Our Internal Floods
It wasn’t just Noah who went through a flood. I believe we all experience floods – internally – when we are overwhelmed and everything feels like too much – the world and all its perpetual demands and crises – and when we are flooded by the intensity of our feelings, as if the floodgates has opened and the intensity of raw emotion comes pouring through our veins. We become dysregulated, thrown off kilter, totally engulfed. Maybe sensing into that energy, bringing to mind the last time you felt overwhelmed like that, as if a thousand voices were talking to you at once, all demanding things from you. Or maybe it’s more like one insistent voice overpowering your sense of safety and flooding you with its unrelenting anxiety or deep pain.
Make For Yourself An Ark
God offers Noah – and us – a way through such floods. Aseh likha tevah, God says. Make for yourself an ark (Genesis 6:14). Make for yourself a safe haven, a refuge, a sanctuary, a protected space where you can ride out the storm. We have just been through a holiday season where we have been engaged in the work of constructing just such a sanctuary for ourselves. That’s what the sukkah represents, this divine cloud of presence that accompanies us through the desert (its own kind of flood, on the opposite extreme). The sukkah is known as tzila demehemenuta, “the shade of faith,” the sense of security we get from knowing that we live under God’s protective wings. And there is another similar image lingering in our minds this time of year: Yonah in the belly of the whale, also a protective haven from the sea waters that surround and threaten to drown him and us, holding us in a safe place until we can reach dry land.
So we have all these overlapping images this time of year, Yonah’s whale, the sukkah, Noah’s ark, and also that refrain we kept saying throughout the season – ahat sha’alti, the one thing that I most desire, dear God, is shivti beveit Hashem, to dwell in Your house always (Psalm 27:4). This is the house we are aiming for with all these images, the house of God that is our true internal home, a place of sanctuary and refuge in the storm.
Constructing Your Own Safe Place
What is your safe place? What does it look and feel like for you? God says, Make for yourself an ark. Lekha. For you. Only you can make it for yourself, only you know what you need it to be. So I’m going to give you some images and ideas for such a sanctuary to get you started, and as I do, I invite you to feel into what resonates and to notice what kind of safe place feels right to you and to begin to form your own image.
It might be like Noah’s ark, a boat floating in the water, sealed in so that you don’t get wet, with a tzohar, a magical light infusing the space, maybe like sitting by a warm fire in a cozy house as you hear the rain pelting against the windows.
Or it might be more open like a sukkah, with a sense of the divine presence hovering around you and calming you, sukkat shalom, a sukkah of deep peace, like a cloud or an aura of protection that walks with you wherever you go. There is a kabbalistic tradition that the two and a half walls required of a sukkah are like a divine embrace, wrapping you up with one arm. What would it feel like for God’s embrace to be your sanctuary?
Or it might be more womblike, like the inside of a whale’s belly, soft and cushiony and nurturing, like a baby wrapped in a blanket.
There is also a hasidic tradition that plays with the idea that the word for ark, tevah, can also mean “word,” the physical written Hebrew word. So another option is to imagine yourself climbing into the physical space inside of a Hebrew word or a single Hebrew letter, climbing into the opening of that letter like a cave and feeling how the letter has a mystical power to hold you in safety as the flood rages.
Imagining It With All Your Senses
That’s a lot. Taking your time to feel into what this safe place looks and feels like for you in this moment and to really see it clearly and sense yourself in it. What colors and textures are around you? What is holding you and how does that feel in your body, or against your skin? Is the space warm or cold? Tight fitting and cozy or open and airy? Light or dark? What does it sound like? Can you hear the rain and the wind or is it totally silent? What does it smell like?
Resting in It
Snuggling yourself into this safe space and resting there. Noah’s name means rest, as in the word menuchah (see also the origin of his name in Genesis 5:29 and Rashi there). Slowing down, taking a deep breath and letting your nervous system rest, sensing the pervasive calm and safety of this space, nothing to worry about, you can put down your armor and your hypervigilance and your striving for a moment and rest in God’s sanctuary. However you imagine this space, noticing how the divine is infused in it, divine peace and abundant divine light and nourishment and care, the sense of unconditional holding. You are safe and loved here for no reason. Lahazot beno’am Hashem (Psalm 27:4), gazing at the pleasantness of God, feeling a sense of well being and contentment, just sitting and basking in that nourishment, letting yourself soak it all up, all those places in you that so desperately need it.
A Place of Remembering God Remembering Us
This sanctuary is not an escape from reality. It is its own reality, perhaps an even truer reality than the flood outside, and one that we often forget about. Vayizkor Elokim et Noah. God remembered Noah in this ark (Genesis 8:1). This sanctuary is a place of remembering, of God’s remembering us, yes, but moreso, perhaps, of our remembering God, of our remembering that God remembers us, that God notices and cares, of our bringing God back to mind, of our remembering that we can still, always, even in the midst of a flood, come back to God inside us. Whatever happens to us in this life, internally or externally, no matter how bad it gets, we always have that option, to return to this safe divine home inside us.
And the return is a return to home. This safe haven is our home. Our true home is this calm place where we are connected to God. We move out of home a lot, yes, but that is still our birthright home, where we belong. Finding that sense of home in your body, in the sanctuary inside you where you and God dwell together. Ashrei yoshvei veteikha. Happy are those who dwell in this divine home.
The Antidote to the Flood
This is the antidote to that feeling of being flooded and overwhelmed we touched at the beginning. The antidote is to continually return home to this calm place with God inside us, to the floating ark that knows how to ride out the flood in safety. Maybe bringing to mind again a recent time of feeling overwhelmed or flooded. Hearing the thousand demanding voices clamoring or the single sharp painful or terrified voice flooding you. From here we will practice moving into our safe place, but I want to be clear that we are not trying to bypass or get rid of these intense feelings. On the contrary, we are going home to God in order to get the resources we need to tend to those feelings. We can’t tend to them from a place of overwhelm, when we are so flooded by them we have lost any sense of ourselves as existing outside of the flood, outside of the pain or the anxiety or the fear. In taking the time to return home, we are resourcing ourselves so that we have something to offer them.
Co-Regulating With God
So taking the time, and it is partly about time, about pausing – Noah as rest – pausing what you are doing in that moment of overwhelm, and moving off into a safe place to get nourished and resourced, to return to your center, to your home. This might sometimes involve physically going somewhere or it might be a simple mental shift in the midst of the storm. Bringing to mind that place that you imagined so vividly before and returning to it, returning to the sense of safety and calm, climbing back into the boat or the Hebrew letter or the blanket or the divine embrace, letting yourself feel held and protected, letting everything slow down, and centering, co-regulating with God, letting the overwhelmed parts of you co-regulate with you and with God in this space, feeling both their overwhelm – too much, too much – and then ah, taking a breath to return home to that safe restful place, both at once, both the calm and the overwhelm, inhabiting both energies until the overwhelmed parts – like small tantruming children who are patiently held in tight loving arms – until they gradually return to breathing normally with you and with God, the whole system calming down now in this safe haven. Even if there is still a flood outdoors, inside you, the skies have cleared.
This is the ark we can build for ourselves. In a way it is already here, planted in us long ago, but we need to build the road back to it, the muscle of return, the neural pathways that remember where it is and can take us there in a moment’s notice.
You Are Worth Saving
Why don’t we do this more often? Why don’t we take the time to come back home to a safe place when we are overwhelmed? Because we forget what really matters. Most of all, I think, we forget that WE matter. We think that replying to every last email is what matters and we ignore the oncoming headache, the darkening clouds overhead. We think all those million demands of the world matter more than us and our mental health. But God says to Noah – aseh likha tevah. Make for yourself a sanctuary. For you. Take care of yourself. This is not optional advice; it is a command. God commands each of us – make for yourself a sanctuary and go into it regularly. You matter. Save yourself.
And don’t think that saving yourself is such a small thing. Saving yourself from the flood is tantamount to saving the whole world. That’s how it was for Noah and that’s how it is for each one of us. It is as if we are each the last person on earth. We matter that much. So that in the moments of your wildest flooding, to save yourself, to return to your breath, to your internal home, to a sense of safety and regulation, that act saves not just you, but the world. This was true for Moshe, too. He, too, was saved by a tevah, that same word, a little ark in the water where he could have drowned. We could say – why bother? He’s just one person, why save him, why construct an ark for yourself, why do I matter when there is a whole world of suffering out there? But here is the thing – saving Moshe, saving Noah, actually did save the world. And so it is for you each time you are flooded. Each time you are flooded, you have the opportunity to say – I matter in this. I am worth saving. I am worth saving.
Bringing Regulation to a Dysregulated World
It’s not selfish. When we build an ark to shelter from the flood, others join us. Maybe some of them are giraffes and mice, but still, others join us. If we stand outside in the pouring rain, we can’t save anyone at all. But if we build an ark for ourselves, maybe a few others can hop along, or maybe they can see it and learn how to build their own internal sanctuary. There are subtle and unseen but incredibly powerful ripple effects of our calm and safety, of our learning to return to and reside in our own internal sanctuary. We bring regulation to a dysregulated universe.
I invite you to conclude by returning again to that felt sense of safety in your body, to the image of the safe place that you constructed for yourself, to your tevah, your ark, anchoring that image and that physical sensation of divine peace and well being in your body and knowing you can come back to it whenever you need, whenever the next flood arrives.
