For Bend, Oregon During Parashat Noach
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I woke to rain this morning. During the week of Parashat Noach, rain asks us to listen. But the flood demanding our attention is one we have made.
At Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, three children, ages five, eight, and eleven, and a teacher were murdered. Children who should have come home. A teacher who should have returned to a life. Families whose worlds have been shattered.
How can we read the story of the flood and imagine it is only a story? Torah introduces Noah as righteous “in his generation.” What does righteousness require in ours? Noah sheltered his family while the world drowned. Can we call ourselves righteous if we protect our own children while accepting that someone else’s classroom might become a killing field?
Our ark must provide safety for every child and every teacher. Unlike the biblical flood, this devastation is sustained by human choices: easy access to deadly weapons, political cowardice, and a culture that confuses reverence for guns with freedom. We cannot surrender to its recurrence.
We must demand laws that protect life - and leaders willing to enact them.
After the flood, God places a rainbow in the sky and promises never again to destroy the world this way. As Rabbi Tali Adler teaches, this means there will be no reboot. This is the world entrusted to us. These are the children we are blessed to love. There is no replacement for any one of them.
Later in the portion, humanity builds the Tower of Babel. But they build a tower in a valley. I wonder whether we, too, keep constructing shallow assurances where the waters will still rise.
Prayers offered without responsibility cannot provide the shelter our children deserve. Prayer must move our hands. Grief must move our feet. Love must shape our laws.
May the memories of those murdered in Bend be blessings.
May their families know tenderness and companionship. May the wounded find healing.
And may we stop asking American children to practice surviving what American adults refuse to prevent.
The rainbow is a covenant. Our answer must be the world we build beneath it, together, beginning now.