Manufactured Disaster in the Genesis Flood Narrative: On Radically Imagining New Worlds As the Waters Rise (Part One)

I want to preface this by stating that there are countless narratives throughout history that center ancient flood narratives. I’m focusing on the narrative of Noah’s Ark because it’s the one I’m most intimately connected to and it’s the one I’ve studied extensively. 

I also want to note that this essay was inspired by two Dr. Julia Watts Belser’s presentations from the 2021 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies series titled Reading Jewish Texts in an Age of Climate; Grappling with Risk, Reimagining Hope and The Afterlives of Noah's Ark - Gender,

Disability & the Politics of Survival. I return to them often because they’re as inspiring as they are nourishing and honest. My phone autocorrected “honest” to “honey” and, honestly, either word would be appropriate. Belser’s words are a sort of spiritual salve when I’m struggling with existential crises. I don’t know if you’ll ever read this, Julia, if I may, but I feel blessed to be intellectually and spiritually nourished by you. 

I also want to thank Rabbi Lucia Pizarro, Founding Spiritual Director of the Jewish Liberation Theology Institute, for guiding me to guide myself through Torah in an intimate and deeply personal way the last few years. Studying and learning from you is a gift. Thank you for helping me connect with my ancestors and myself in such liberating and fulfilling ways. 

I also want to thank a beloved pin oak who lives in my neighborhood. Their grounding and strong presence in my life cradles and protects me. Like my loved ones with whom I regularly share space and connect with, my beloved pin oak offers me refuge. I want to thank my chosen family, my beloved thought partners, my trusted confidantes, my teachers, my ancestors. Henry, Lola, and Florestine who have held me close from the other side extra tightly the last few weeks. 

Blessed be my zygomaticus major. Blessed be my veins and the star-borne fluids that meander below my flesh. Blessed be neuroplasticity. Blessed be my hippocampus, without which my ability to dream might be extinguished. Blessed be the present moment, everlasting space of possibility. Blessed be the person reading these words and any being anywhere for whom this planet is home. “Blessed are the beloved I didn’t describe. I couldn’t describe. I will learn to describe,” as Fatima Jamal powerfully professed. 

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While meditating on the ways gevurah manifests in my life, I realized how much I associate discipline with pain and fear. But, gevurah is more than discipline. Often something other than discipline. Michael Zank stated that “literally, and in its biblical usage, the word gevurah refers to that which makes the hero (gibbor) a hero.” For Rabbi Los Bass, gevurah means “power, strength, rigor, or bravery.” Rabbi John Carrier has multiple videos, part of his Counting the Omer series, that feature stories and lessons that center the importance of gevurah that I highly recommend. As Saidiya Hartman would say, Rabbi Carrier is “always on the page with me,” along with Dr. Hartman. 

Now I’m “thinking through this [device qua smartphone] and the images I’ve taken as a reminder to myself that there’s a larger belonging,” as Torkwase Dyson explained in her School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Visiting Artists Program Lecture. That “larger belonging” grounds my meditations on gevurah today. In the sukkah of my dreams, all life and every ancestor for whom the universe is home, and with whom I’d be genuinely safe, are invited to feast at my spiritual table. In that way, our shared planetary home is the almost sukkah of my dreams. I’m rooted in that “larger belonging.” 

Later in the SAIC lecture, Dyson describes enclosures as follows: “I can hide. I can put away and then I can understand. I can create my own enclosures. I can create these enclosures in a way that’s safe and good and I understand the construction and I can take it apart and put it back together. Then I find myself in this sort of archaeological realm where the unknowing is driving me almost crazy. But the digging and the construction helps me.” 

When I think about sukkahs through a Dysonian lens, as “poetry of surface,” as an enclosure, and then I relate my reflections to the practice and concept of the central sefirot of the day, gevurah, the abstract, ideational, “archeological realm” within which my dream sukkah is sparked into being becomes fertile grounds for imaginative praxis. Creating a space, a flourishing ecosystem, in my mind for intentional dreaming and imagining is a type of construction. A type of construction not unlike the myriad Torah moments that center building, construction, and the creation of enclosures. 

***

In Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams, Jill Hammer explains that “for the kabbalists, God has multiple aspects with different energies. One of the most important forms of God is the Presence, or the tangible divine energy within all physical substance. In Hebrew, this Presence is called Shekhinah (literally, Indwelling).” She goes on to add that this Presence “receives the energy of all of the hidden realms and manifests that energy as the abundance of forms in the physical world.”

During Sukkot we’re encouraged to welcome spiritual visitors and ancestors, the beloved ushpizin, into our sukkah. For now, I invite you to welcome spiritual visitors and ancestors into your mind, as enclosure, as fertile grounds for imaginative praxis, for intentional dreaming and imagining as you connect with my energy through these words. 

During Sukkot, we’re also encouraged to reflect on and feel through a central sefirot each day. This brings me back to gevurah. Back to the sukkah. Back to enclosures. Back to the Genesis flood narrative. 

“‪We have a collective, communal responsibility to change the situations that might require divine rescue and not simply put our trust in good fortune or in G-d,” Dr. Belser urges us. “Is this the limit of our refuge dreams?” She asks.

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