Rachel Goldberg is getting remarried.
Last year, I wrote about her husband, Rabbi Avi Goldberg of blessed memory, a reservist and beloved educator who fell in Gaza. This year, she’s engaged.
Rachel isn’t superhuman, and she isn’t unscarred. Yet her choice to love and risk again captures the quiet grace we’ve seen across Israel since October 7: a people who mourn and rebuild, who keep choosing life.
It’s the faith Noah, the hero of this week’s portion, could not find after the flood. At our Shabbat table, I bless my son to be like Ephraim and Menashe, my daughter to be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.
But no Jewish parent says, “Be like Noah.” There’s something uneasy about him; he’s not a villain, but not quite a hero either.
We American Jews need to understand why. Because right now we’re at risk of repeating his mistake.
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Think of Noah’s life in three acts.
Before the flood, he’s righteous.
During the flood, he saves humanity and every animal species.
After the flood, he plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and shames himself. The man who had saved the world can no longer live in it.
Consider what he’d endured: humanity decayed and destroyed, 120 years building an ark, 40 days and nights of endless labor in the flood. Then, after a year waiting for the waters to recede, Noah finally steps out. God offers him the covenant of the rainbow: I will never again send a flood.
Here's my theory about what went wrong.
Noah misunderstood. He heard the rainbow as permission to rest. The world is safe now. The struggle is over. He could finally exhale.
But life after the flood still demanded work—hard, messy work. Building a civilization. Managing family tensions. Dealing with his own trauma and his sons' dysfunction. The world still needed tending.
Noah wasn't ready for that kind of struggle. He'd prepared his whole life for catastrophe—the flood, the survival, the rescue. But he had no framework for the slower, subtler work of living after disaster.
That's the trap: when we believe we've reached safety, we lose the capacity to face what comes next. The expectation of ease weakens the very muscles that help us endure.
So he planted a vineyard, got drunk, and ended his story naked and humiliated.
Now compare him to his descendant Abraham, who understood God's promise differently. As Jon D. Levenson writes in Inheriting Abraham:
Abraham’s “covenant… does not guarantee freedom from adversity or a life without suffering…. To the contrary, the adversity and suffering are now included [within the covenantal promise]."
Noah heard, "Rest now." Abraham heard, "Walk with Me."
Noah's failure wasn't that he gave up. It's that he thought he could.
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This message matters urgently. For decades, we American Jews have made the same mistake.
We’ve lived under our own rainbow. We never called it that, but we acted as if safety were permanent, secured through liberalism, tolerance, and holocaust memory.
The postwar order. The civil-rights coalition. Social acceptance. We thought we’d finally earned Jewish safety. So we stopped teaching our children how to fight, because we thought the fight against antisemitism was over.
Then the waters rose again.
Campus protests. The silence from friends. Jew hatred feeding on social media algorithms. The realization that our alliances were conditional, our safety negotiable. We were shocked.
We had been living as if the rainbow were real.
And here’s part of what we have to understand for the work ahead: the comfort we achieved didn’t just dull our vigilance; it erased it. Comfort doesn’t only relax you. It rewires you. It makes action feel extreme. It makes courage feel unnecessary, until it’s too late.
Many Israelis, by contrast, never thought the fight was over. They built a state knowing they would have to live by the sword. Their children learn to fight not as a contingency but as a given.
Rachel Goldberg understands what Noah forgot: that covenants aren’t promises of ease, they’re invitations to purpose. Resilience isn’t the absence of pain; it’s the refusal to let pain become permission for paralysis.
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The rainbow wasn’t a gift. It was a test Noah failed.
The question for American Jews is whether we’ll fail it too.
Will we keep planting vineyards in a diaspora we mistake for Zion? Or will we learn what Abraham knew, and what so many Israelis live—that Jewish life has never been about safety, but about purpose, agency, and the daily choice to build, to fight, and to resist the seduction of rest?
The world that believed in our rainbow is gone, and the challenges ahead are real. Here in New York, we may soon have a new mayor who, when first asked, could not bring himself to say that Hamas should disarm — a man many of us believe poses a genuine threat to Jewish well-being. Facing that, and all it represents, means rebuilding our muscles for struggle.
There is no happily ever after. There never was.
To be a Jew is to struggle, not bitterly, but faithfully. We live, rejoice, and insist on Jewish joy, knowing the covenant never promised ease, only purpose. Our task is not to wait for safety but to choose life.
Not because it’s easy.
Because the covenant demands it.
Again and again.
Dr. Mijal Bitton is a spiritual leader, sociologist, Rabbi Sacks Scholar, and one of our Partners in Wisdom. You can read more from Dr. Bitton on her Substack, Committed.