Noach: Why We Lose Greatness

Hi, this is David Olawski with the parsha in five where in five minutes we give you a little insight into the parsha and so for the fourth time we're looking at parshas Noach. I want you to appreciate when I was studying for the SATs in America, they teach you certain words that are like strange words that may or may not pop up in the vocabulary section. And one of them as I remember was called antediluvian. Antediluvian, ante is before. Yeah. And diluvian is the deluge, the flood. So when you want to speak about something being very old, you say it's antediluvian. It comes from before the flood. But we have a very particular use for the term antediluvian because Adam and Hava were created in a world that was perfect. There was no death, there was no decay. You didn't have to be afraid of wild animals. All the food grew on the trees. You didn't need clothes. Bread grew fully made on the on the trees. You could just reach over and get a bread. If it was a dogwood tree, you got pumpernickel. You know, if you had one of those trees with a hole in the middle, you could pick a bagel, you know. There were little donut bushes. And everything was growing. You didn't have to do anything. You didn't have to plant and plow and thresh and winnow and you know, all the all the malachas that go with the making bread. You didn't do anything. Everything was perfect. And after that, the world was destroyed. What does a destroyed world look like? People lived to a thousand. There were no diseases. It rained once in 40 years and that was enough to sustain everything. Uh a baby was born functional. Just like you see a little baby the comes out of its mother and can start walking. The Gemara says that the little baby got out of the womb and walked over to get the knife to cut the umbilical cord. Uh this was a destroyed world. And then, after that, when the the mabul came, slowly the life spans began getting shorter and shorter until they came down to, as it says in Tehillim, 70 years of you're strong, 80 years. That became the normal. And suddenly there were illness. And suddenly all kinds of other things changed that in the world that was destroyed from Gan Eden, it was still the antediluvian world was unbelievable. The mabul just just brought the world to a different level. Why is that? Because when people lived to 1,000 years, they had a lot more time to do bad things. So, instead of looking at life as an opportunity, you look at life as an opportunity to become worse and worse. And things were getting just terrible. Terrible. Cuz instead of using the gifts we were given for good, we used them for evil. And so, Hakadosh Baruch Hu lowered the potential of people. Because the only way to eliminate evil is to limit the power of good. Why? Because zeh lazeh The only way to eliminate depth is to remove height. If I'm all the way up here, then I can fall all the way down here. So, if I don't want to fall so far, I have to lower the level. And that's why when the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah, the men of the Great Assembly, wanted to remove the desire for avodah zarah, idol worship, as a result of that, we lost prophecy. We lost nevu'ah. Because if you want to reach the level for nevu'ah, you have to be able to fall down to the level of what is all right. And if you don't want to fall that far, then you have to lower the height. And so the world that Noah lived in beforehand was a completely different world than the world that I will be was born into. It says that one of the people who saw an old cottage and new world was Noah. Cuz there was no relationship between the world after the flood and the world anti-diluvian. Because if you want opportunity, you got to use it well. And if you don't the world takes it away. So when we had the base of because we did not use that and power well, could you took it away from us. And when we show that we can maintain the and the greatness of the base of us and of lion the way it should be is will be to get it back in a sham. Good Shabbos.