"There were ten generations from Adam to Noah, to let it be known how slow God is to anger—because all these generations increasingly angered Him until He brought upon them the waters of the Flood".
The obvious moral of the mishnah is implicit: if God is slow to anger, shouldn't we too make an effort not to fly off the handle? Isn't it only right that that we should temper our anger with careful thought as to why we are angry and whether a display of anger is indeed the appropriate response to whatever is troubling us?
There is however much more that can be said about this mishnah.
The world as a fish tank
The ten generations from Adam to Noah had ample time to assuage God’s anger and build the kind of World He envisaged. They did not do so and were almost entirely destroyed. This harsh judgement on the first ten generations of mankind does not mean that no decent, upright souls had ever walked the planet before the Flood. The Torah itself twice records that Enoch “walked with God,” and numerous midrashim praise the qualities of Adam, Seth and Methuselah. However, there is an irreducible number of righteous people below which God’s collective punishment cannot be prevented. This is demonstrated by the famous dialogue in which Abraham persuades God not to destroy the patently evil communities of Sodom and Gemorrah if 50, then 45, 40, 30, 20 or even 10 righteous people live here. Once he has negotiated God down to 10, Abraham breaks off the negotiation, presumably on the unspoken understanding that he has gone as far as he can go.
From the time of Adam until the generation of Noah, God waited patiently for some genuine sign of recognition, some glimmer of gratitude or respect, indeed any sort of response or interaction from His human creations. Not only was none forthcoming, but “the wickedness of man on Earth was great, and every desire in the thoughts of man was nothing but evil the whole time.”
Only Noah, whom the Torah describes as a tzaddik —a righteous man—found grace in God’s eyes. There is substantial debate as to quite how righteous Noah was, and the Torah’s account of his life after the Flood does not mark him out as a role model for subsequent generations. However, we learn that he had two particular qualities that marked him out for continuing the human race: (i) at a time of idolatry he believed in God, listened to Him and obeyed Him, and (ii) in an era of rampant sexual immorality he was a family man.
There is no way that we can understand or experience God’s perspective, but the following analogy might help. Imagine that you have purchased an expensive fish-tank with a selection of beautiful tropical fish. You furnish the fish-tank with all the accessories needed for their health and comfort, provide them with food and keep their environment clean and fresh. The fish however pay you no attention whatsoever. They have no gratitude and show no recognition of your love, your care and your efforts on their behalf. That wouldn’t be so bad by itself, but the fish become aggressive and fight, preferring to eat one another rather than avail themselves of the food you have provided.
There is no satisfaction to be gained by watching these fish swimming around in their tank. The time has come to jettison these fish and try again. But wait! There is one fish that swims expectantly to the surface when feeding time comes, one fish that refrains from attacking its fellows. You reject the idea of starting over with a new set of fish. Instead, you conceive a plan to breed them from this one fish and its mate in the hope that its less aggressive and more positive attributes may be passed on to its offspring.
The lack of any sort of positive response or recognition is almost inevitable with fish, but not with humans—sentient social beings who, having partaken of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, have a far wider scope for behaving in accordance with God’s will.
Free will, determinism and fear of Heaven
It may be that the function of this mishnah is to demonstrate the importance of free will since, without it, the repentance of sinners would be pointless. Starting with Adam, God could have created humans who were programmed to act in precisely the manner He chose for them. Their choices and their decisions could all have been determined in advance of their creation, as could their thoughts, their words and their social interactions. He could have even programmed into them the illusion that they were acting autonomously and of their own free will. The Torah’s Creation narrative however makes it plain that God did not follow this plan. If He had done, the World would have been a tidier, better-run and far more peaceful place, for sure, but the exercise of creating and populating such a World would have been about as meaningless as for an intelligent adult human being to play games with a set of toy soldiers.
For whatever reason, God created a World in which He made mankind in His image, which meant giving humans a measure of free will. This free will could be used for establishing some sort of relationship with God and for doing acts of kindness to others—just as God does good to them. The first ten generations sadly failed to establish any sort of relationship with God: they showed Him neither gratitude nor respect and had no love or fear of Him. They also failed to develop any sort of stable society in which they could act for the good of each other. In short, they were not exercising their freedom of choice in the way that God had hoped they would.
God gave humanity plenty of time to improve but, the more it did not do so, the angrier God became. Only Noah appeared to be acting along the lines that God had hoped would be the norm for humanity, so it was Noah who was saved—along with as much of his nuclear family as was necessary for God to begin human life on Earth for a second time. Everything else was simply washed away.
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