As I discussed in last week’s post, God doesn’t change, its man that changes. According to the Rambam, a catastrophic flood isn't a result of God suddenly deciding to do something new. The world getting wiped out can just be a natural event, the same way the dinosaurs got wiped out by a meteor. Nature does what nature does. God set the order of the world and it keeps running.
What the Torah is teaching is that a person who walks in the ways of God can see something coming and do something about it — whether through actual knowledge, ruach hakodesh, or nevuah. The people who died weren’t specially targeted. They lived like animals. They did whatever felt good instead of following justice and the way God set up the world. That’s what the Torah means by “והלכתם עמי בקרי” — if you live by happenstance, then happenstance hits you. “ויספתי עליכם מכה שבע כחטאתיכם.” You become a victim of whatever nature throws at you.
A person who is actually trying to live according to the middot built into creation is different. He’s constantly thinking about how the world works and what justice looks like, so he ends up either saving himself or the people around him from pure chance. That’s the point of the ship example the Rambam gives in the Moreh (3:17). The ship going down is chance — a natural event. But the fact that certain people got on that ship isn’t just chance. It’s tied to the choices they made. (Rambam’s own brother drowned at sea, so this isn’t an abstract example for him.)
Rambam puts it like this: in the world, individual providence only really applies to humans. Everything else happens by chance, the way Aristotle described. Providence is connected to the intellectual influence that reaches a person. The more of that someone has, the more protected they are. The less they have, the more they’re left to chance — “like the beasts.” This is the meaning according to the Rambam of "הכל בידי שמים חוץ מיראת שמים".
So Noah is the story of someone who wasn’t living by keri. Through prophecy, he saw what was coming and built the ark. Even the Ramban says the rainbow itself always existed as a natural thing — sunlight on moist air does that. It wasn’t a brand-new creation. Noah, through prophecy, turned an existing natural phenomenon into the symbol that this particular kind of destruction wouldn’t happen again. Or maybe the deeper point of the rainbow is that from now on people would start moving toward knowing God (Abraham and onward) by looking at nature and finding God in how the world actually works, and that would be what prevents another total wipeout.
There’s a caveat here, though, for anyone who thinks that walking in God’s ways means wealth, success, and personal physical happiness as the end result. That’s not necessarily true. Noah walked with God and still lost his entire society. He was traumatized enough that he got drunk and lost control. The Rambam’s whole framework makes this make sense. Providence isn’t a promise of comfort or material reward. It’s tied to the intellectual attachment and the drive to know God’s ways in the world. When someone follows that, personal needs start to matter less — or, on a higher level, there’s a kind of abandonment to God’s will as it plays out in creation. The real need becomes the survival and betterment of society and the world.
Just look at Noah: he preserved the physical continuation of mankind. Or Moshe, the greatest prophet who ever lived — he changed how the world thinks and practices for eternity, toward the eventual realization of the unity of God by all of mankind. That’s the higher end of walking in the ways of God. Not a comfortable life for yourself, but something that lasts beyond you.
God doesn’t change. Nature keeps going. What changes is whether a person is close enough to God that he’s not just another body in the path of whatever happens next — and whether he’s willing to put the world ahead of his own ease. That’s the whole story, and that’s what the rainbow is pointing to.
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