Noach

Rabbi Miriam's sermon - delivered Shabbat 25th October 2025 on the celebration of Beth and Iona Farshi's Batmitzvah Iona, your dvar Torah brought the words you leined to life, giving us all inspiration for confidence among our own “generation”, our own peers and communities. 

And Beth, your poem was amazing, combining research and some really deep ideas, with poetic expression, and your amazing, precious essence. 

The name Noach means “rest” and when he was born, Noach’s father said:

“This one will provide us relief”.

It feels to me that for the past 2 weeks, our people have experienced the first real relief in two years. We are experiencing a moment of the dove returning with an olive branch in its beak - a glimpse of a possible peace. Or the moment of the rainbow as the floodwater subsides. As you mentioned, Beth, the Ibn Ezra says that the rainbow is the shape it is to show a hunter’s bow, no longer pointed in aggression, but hung up for a time of peace. The promise of a better time is ahead. 

It’s an amazing time in Jewish history, Beth and Iona, and I hope that when you look back to this momentous day in your lives, you’ll also remember the momentous time in Jewish history that we’re in. 

But if you read on in the parasha, you’ll see that it isn’t all plain sailing. The first thing that Noach plants is a vine. He gets drunk and what follows is a very complicated family unravelling. 

Then in the next episode, the post-flood people try to build a tower, the tower of Bavel. One heartbreaking midrash says that the tower was designed to hold up the sky so that it wouldn’t flood again. 

In other words, yes, we’re in a time of great hope and the glimmer of peace, but the ripples that can result from a trauma like the flood, are huge. And Noach doesn’t cover himself in glory towards the end of the story. As you quoted Rashi saying, Iona, if he was in Avraham’s generation, he would have been a nobody. 

How was Avraham better than Noach? He was active rather than passive. Avraham’s tent is open on all sides to welcome guests, while Noach gets drunk alone in his tent. Avraham fights for the people of Sdom, even though they’re awful, while Noach leaves the awful people around him to the flood. 

On a long train journey this week, I eavesdropped as the two chareidi men in the next row talked about their families, work and health. Then one said the following line:

“at the end of the day, it’s all siata d’shmaya” - it’s all in God’s hands."

This is why we write בס״ד at the top of documents - an acronym for בְּסִיַּעְתָּא דִּשְׁמַיָּא. 

Fascinatingly, the other man disagreed with him. No, he said, it’s also hishdadlut (he actually said hishdadlus!), which translates to personal effort/striving. We can’t sit around waiting for God to make things happen for us. We need to get up and put in the work ourselves. 

Noach was siata d’shmaya. God says the world is to be flooded? OK. Avraham was hishdadlut - fighting for better. 

And in this moment of hope, of promise, of relief, we need the Avraham energy. We can all play a part in making this a moment of optimism rather than despair, peace rather than cynicism, action rather than inertia. 

Finally, I noticed that in each of your beautiful Hebrew names, Beth and Iona, the women you are named after really exemplified this. 

Beth - Batya Rachel. Batya defied her antisemitic father Pharoah by bringing up a Jewish baby under his nose! Rachel fights to be with the man she loves and fights for the children she badly wants.

Iona - Chana Esther. Chana invented Jewish prayer as we know it today. She also fights to have children. And Esther, one of the bravest characters in the Tanakh, saves her people by putting herself in incredibly dangerous situations. 

Your names exemplify hishdadlut. As do your own personalities. So my blessing to you both on your bat mitzvah is that your lives will be filled with hishdadlut - putting yourselves out there to actively better the world and yourselves. Because siata d’shmaya - God’s help - gives us amazing things like this moment of relief in our history. But that’s only the beginning of the story. The next chapter is written by us.