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The world, especially children, loves superheroes. Why? Good question. It’s very gratifying to imagine yourself flying in the sky, climbing skyscrapers and saving the world. But this is only a fantasy, very remote from our everyday lives. Can superheroes help and inspire us in our daily lives and our simple problems?
Who is a real hero? Who would you choose as your biblical Hero? What about Noah?
In this week’s Parashah, Noah, although the best of in all his generation, was not perfect. Our Sages note that his faith in G-d and His promise that a Flood will come was not complete. G-d had told him to enter the Arch, but Noah waited until he had no choice and was forced by the flood to go inside...
This, in my opinion, makes him a more approachable hero that we can all relate to and imitate. Noah’s faith may not have been perfect but bottom line he did the right thing. He built the Ark, gathered the animals and at the end of the Flood build again the world from scratch.
There is a proverb in Yiddish: “You don’t die from having a question”. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t have all the answers to the philosophical questions of life. We can live with unanswered questions. What is important is not let our doubts stop us from acting correctly. At the end of the day, what matters is how we acted.
We can all be like Noah. We do not need to be fearless in order to get involved. We do not need to have understood it all before contributing. We do not need to be a Tzadik in order to make a Mitzvah. There is no need to be a rabbi in order to eat kosher or be a professor to attend a Torah class.
Noah wasn’t perfect, he was full of doubts, but he did the right action. Let’s imitate him!
Shabbat Shalom!
Hanna