Q&A: The Sin of Animals in the Flood
The Sin of Animals in the Flood
Question
What sin did the birds, the cattle, the wild animals, and the creeping creatures commit that they were destroyed together with human beings?
Answer
There are all kinds of homiletic answers about this, like Nachmanides there, who says that the violence became ingrained in the souls of the animals because of human actions. That of course assumes that once violence is ingrained in an animal it should be destroyed, and that it bears some guilt for the fact that the people around it behaved improperly. In short, I wasn’t convinced. It may be that this was done for an educational purpose, so that people would understand how deep the plague of a culture of violence runs—so deep that in such a situation everything has to be destroyed from the ground up, including the animals (as with Amalek).
Discussion on Answer
I’m not convinced.
Everything is in unity (though of course not uniformity).
When man, who is the head of the pyramid of creation, sins, naturally the whole pyramid is affected.
When the Jew, who is the head of the pyramid of humanity, sins, here too the whole pyramid is affected.
That doesn’t sit right with me either. He could have brought a plague among human beings.
The same answer regarding the punishment of the serpent in the Garden of Eden is relevant here too. The acts of Creation are one unit.
The serpent tempted them. What does that have to do with this?
I don’t understand the insistence. That is exactly what I suggested: if the Holy One, blessed be He, had brought a plague on human beings, the total lesson would not have been achieved. The total punishment comes to teach the extent of the destruction caused by a culture of violence, which ruins the entire world and doesn’t merely bring punishment upon the sinners. The world is not worth maintaining when it is wholly violence. Using animals to teach human beings a lesson is like any other use of them.
That itself—using them—is bad.
The serpent tempted, and “all flesh had corrupted its way.”
That’s talking about man.
Not necessarily.
Because animals have the conscious awareness to corrupt their ways?
The aggadic conception of the Torah is that animals too have some kind of choice. That is why the ox is stoned, and why after the Flood it was decreed that even an animal that sheds human blood will have its blood required (chapter 9). That is why one who sheds the blood of an animal is like one who sheds a life (according to source H; see at length in Baruch Schwartz, The Holiness Code). Therefore, when human beings became corrupt in the early generations, nature as a whole was clouded, as in a kind of corrupt karma, and animals too murdered, raped, and stole; this is what the Sages explicitly wrote. One who does not accept this aggadic-panpsychist conception can easily understand the whole Flood story as a mere allegory describing the reason for natural disasters and for the covenant that there will never again be such a catastrophic picture. As stated, one cannot accept only the historical description and ask questions, because one also does not accept the Torah’s conception of reality regarding the nature of animals.
Correction: instead of “of the form,” it should read “of the Torah.”
Right, because the creeping creatures robbed one another.
The behavior of the animals in the Creation narrative is anthropomorphized, and it is not advisable to interpret it as a zoological-psychological fact and then wonder about it.
This can be compared to the plague of tzaraat on a garment or a house, where there too they tear down the house because of the deeds of the homeowner. True, a house obviously doesn’t suffer, but the educational purpose exists there too.