Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein

The Dynamics of Change

Here is a question that all of us must ask ourselves in our life. How does change happen?

To properly address this, we must approach it from two perspectives. If negative change is taking root in our lives, we need to know how to reverse it. Conversely, if we seek to generate positive change proactively, we must understand how to initiate and sustain it. We must uncover the underlying dynamics of transformation in our personal lives, our families, our communities, our society, and our world. Once we grasp this process, we hold the key not only to blessing, but also to averting catastrophe.

One of the most dramatic case studies in the Torah is the story of Noach. It is the account of civilization’s total collapse; a moment when G-d deemed an entire world irredeemable and resolved to begin anew. From the remnants of humanity, namely Noach, his family, and their wives, a new civilization would emerge.

The question is how humanity descended so far. The world began with Adam and Chava, beings of immense spiritual clarity, fully conscious of G-d’s presence. They erred, yes, but they were still profoundly great. How, then, did their descendants reach the point of such pervasive moral corruption that the world had to be destroyed?

Pirkei Avos (5:2) gives us a key: “There were ten generations from Adam to Noach, to show how great is G-d’s patience, for all those generations angered Him repeatedly, until He finally brought the Flood upon them.” This Mishnah reveals that change, even catastrophic change, does not occur overnight. It unfolds gradually, over time, generation by generation.

The Rambam (Hilchos Avodas Kochavim 1:1), describes how humanity’s faith in the one G-d deteriorated slowly and incrementally. Adam and Chava believed in the Creator, but by the days of Enosh, Adam’s grandson, people began to “honor” the sun, moon and stars as G-d’s servants. Later generations forgot the distinction and worshiped these forces directly. Eventually, they forgot G-d entirely, and idolatry reigned supreme. Thus, belief decayed step by step, from truth to confusion to corruption. And once moral clarity was lost, every ethical foundation collapsed: family life disintegrated, violence spread, and chaos reigned.

Ernest Hemingway once captured this dynamic in The Sun Also Rises: “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways,” he replied. “Gradually, then suddenly.” So it was with the generation of the Flood. The moral bankruptcy of humanity occurred gradually, then suddenly. Incremental compromises accumulated until society passed a point of no return.

This is the first great principle of change: it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Tiny shifts, often imperceptible, accumulate until they erupt into visible transformation.

But there is a second, deeper dimension. The Mishnah that precedes this one (Avos 5:1) teaches: “With ten utterances the world was created... to teach that those who sustain the world created with ten utterances are rewarded, while those who destroy it are held accountable.” The Abarbanel explains that the story of the ten generations from Adam to Noach exemplifies this principle. The wicked destroy the world not because of an external punishment, but because their very actions contain the seeds of destruction.

In Parshas Noach, the Torah says: “The earth became corrupt before G-d… and G-d said to Noach, ‘Behold, I am about to destroy (mashchitam) the earth.’” The same Hebrew root—shacheit—describes both corruption and destruction. The message is clear: the destruction was not imposed from without; it emerged from within. Their corruption was itself the destruction. When G-d “brought the Flood,” He merely allowed the natural consequences of their actions to reach full expression.

Rashi notes that mabul, the word for “flood,” comes from bilbel, confusion, mixture, disarray. The world was overturned because it had already overturned its moral order. As Yeats famously wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” That is precisely what happened: the moral and spiritual “centre”—connection to G-d—dissolved. And when the center collapses, chaos inevitably follows.

These Mishnayos together reveal a profound truth: the world itself is built upon moral and spiritual laws, just as it is built upon physical ones. The Rambam and Maharal both emphasize that the Torah is not merely a code imposed upon creation; rather, G-d looked into the Torah and created the world through it. The Torah is the world’s blueprint. Therefore, good deeds sustain reality, while sin corrodes it. Just as violating the laws of health destroys the body, and violating economic principles bankrupts a business, so too violating the laws of Torah erodes the moral structure of existence. Change, then, is cumulative. A person does not become morally or spiritually bankrupt through one act alone, nor do they achieve greatness in a single moment. It is the aggregation of countless small choices.

The same principle applies to every aspect of life. Health deteriorates not from one cigarette, but from many. Relationships do not collapse from one argument, but from repeated words of anger or neglect. Likewise, faith does not fade from a single doubt, but from the slow erosion of daily connection.

Yet the converse is also true. Every act of kindness, every prayer, every moment of Torah study, every gesture of generosity; each contributes to a cumulative ascent. Over time, these acts construct a moral and spiritual edifice of immense strength and beauty. The Torah’s message is therefore deeply empowering. If decline happens gradually, so too does redemption. Every small act matters. Every step taken in the right direction begins to reverse the trend.

R' Chananya ben Akashya teaches: “G-d desired to bring merit to Israel; therefore, He gave them an abundance of Torah and mitzvos” (Makkos 23b). Each mitzvah, each commandment, is a small action with transformative power. Together, they create light in the world. Through our choices—our words, our deeds, our habits—we participate daily in the creation or destruction of our personal world. We can build families rooted in love and trust, communities grounded in Torah and kindness, societies infused with holiness and integrity.

Change begins small. It begins now. Gradually and then suddenly, we can bring about renewal, redemption and blessing.

Rabbi Shlomo Farhi

Finding Favor

Parshat Noach truly begins with last week’s Parshat Bereishit. The final verse of Bereishit reads, “And Noach found favor in the eyes of Hashem.” Already there, the Torah hints to something exceptional. Noach’s very name carries a sense of destiny. His father, Lemech, called him Noach, saying, “This one will comfort us from the toil and pain of working the cursed earth.” From the moment of his birth, Noach was marked as a man with a mission.

But here is where it becomes remarkable. The Torah doesn’t simply say Noach found favor with people. It says he found favor in the eyes of Hashem Himself. That is not a small compliment. You can fool a human being, you can impress others for a moment, but Hashem sees the inner truth. If Hashem therefore declares that Noach found favor, that means something profound. But considering this, it is all the more puzzling when we reach the opening of our Parsha and encounter one of the most famous disputes in Chazal.

The verse says: “These are the generations of Noach; Noach was a righteous man, perfect in his generations.” Rashi, citing the Gemara, brings two interpretations:

“In his generations” means even in a corrupt generation, Noach remained righteous. If he had lived in a better time, among greater people, he would have risen even higher. Alternatively, “In his generations” means relative to his generation he was righteous, but had he lived in the days of Avraham Avinu, he would have been insignificant.

Now we face a real question. If the Torah tells us that Noach found favor in the eyes of Hashem, how could he have been spiritually mediocre? You can’t say that Hashem was simply grading on a curve. This isn’t a classroom; this is divine assessment. If the Torah calls him tzaddik, there must be real righteousness there.

The answer, I believe, lies in a deep principle about how Hashem judges human beings.

When someone lives in a generation like that of Noach—when the world around them is steeped in corruption and moral collapse—and yet that person remains faithful to what is right, Hashem counts them as a tzaddik. Maybe, in another generation, surrounded by giants like Avraham, Sarah, and Moshe, their light would seem small. But Hashem doesn’t judge hypotheticals. He judges you in your world, under your conditions, in your battles.

So yes, perhaps Noach was only “righteous in his generation.” But in the eyes of Heaven, he was righteous. Period.

This is our story. We read of earlier generations, of people whose entire communities lived like angels. I have a book written about the Jews of Halab (Aleppo). It describes how, after Shacharit on Shabbat, the entire community would go home for a brief meal and then return to the synagogue to learn Torah until Minchah. Not the rabbis; the entire community. Men, merchants, laborers all immersed in Torah. It’s humbling to read that. Today, even full-time kollel students don’t maintain that schedule. So what are we to think? That we don’t measure up? No. The lesson of Noach is that Hashem loves you for far less, when that “less” is achieved through struggle. He sees your world, your generation, your pressures, and He cherishes your effort.

Of course, aim higher. But when someone tells me, “Rabbi, I’m not such a religious person,” I sometimes smile, because often, in their circle, they are the rabbi. Their family asks them the halachic questions, their friends turn to them for guidance, they keep Shabbat when few around them do, and they resist certain temptations when others don’t even recognize them as wrong. That person is Noach, a tzaddik in his generation.

A person raised in a home of Torah, surrounded by rabbis, yeshiva students, and observant peers, doesn’t face the same daily tests. He doesn’t need to choose between Shabbat and social belonging. He never hears, “Come on, just once; what’s the big deal?” His righteousness may be pure, but it’s not forged in fire. But when someone lives surrounded by influences that pull them away—friends who don’t keep kosher, colleagues who work on Shabbat—and they still hold their ground, even imperfectly, that is greatness. Even when they walk into the non-kosher restaurant and only drink a Diet Coke, Hashem says, “That’s My Noach. That’s My tzaddik.” For someone raised in a beit midrash, that same act might be a step backward. But for someone fighting upstream, it is holiness itself.

There are times in life when everything seems to be against us, whether it be business pressures, family strain or emotional exhaustion. In those moments, we may not perform at our best. We might miss a class, skip a tefillah, or feel spiritually numb. But Hashem judges us in the moment we are in. He doesn’t compare you to your best day. He looks at your struggle today and asks: “Are you still walking toward Me?”

There’s a stunning Pasuk in Shir HaShirim (7:2): “How beautiful are your footsteps in shoes, noble daughter.” The Sages (Chagigah 3a) explain this refers to Am Yisrael ascending to the Beit Hamikdash for the festivals. But why praise their shoes? What’s beautiful about shoes?

Because before they arrived at the Temple, before they removed their shoes on holy ground, they had to walk there. They had to leave their homes unguarded, trusting Hashem’s promise that “no one will covet your land” while you come to serve Him. Those footsteps, still filled with worry, still human, still imperfect—that’s what Hashem calls beautiful. “How beautiful are your footsteps in shoes.” He loves us not only when we’ve arrived at holiness, but when we are walking toward it.

So perhaps Noach, in the eyes of some, was only righteous in his generation. But that was the generation he was given. And his courage to stand alone against an entire world—that is what Hashem loved.

This is why, every Motzei Shabbat in Havdalah, many have the custom to say three times, “And Noach found favor in the eyes of Hashem.” We say it three times because “three” represents permanence and commitment. It’s as if we declare: “Hashem, this week may bring challenges. I don’t know what will come my way. But I promise to try, to put one foot forward, to do my best, however imperfectly. And I trust that You will love me for it.”

And to that, Hashem answers, as He did to Noach: “You have found favor in My eyes.”

Rabbi Aharon Pessin

A Crooked Mind

There was once a very old man among the Chassidim, and it was whispered that he had actually seen the holy Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, the Noam Elimelech, in his youth. Naturally, whenever Chassidim would gather around him, they would ask with great excitement, “Is it true? Did you really see the Rebbe of Lizhensk? Tell us, what was it like?”

The old man nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I saw him with my own eyes.” “Then tell us,” they pressed, “what happened?” The man began his tale.

“I was a simple businessman. I had a wagon and horses, and one morning, when I went out to begin my workday, the horses were gone, stolen in the night. I was frantic. People advised me, ‘Go to the Tzaddik, to Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk. He’ll help you.’ So I went. I told him my story. The Tzaddik listened quietly, took out a piece of paper and a pen, and began to draw. He drew a map—roads, rivers, landmarks—and then handed it to me. ‘Follow this path,’ he said, ‘and at the end, you will find your horses.’

“What did I have to lose? I took the paper, followed the map step by step, and to my utter astonishment, when I arrived at the exact spot he had marked, there were my horses! Just as he said! A miracle; an open wonder before my eyes.”

The listeners leaned in. “So what happened after that? You must have become a devoted Chassid of the Rebbe! You must have never left his side again!” But the old man shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I never went back.”

They were stunned. “You saw an open miracle, a mofes! You experienced the hand of Heaven through a Tzaddik—and you never went back? How could that be?”

The old man paused and smiled faintly. “I thought about it,” he said, “and I realized… why should I connect myself to a man who keeps company with all the thieves in town?”

The Chassidim were horrified by his logic, and they later repeated this story to the great Ba’alei Mussar.

They said, “This is a perfect example of sevara akuma, crooked reasoning.” But then they asked an even further question. “If such crooked logic can lead a man to suspect a saint, why did Hashem create the capacity for a sevara akuma at all?”

The answer they gave is beautiful. A crooked mind was not created to suspect a Tzaddik; it was created to judge others favorably.

Sometimes, to truly see the good in another person, to find a way to understand them charitably, you have to bend your logic a little. You have to stretch the imagination, twist the reasoning, even contort the mind, just to find a path that leads to compassion.

So yes, a crooked mind exists, but it was meant to make our hearts straight.

Rabbi Label Lam

The Permanent Record

I remember, as a child, sitting in school beneath the shadow of something both mysterious and terrifying: the Permanent Record Card. It was enough to keep me sitting up straight, number-two pencil sharpened, heart pounding. Every misstep, every late homework, every whispered comment in class, surely it was all being written down somewhere, forever.

Eventually, of course, we laughed it off. The Permanent Record turned out to be more myth than menace, filed away with the Tooth Fairy and the monsters under the bed. Life moved on.

And yet, years later, I’ve come to realize that maybe the idea wasn’t so childish after all. There is a permanent record, just not the kind we imagined. Every word we speak, every thought we nurture, every act we perform, it all leaves an imprint. On others, on the world, on ourselves.

In the Torah’s language, nothing is truly forgotten; every moment is part of an eternal story. Shabbos reminds us of that. It is the weekly pause that reconnects us to the timeless, the enduring, the permanent.

So yes, there is a permanent record. But unlike the one we feared in childhood, this one is written not in ink, but in impact. And its lesson is simple and sobering: Think responsibly. Act meaningfully. Shabbos is forever.