Jewish tradition contains a great deal of ceremony that includes drinking a cup of wine. There is Kiddush at the Shabbas meals, and Yom Tov meals as well…Not to mention four cups of wine at the Pesach Seder. There’s wine drunk under the chuppah, and even wine given to the babe at the bris (to sooth him and numb him from the pain to come). And there is often a great deal of wine on Purim and Simchas Torah. And yet, on the whole, Jews are not known as a drunken people, perhaps because at each of these occasions at which wine is drunk, one is meant to be sharing time with others.
The first mention of wine in the Torah
comes in Bereishis 9, in Parshas Noah. After the world has been destroyed and Hashem
has made the covenant of the rainbow with Noah, the Torah states: “And Noah
began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard” (9:20). Most commentaries
immediately flag the fact that planting a vineyard was what Noah chose as his
very first action. One would think that he would first plant food. Noah planted
a vineyard and immediately the Torah tells us that he drank and got drunk and
embarrassed himself. His son, Ham, derided him while his other two sons, Shem
and Yafes, tried to treat him respectfully. When Noah woke from his wine
induced slumber, probably with a fearsome hangover, he cursed son Canaan.
This famous story, when looked at a
little closer, leads to some rather fascinating realizations about how we read
the Torah. Telling time in the Torah is not always a simple thing, to say the
least. With its string of conjunction vav’s, and…and…and…, it often sounds as
if one thing happened right after another, and they are therefore related. Certainly,
one reading the narrative of Noah imagines it all happening as consecutive
action. Noah and sons get out of the Ark, build an altar for an offering,
receive Hashem’s blessing and covenant, and set to farming the land and plant a
vinyard. There is no mention of a passage of time, which makes Noah’s taking to
drink seem all the more unacceptable.
But then there’s Canaan. When Noah gets
drunk and goes “uncovered in his tent” (9:21), the Torah tells us: “And Ham,
the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness” (9:22). After Noah awakens,
he doesn’t curse Ham, but rather Ham’s son Canaan. Not surprisingly, given the
pacing of the Parsha, most people don’t stop to question where Canaan came
from. After all, it is stated quite clearly that only Noah and his wife and his
three sons and their wives got onto the Ark. The subtly active role of Canaan
in these verses tell us that Noah did not just hop out of the Ark and think
about getting drunk.
Given the fact that the Midrash
states that Noah and his sons and Noah’s wife and his sons’ wives kept
themselves apart while the flood ravaged the land, we can assess that Canaan
was not even conceived until after the catastrophe. But then, if Noah turned to
farming so soon after the covenant of the rainbow, how old could Ham have been
at the time of Noah’s drunkenness? Researching grapes, one finds that there is
a common assessment that it takes from 3-7 years for a grapevine to bear fruit.
Once we are realizing that these situations did not take place with the
immediacy that is implied in the pacing of the verses, one can now recognize
that by the time Ham insulted his father’s dignity, Canaan was already a child
old enough to be influenced by the actions of those around him…if not already a
young adult.
This leads to a basic question of
why Noah sought to get drunk. One might have thought that Noah was drinking as
a means to forget the destruction of the world that he knew, but now we know
that a significant amount of time has passed. Life is moving forward and there
is a whole world to rebuild…a whole world for his sons and their wives and his
grandchildren. Noah, who was a unique and special man from among his
generation, finds himself on the other side of life and perhaps doesn’t know
what to do with himself. This is would also, possibly, explain why some
commentaries accentuate the idea that Noah wanted to have a fourth child and
was prevented from doing so by the actions of Ham. That fourth child would have
brought him relevance among the next generation.
Planting the vineyard would not, in
itself, seem to be a problem. One can assume that they all drank some wine. Archeological
and historical studies have found that wine or beer was often the more common
drink than water. The problem was that Noah drank to excess, and did so,
perhaps, purposefully because he no longer felt a purpose. The problem was that
Noah did not feel connected to the world his sons were building. Shem and Yafet
could show such a perspective sympathy. Ham could not.
Understanding the motivations of the
Biblical personalities helps us to understand deeper lessons in the Torah.
Here, where it is easy to take an attitude of condescension to Noah for his behavior,
perhaps one should also take the time to think about his motivations. Perhaps
one needs to contemplate Noah’s life before, during, and after the flood.
Perhaps one needs to not glance quickly at the situation and presume a failing,
but rather think through the steps that brings a person to a place. In learning to do so, we come back to the
beautiful truth at the heart of Jewish life: we are a family and we are meant
to be there for each other.
Shabbat Shalom
