Parshas Noach - The Duality of the Second Father of Mankind

Noach, as a figure, comes burdened with ambiguity from the very beginning. Instead of taking the Torah's declaration of his righteousness at face value, they dig into the qualifier of the verse.

"Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya bedorotav", "Noach was a perfectly righteous man in his time" becomes the basis of an argument over whether he was really a righteous man, or only righteous by the standards of his age. Would he have been a better or a worse man in a nobler time, they inquire.

If this seems unfair, Noach is the second father of mankind, and the man who plants a vineyard and gets drunk in front of his sons and grandson. He's a righteous man, but unlike Avraham, seems to have little impact on those around him. And even his grandson turns out to be wicked and ends up cursed by him.

The duality and ambiguity of Noach is there at the beginning. His name, Noach, means rest. His father gave him the name hoping that with his birth, mankind would have rest from the curse of the earth.

And indeed there is rest, but because a flood covers the earth and wipes out all the rest of mankind.

Only after Noach leaves the ark and brings sacrifices, does the meaning of his name emerge when G-d pledges not to curse the earth again because of mankind. It is not because man has proven himself holy, but because, "the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth". 

The first letters of Noach also those of Nechama which can mean consolation or regret. Before the flood, Vayenachem, G-d regrets having created man. Afterward, Noach appears to seek consolation in wine.

Noach's own name, literally rest, can be used to mean respite from foes who are killed. That's the way it is used from time to time, from the prophets to Purim.

All this duality makes Noach a curious and fitting second father to mankind. A man who is both righteous and flawed with the familiar human weaknesses. Noach is not ideal, perhaps, and yet he's able to rise above his flaws through faith. 

An ideal man might have been saved from the flood and yet would not have met with G-d's tolerant response that the earth would no longer be cursed because "the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth". 

Noach was not perfect, yet saved mankind despite his imperfections. Despite whatever flaws there might have been in his character, his faith in G-d persisted. He was a perfectly righteous man in an era where people did not aspire to heights, but sank to the lowest depths, not because he never sinned, but because he never stopped resisting the same forces that had dragged down a generation and that, in the aftermath of the apocalypse, threatened his own moral standing.

Gifted with a prophetic name, Noach did indeed win G-d's forbearance by struggling despite his flaws. And so mankind could win some respite and rest, that Noach himself, ironically, could not. Whether he labored to build the ark, to maintain it during the flood, or to rebuild mankind afterward, Noach may have been one of the hardest working men in the bible. And when he did rest, he fell into a scandal.

It was this quality, bringing sacrifices of the very animals he had worked so hard to preserve, the act of faith it implied, that won mankind rest from the curses of the earth. Man might be flawed in character, as Noach shows when, on planting the vineyard he is referred to as Ish HaAdama, a man of the earth, but his struggle and toil need not be external, if it is internal, as it was for the second father of mankind.