that the evil of humanity was widespread upon the earth; that all day long the thoughts that formed in their hearts were nothing but evil. And YHVH regretted that he had created human beings upon the earth; it troubled his heart. And YHVH said, “I will blot out from the face of the earth these human beings that I created, man and beast, from creeping things to birds of the sky for I regret that I made them.” (Genesis 6:5-7)
God’s expectations had not been met, and God wasn’t just disappointed, God was enraged. I can almost imagine God saying:
“This isn’t what I wanted or expected.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
“You aren’t doing what I need/want/told you to do.”
“This is unacceptable.”
That’s surely what I would say, what I have said when I’ve been at war with reality, trying to control a situation that, truth be told, is beyond my control. Sound familiar?
When we are in the grip of this kind of anger and resentment, we lose access to rationality and inner wisdom. We rage, and throw words, and sometimes things at whatever it is that is failing to meet our expectations. We become destructive forces in our attempts to control reality and bend it to our will. We devastate relationships; we obliterate entire worlds. All because we aren’t getting our way.
Most of us know what happens next in the biblical story, although popular depictions tend to focus on the floating zoo and miss the horrific devastation that its inhabitants escaped. Noah (Noakh in Hebrew) builds the ark, fills it with family members and animals destined to repopulate the earth, and rides out months of flooding only to confront an uninhabitable world once it ceases.
If we are awake, or maybe just lucky, we realize what we have done before it’s too late. We recognize that our war with reality is futile. We accept what is, and take it from there. After the Flood, God recognized that Creation had become independent of Divine Will. Reality had trumped expectation. All of the Ark’s beings were released back into the world and they, as well as God, began again:
And YHVH spoke from his heart, “Never again will I curse the earth on account of humanity, because the thoughts that arise in human being’s hearts are evil from youth on; I will never again strike down all living things as I have just done.” (Genesis 8:21)
God blessed the survivors in much the same way that Adam and Eve had been blessed, that they should be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. But God made a significant change in the terms of humanity’s relationship with the earth and it’s other inhabitants.
Whereas in chapter 1, human beings were blessed to be stewards in peaceful co-existence with other beings, in chapter 9 the humans become predators and the beasts learn to fear them. The vegetarians of Eden have shown themselves to be omnivores and God, recognizing that this is so, acquiesces to their carnivorous ways (Genesis 1:28-30 and 9:1-3).
This wasn’t the Edenic vision, but it was the reality of Creation. God made peace with that, and found a way to go forward in full knowledge and acceptance of what was. God made a covenant with reality.
May we be blessed to learn how to manage our own expectations. May we make our peace with what is. And may we covenant with our own worlds that we will never lash out at them in destructive anger again.
Amen, keyn yehi ratzon. Amen, may it be so.
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