I hear a rising chorus of unease within the Jewish community. More than anxiety, it feels like warning sirens before a storm. The political winds have shifted, and we now find ourselves battered from both directions: a resurgent antisemitism on the right and a newly emboldened, ideologically re-framed version on the left. The old assumption that one side would offer refuge from the other has collapsed. There is no harbor. Only rough water ahead.

For those who choose not to make Aliyah, the question is unavoidable: how do you weather the gathering storm? Do you retreat into political silence, shrinking your identity until it is barely visible, a modern-day crypto-Jew? Do you shed it altogether, dissolving into the anonymity of secularism or the false universalism of ideological movements that demand you leave your particular-ism at the door?

As Dennis Prager has argued, “Without God, there is no moral truth; only moral opinions.” That insight goes to the heart of the moment. In a culture increasingly un-tethered from moral standards, the boundary between good and evil is not recognizable. And once that border disappears, Jews are inevitably recast through an alien moral framework, not one of their own making.

Yet even amidst a tempest, there is a channel forward to reach safe harbor. The story of Noah is not metaphor; it is instruction. To be a “Noah” today is not to outrun the flood, but to endure it with clarity and resolve. Noah does not debate the storm or deny its approach. He builds. He prepares. He draws a boundary between himself and the surrounding corruption and then lives within it without apology.

What does that look like in practice today?

It begins with anchoring in a moral code that does not bend with cultural fashion. In Jewish tradition, that foundation rests not only on the 613 commandments, but also on the universal ethical framework, of the Seven Noahide Laws, the baseline obligations, in Jewish thought, for a civilized humanity. They prohibit murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy, and cruelty, and they require justice while rejecting idolatry. These are not abstractions. They are the minimum conditions for moral order.

To be a “Noah” today is to treat those principles as nonnegotiable in an age that treats everything as negotiable. It means affirming the sanctity of human life when others reduce it to politics. It means rejecting moral relativism when it is convenient and refusing to launder violence or hatred through the language of grievance. It means building families, schools, and institutions that reflect responsibility, discipline, and reverence rather than fragmentation and nihilism.

It also means refusing disappearance. Noah does not survive by assimilation into the corruption of his age; he survives by standing apart from it. In modern terms, which is moral visibility: living openly and unapologetically as a Jew in public and private life, even when that visibility carries cost. The ark is not concealment. It is construction; it is the survival of humanity and its charges.

And it means thinking in generations. Noah builds not for himself alone, but for what comes after the flood. In a time of uncertainty and hostility, which becomes an obligation to educate the next generation with clarity, about identity, purpose, and continuity. Not only awareness of the storm, but confidence in what endures beyond it.

The rainbow is not a promise that storms will cease. It is a reminder that renewal is possible, that after the deluge, continuity can still be built by those who remain anchored.

The tempest may be unavoidable. But how one responds to it, whether by drifting, disappearing, or building, remains a choice. I say, choose to be a Noah!

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)