Shabbat shalom.
When we hear the word brit, covenant, most of us think of Abraham. We think of Sinai, of the tablets, of a people standing at the foot of a mountain. We think of a covenant between God and us.
But that is not where the Torah begins. Long before Abraham, long before Sinai, the very first covenant in the Torah is made after the waters of the flood recede. Rabbi David Seidenberg loves to remind us, its partners are not only Noah and his family. It is a covenant with every living creature, and with the Earth itself.
This morning I want to ask a simple question:
Who signed the first covenant? And what would it mean for us to take their signatures seriously?
Listen to how carefully the Torah lists the partners. In Genesis 9:9–10, God says:
“I am establishing My covenant with you, and with your offspring after you, and with every living being that is with you: the birds, the cattle, and every wild creature of the earth."
The Torah could have said "with you" and moved on. Instead it names the birds. It names the cattle. It names the wild animals, the ones that never served anyone.
And then it repeats itself, again and again, kol nefesh chayah, kol basar, every living soul, all flesh.
The repetition is the point. No one is to be left off the list.
Then comes the most astonishing verse of all, Genesis 9:13: Et kashti natati be'anan, v'hayta l'ot brit beini u'vein ha'aretz.
"I have set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the Earth."
Not between Me and humanity. Between Me and ha'aretz, the land, the Earth itself.
Rabbi Seidenberg reads this verse as a kind of signature. In the way we sign a contract with our name, God signs this covenant with a rainbow, and the Earth is a party to the agreement.
Just before this, in Genesis 8:22, God makes a promise about the rhythms of the world: seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
The covenant is not only about survival. It is about the steady breathing of seasons that makes life possible.
Rabbi David Seidenberg, a teacher in the neo-Hasidic and Jewish Renewal world and the founder of www.neohasid.org, has spent decades asking what Torah looks like when we stop reading it as a story about humans alone.
In his book Kabbalah and Ecology: God's Image in the More-Than-Human World, he makes a bold claim: the divine image, tzelem Elohim, is not the private property of human beings. It echoes through the whole of Creation.
He uses a phrase I love: The more-than-human world.
Not "nature," as if it were the scenery behind our human drama, a backdrop like a movie scene.
Not "the environment," as if it simply surrounds us.
The more-than-human world is a community of beings, each with its own relationship to the Holy One.
Read through that lens, the Brit after the flood is not a footnote. It is the foundation of this world.
Before God ever chose a people, God bound the Divine self to All of life.
Every later covenant with Abraham as the first Hebrew or at Sinai with the entire people Israel is built on top of this one.
We are latecomers to a covenant the sparrows and the whales were already part of.
Rabbi Seidenberg also teaches that the Torah's covenant already aims at blessing all humanity, and that Jewish mysticism widened it further. The Kabbalists understood our task as bringing blessing to all creatures and to the whole cosmos,
Tikkun olam, in this reading, is not only repairing human society , it’s an act for all of creation.
It is repairing our relationship with every living thing.
And there is one more teaching in the rainbow.
A rainbow is not one color. It is white light broken open into its full diversity. Seidenberg reminds us that the rainbow is a sign of the diversity of colors and of peoples.
A celebration of difference held together in one arc.
Our tradition gives us a blessing for when we see a rainbow:
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam, zocher habrit, ne'eman bivrito, v'kayam b'ma'amaro.
Blessed are You, who remembers the covenant, who is faithful to the covenant, and who keeps Your word.
Notice what the blessing says. God remembers.
In Genesis 9:16, God says, "When the bow is in the cloud, I will see it and remember." The rainbow is first of all a reminder for God.
But Rabbi Seidenberg asks us to hear the blessing as a reminder for ourselves too.
When we say zocher habrit, we are also remembering that the first covenant was not made for humanity alone. It was made with the animals and with the land.
To say this blessing honestly is to remember who else is standing under the rainbow with us.
Here the teaching turns uncomfortable. God promised never again to destroy the world by flood. God kept that promise.
But the covenant never said that we could not unravel the world.
Rabbi Seidenberg asks whether we have become determined to undo the rainbow covenant with our own hands.
The steady seasons promised in Genesis 8:22, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, are exactly what a changing climate puts at risk.
God has remembered.
Will we remember?
We do not need to imagine rising waters. In Miami, this is the season of the king tides. We had seen in the news how the sea came up through the storm drains onto streets that were dry a generation ago.
We live between the ocean and the Everglades, one of the great wild places of this continent. Living in Miami, in a sense, is like living on the deck of Noah’s ark.
So what does it mean for a community like ours to be a partner in the first covenant?
I want to offer three simple practices, drawn from Rabbi Seidenberg's teaching.
Let the rainbow teach us about one another as well.
A rainbow holds many colors without erasing any of them. A Jewish community that embraces the full diversity of its people paths to the holy is itself a small sign of that covenant.
Rabbi Seidenberg has written a prayer for the rainbow covenant, rooted in the first Tu BiShvat seder.
In its spirit, let us close:
“Compassionate One, remember Your covenant with all that lives, the covenant You made beside the waters of Noah.
Spread a shelter of mercy and peace over every species, and over us.
Let Your light rest on all our relations, in every place they call home. May the bow appear in the cloud, bright in all its colors, and may the Tree of Life be restored to its strength, so that we and our children may dwell long upon this Earth.
Baruch atah, zocher habrit. Blessed are You, who remembers the covenant.
Shabbat shalom.
Center for Jewish Life at Beth David
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