When I think about flooding and baseball, Hurricane Harvey immediately comes to mind. In August 2017, the monster category 4 storm made landfall in Texas and devastated the greater Houston area. It is tied with 2005’s Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record, with many areas receiving more than 40 (!) inches of rain over just a few days, flooding hundreds of thousands of homes.
Flooding is a fact of life in Houston and all of coastal Texas. Growing up, school wasn’t called on account on snow but on account of rain: The Bayou City is only 50′ above sea level. The 1900 Galveston hurricane — still “the deadliest natural disaster and the worst hurricane in U.S. history” — featured prominently in my childhood education.
At the time of Harvey I was living in New York and Boston, where news of hardship in the backwards South is sometimes met with schadenfreude. (To be sure, “[t]he city of Houston is a monument to what might charitably be described as Texan determination or less charitably as unbounded human arrogance.”1) I watched with a heavy heart as my hometown was engulfed, houses and highways swallowed up. (B”H, my family in Houston escaped unscathed.) Two blocks from the George R. Brown Convention Center, where at the peak of the crisis 10,000 people took refuge, stands Minute Maid Park, where the Astros were making a run at a division title for the first time in 16 years.
A friend joked that he thought I might be able to write this week about how the Astros emerged from the flood of the playoffs after the destruction of all other American League teams. Alas, it was not to be, and after a valiant run the ‘Stros were eliminated by the Tampa Bay Rays on motzei Shabbos. But his point remains: For me it is hard to focus on anything other than the disaster of the flood in parshat Noach, and I struggle with a Gd who so easily wipes out nearly all of humanity, especially as a native of a place where the power of water is lethal.
But Gd chooses to save Noah, and the instrument of that salvation is an ark. It is interesting that though Gd commands Noah to include an opening in that ark, the window is not meant for Noah to determine when to leave the ark. Gd makes that decision for Noah when Gd only orders him to leave the ark more than two months after his bird test-balloons (Gen. 8:14-16).
Rashi comments on the word that is first used to describe the opening, tzohar (צהר, Gen. 6:16) a word when used in the plural (צהריים) usually means, “noon,” or “midday.” Says Rashi: “Some say [this צהר was] a window; others say [it was] a precious stone that gave light to them.”2 It’s only later in the text that the usual word for window (חלון, Gen. 8:6) is used to describe the opening. Rabbi Sara and Dr. Michael Paasche-Orlow posit: “The window – where the dove returns with an olive branch – is about hope and connection. The window is escape . . . The window is a possibility of change – of redemption.”3
In September and October of 2017, baseball became that window in the ark.
Following Harvey, the Astros became a symbol of hope in a drowning city. The Rays generously offered the Astros Tropicana Field for their first homestand after the hurricane, but the ‘Stros played only three games there before Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner asked the team to come back home to help the city get back to normal. The Astros started wearing a patch on their uniforms that would remain a fixture through the postseason: the logo, a capital H with a star inside, with the word “strong” underneath. The word was an homage to the “Boston Strong” slogan adopted by the city after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing — a slogan invoked by the Red Sox when they won the World Series later that fall. As I wrote about this spring over on Omertime, in the past two decades baseball has more than once played a kind of restorative role in the life of a city.
And that hope is not just a possibility on the ark, it’s an imperative. Avivah Zornberg writes about Noah’s role as “life sustainer” on the ark — making it to the other side of the 40 days of rain is not a matter of mere survival. Noah’s attentiveness to the animals under his care is evidence of the righteousness (איש צדיק, Gen. 6:9) that the text offers as a reason for Noah being spared the fate of the rest of humankind. “In another midrash (Tanhuma 5),” she notes, “Noah as tzaddik is defined specifically by his ‘feeding the creatures of God.’ To be a righteous man is to care for and provide the needs of all creatures, like God [God]self.”4 (I would argue that to the extent that Noah’s righteousness is demonstrated by his care of the animals in the ark, it is actually in marked contrast to Gd’s disregard of the humans abandoned to the deluge. In the ark, Noah is in fact doing what Gd has declined to do. But let’s say here that Noah is acting aspirationally Gd-like.)
Zornberg quotes Emmanuel Levinas in elevating the fulfillment of needs as “a matter of joy and affirmation of life.” “Nourishment as a means of invigoration is the transmutation of the other into the same, which is in the essence of enjoyment: an energy that is other, recognized as other . . . becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, my strength, me. All enjoyment is in this sense alimentation . . .”5
Through the story of Noah, the Torah emphasizes for us the importance, even at the darkest hour, of experiencing nourishment, of all kinds. It is a righteous act to seek such enjoyment for oneself and for others.
The Astros winning the World Series in 2017 (the asterisk had not yet been hung on the title) did not repair homes. The third Red Sox championship in 2013 did not heal injuries. Mike Piazza’s go-ahead homer in New York City in 2001 did not mitigate death. But baseball did become — and can always be — that window of hope and that source of gratification with which Gd blesses us even in the worst of times.
1. Michael Baumann, “Hurricane Harvey, the Houston Astros, and Home,” in The Ringer.
2. Rashi on Gen. 6:16, trans. Rabbi Abraham Ben Isaiah and Rabbi Benjamin Sharfman, The Pentateuch and Rashi’s Commentary (S. S. & R. Publishing Compnay, Inc.: Brooklyn, N.Y.,1949), p. 60.
3. “Be the Window: A D’var Torah for Parshat Noach by Rabbi Sara and Dr. Michael Paasche-Orlow,” T’ruah’s Torah 20/20.
4. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (The Jewish Publication Society: Philadelphia, 1995), p. 60.
5. Zornberg, p. 61.
Ball-at Kriah 