A while ago, I heard a story on a podcast: An Israeli psychologist volunteering in war-torn Ukraine had spent time helping a young girl who had lost her family. Before they parted, the psychologist asked her, “What should I tell other children who have lost hope?”
“Tell them to remember you.”
What did she mean, the psychologist asked?
“Tell them to remember that people like you exist,” the young girl replied. “Good people who cross the world to help strangers like me.”
I thought about those words when reading Parshat Noach. The story of the Flood begins with God grieving over humanity. The world is filled with chamas—violence—and the human experiment appears to have failed.
But then: “Noah found favor in the eyes of God.” Noah’s existence does not erase the evil around him, but it prevents that evil from becoming the whole story of humanity. Noah represents the fragment of human goodness in a world overwhelmed by corruption.
What is surprising is what happens after the flood. We might expect God to begin again with a different kind of human being, one naturally disposed toward goodness. But instead, He describes human nature with depressing candor: “the inclination of the human heart is evil from his youth.”
Humanity has not fundamentally changed. Freedom remains, and with it the possibility of evil. What has changed, however, is God’s response to that freedom.
It is here that the Torah introduces a new idea: brit—covenant. God enters into a relationship with humanity, choosing to depend on human beings to help repair the world, with all the risk that it entails.
The image God chooses to represent that covenant is the rainbow. The rainbow reminds God, and us, too, that even in the midst of the storm, light can still break through. It is Noah. It is the Jewish people. It is every small act of human goodness that breaks through the darkness of human evil.
The Hebrew word for rainbow, keshet, also means a bow, a weapon of war that it even resembles. Yet here the bow is transformed into a sign of covenant, a reminder that violence need not be the only story humanity tells. We remain capable of goodness. We can always choose to act differently from those around us who act badly.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks saw in the rainbow something he called the “dignity of difference.” Its beauty lies not in its colors dissolving into one another, but in the distinct boundaries that define them.
So too, the Jewish people are not called to be like everyone else, nor to ask everyone else to become like us. We are called to retain the distinctiveness of our own color while dignifying the colors of others. We might say that the Jewish people are called to be a rainbow in the moral landscape of humanity.
Rabbi Sacks tells a story about Stephen Carter, whose black family was the first to move into a previously white neighborhood. As neighbors passed their new home without acknowledging them, the young Carter understood the message: they were not welcome. Then a woman named Sarah Kestenbaum saw them. She smiled, welcomed them, and brought drinks and cookies.
Carter would remember that small act of kindness for the rest of his life. Sarah could not remove racism from the world. But to that little boy, she became a rainbow—a small piece of evidence that the world could be something else. By welcoming a family her neighbors had ignored, she showed what it means to dignify someone different from ourselves. She became the “you” of the Ukrainian girl’s story - the you that deserves to be remembered for helping the stranger.
Perhaps this is what it means to be a people bound by a covenant: to live in such a way that our existence makes it harder for another person to despair. This is not naive optimism but hope grounded in covenant. God’s covenant with Noah is born of his recognition of human frailty and His choice, despite it all, to believe in human goodness: to choose covenant over destruction, relationship over despair, possibility over resignation.
The covenant with Noah reminds us that God never gave up on the world, and neither must we. In a world consumed by anger, pain, and its own certainties, we must become the interruption. The person who crosses the street. The person who brings the cookies. The person whose actions make someone reconsider the conclusion that humanity is beyond hope.
Perhaps the greatest testimony we can offer the world is simply to live so that someone else can say, when asked about hope: “Tell them to remember you.”
Dr. Tanya White writes, teaches and lectures on Tanach and Jewish Philosophy in Israel and abroad. She is a senior lecturer at the Matan Women's Institute for Torah Studies and LSJS and a lecturer in Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
