“They say that while the Torah doesn’t change each year, we — its readers — do, and so we experience it differently each time we read it. This was true for me as I read the story of the flood and Noah’s ark that will be chanted in synagogues around the world this Shabbat.

In the Genesis story, wicked violence pushes God over the edge to wipe out humanity. In my mind, that became the violence that Hamas inflicted upon Israelis in the towns near the Gaza border last week. Noah’s ark became a metaphor for the safe rooms that allowed a few of those targeted Israelis to escape the massacre. This season, we are reading the Torah thinking about life, death — and reckoning.

After the flood, God makes a promise: ‘Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth.’ (Genesis 8:21) The narrative assumes that humans will still act wickedly. But instead of God judging and punishing evil behavior, that responsibility will now fall on humans.

We get some specific instruction on the human responsibility to deal with violence in the very next chapter, where we learn that when someone takes another human life, a ‘reckoning’ is required: ‘Whosoever sheds human blood, by human [hands] shall that one’s blood be shed; for in the image of God was humankind made.’ While some rules in the Torah come with no rationale, this one is justified by a teaching: Humans are made in the image of God.

The context of the verse is important too. At the beginning of chapter 9, God instructs Noah and his sons to ‘be fertile and increase, and fill the earth.’ To sustain themselves, humans are given plants and (most) animals to eat, provided they do not eat the ‘life-blood’ in animal flesh. The Torah permits taking animal life to sustain human life, but killing a person is different because humans are made in the image of God. So when a human is killed, a reckoning must take place. If the taking of a single human life requires a reckoning, how much more so does the murder of 1,200?

There are tough questions now facing Israelis and the Jewish people. What constitutes a reckoning? How do we act morally, rooted in our values, as we carry that out? And can Jewish tradition guide us as we do?”

Read the full article on JTA, originally published on My Jewish Learning.