Pop Goes the Flood

Who is not enthralled by the story of Noah and his floating menagerie, the few survivors of a global flood? This awesome spectacle has been reimagined in countless illustrations, while versions of a toy ark with colorful pairs of complementary animals can be found in most Jewish homes. However, the visual richness of this fable may act as a distraction from the meaning of the narrative. God’s purpose can get lost in the Doctor Dolittle-ing of the text.

Two interrelated questions beg our attention. Why was all animate life irredeemable, and why did God choose a flood as the mode of punishment? A more efficient lethal miracle could have easily reduced the three-and-a-half-chapter story to just a few verses. What is there to learn from introducing a catastrophic deluge? This was more than regular rain. The Hebrew word for flood, mabul, only ever appears in the biblical text when referencing this unique event. What is the Torah teaching here?

Valuable insights can come from unexpected places. Though the pop music of my youth contained much that was instantly forgettable, there were several performers whose inspiring music and evocative lyrics stood out. I recall four distinct songs that engage with the mabul meaningfully. Listening to them again sheds light on various strands of traditional Jewish interpretation.

“Rock Steady,” by the British artist Sting, is from his second solo album, Nothing Like the Sun (1987). The song is a funky retelling of Noah’s ark in which a hip young couple reply to a newspaper advertisement: “Volunteers wanted for a very special trip, to commune with Mother Nature on a big wooden ship.” The song stresses their onboard duties:

We had no time to worry, though, there was just too much to do
Between the signified monkey and the kangaroo
We had to wash all the animals, we had to feed them, too
We were merely human slaves in a big floating zoo

This chimes with a midrash that recounts the imagined conversation between Abraham and Noah’s son Shem, who was also on the ark. Abraham asks him by what merit they survived. Shem replies:

Because of the tzedakah (righteousness) we did for the beasts, animals, and birds. We did not sleep all night because if we weren’t caring for one of them, then we were caring for another! (Shocher Tov 37)

Sting co-founded a fund that seeks to protect the rainforests and the indigenous peoples who inhabit them. In his song, the mabul represents the failure of today’s society to respond to man-made climate change and its disastrous consequences. Our planet is a delicate “ark of life” that is in growing danger of destruction. It needs rebalancing if it is to become “rock steady” once again.

The Global Challenges Foundation researches potential catastrophes that could occur due to large-scale human activity and publishes an important annual report on its findings. In addition to the climate crisis, pandemics and weapons of mass destruction always feature high up on the list. These global risks are the theme of another pop song, “Here Comes the Flood” by the Northern Irish composer Neil Hannon, for his band The Divine Comedy. It appears on their 1998 album Fin de Siecle:

Here comes the flood
Rivers of blood, baby
Here comes the quake
Evacuate while you still can
Here comes the fire
Our funeral pyre, baby
Here comes the flood
Here comes the blood bath

The song builds and builds, cynically feeding our growing fears. What will it be that destroys us first, it asks. Will it be gun violence, earthquakes, global recession, El Niño, chemical war, interracial conflict, or dangerous diseases? Hannon seems to view the mabul as a primal destructive force that encapsulates our media-fueled nightmares of mass devastation. He concludes: “If you believe all that you read, you’ll know the end is nigh, we’re gonna die!”

After the flood, God promised never to destroy the earth in this way again (Genesis 9:15). This implies all other mega disasters are still possible. And so, we are meant to be unnerved as we read this story each year in synagogue. The multiple threats might not be world-ending, but they are very real.

The third song focuses on the breakdown of society that prompted the mabul in the first place. “Lost in the Flood,” by American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, is a track on his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973). This is a modern tale that resonates with the opening of the sedra of Noach: “And the earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with outrage.” (Genesis 6:12)

In each of three verses, Springsteen portrays a different scene and character. First, a soldier who returns from war a changed man: “Like a hungry runaway, he walks through town all alone.” He succumbs to the surrounding culture of drugs, violence, promiscuity, and faithlessness: “Everybody’s wrecked on Main Street, from drinking unholy blood.”

Second, a New Jersey boy who races cars on Sundays. This showoff speed junky ends up in a fatal head-on collision. And for what? “There’s nothin’ left but some blood where the body fell … just junk all across the horizon, a real highwayman’s farewell.”

Third, a puffed-up street gang kid from the Bronx who carries a gun (“stands with his hand on his own hardware”). During a shootout he “gets blown right off his feet.”

These harrowing episodes represent the disenfranchising of American society in the 1970s. None of the characters can escape their circumstances. All succumb to an inevitable fate. With the rising tide of hopelessness, each gets “lost in the flood.” Still today, for many who are socially disadvantaged, this mabul is inescapable.

The final song, my favorite, explores an even deeper layer to the mabul. Also titled, “Here Comes the Flood,” it is the last track of the first self-titled solo album by British artist Peter Gabriel, in 1977. The imagery is unsettling:

When the night shows
The signals grow on radios
All the strange things
They come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
Still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There’s no point in direction
We cannot even choose a side ...

Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood …

Here the mabul is presented as a powerful psychodrama. The material world is overwhelmed: “goodbye to flesh and blood.” Physical separateness dissipates; there is “no place to hide … we cannot even choose a side.” This change leads to a new interconnected collective experience:

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You’re a thousand minds, within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there’s only you and me

In a published interview, Gabriel said: “When I wrote this song … I had had an apocalyptic dream in which the psychic barriers which normally prevent us from seeing into each other’s thoughts had been completely eroded producing a mental flood. Those that had been used to having their innermost thoughts exposed would handle this torrent, and those inclined to concealment would drown in it.”

To me, this is akin to the experience of standing before God. A human judge can only deliberate based on externals, but before the “Judge of all the Earth” (Genesis 18:25) our inner selves are exposed. More than their bodies, the mabul drowned the corrupted consciousness of humanity. As the waves rose, their psyches were opened, and their evil thoughts uncovered. Indeed, the Torah seems to hint at this in the prelude to the flood:

And the Lord saw that the evil of humanity was great on the earth and that every scheme that humanity’s heart devised (kol yetzer machshavot libo) was only perpetually evil. (Genesis 6:5)

Ultimately, the mabul was a mental flood that revealed humanity’s failings, which led to their destruction. This casts the post-COVID-19 mental health crisis in a new light. Psychological wellness and stability benefit from increased awareness and responsibility. The habit of performing mitzvot, holy rituals, gives much-needed structure and meaning to our lives.

Each of these four songs addresses another dimension of the flood narrative. They all resonate with traditional Jewish interpretation, and even enhance it. For Sting, the mabul reminds us of our environmental responsibilities as custodians of earth. For Hannon, it is humanity’s primal self-destructiveness that is terrifying and leads us to catastrophize. Springsteen described late 20th-century society drowning in a flood of moral failures, and Gabriel realised that the mabul threatens the essence of our humanity: our brittle consciousness.

Noah and his buoyant zoo might appeal as a tall tale for small children, but the world-threatening mabul narrative is a standing challenge to responsible adults. For those willing to listen, it has lost none of its potency.