Let me start with a question that has bothered me for years. What do you do the morning after you've saved the world?
I'm talking about Noach. For a year he has been locked in a floating zoo. He has fed the lions, cleaned up after the elephants, and he barely slept, because every creature on that boat ate on a different schedule. Chazal say the lion bit him once when he was late with dinner. So he's had a year of that.
And then the door opens, the dove doesn't come back, and Noach steps out onto a planet that has been scrubbed clean. Every city, every person he ever knew, they've all gone. He is the father of all humanity, the only person left on earth – him and his family.
And what is the very first thing the Torah tells us he does?
וַיָּחֶל נֹחַ אִישׁ הָאֲדָמָה וַיִּטַּע כָּרֶם – "Noach, the man of the soil, began, and he planted a vineyard." A vineyard. Not an olive tree. Not a fig tree. Grapes. Or more accurately: Wine.
Rashi picks up on that word וַיָּחֶל. It doesn't just mean "he began." It comes from the word chullin, which means "profane." Noach made himself ordinary. At the start of the parsha the Torah had called him ish tzaddik, a righteous man. Now he's a plain old ish ha'adamah, a man of the earth.
And you know how this ends: וַיֵּשְׁתְּ מִן הַיַּיִן וַיִּשְׁכָּר וַיִּתְגַּל בְּתוֹךְ אָהֳלֹה. He drank the wine, he got drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent.
The Midrash Tanchuma has a wonderful, slightly wicked account of what happened when Noach planted that vineyard. The Satan showed up and offered to be his business partner. Noach agreed. So the Satan brought a lamb, a lion, a pig and a monkey, slaughtered them, and let their blood soak into the roots of the vines.
And that, says the Midrash, is why wine does what it does. Before a man drinks, he's a lamb, gentle and sweet. Drink a little, and he's a lion, he thinks he can take on the world. Drink too much, and he's a pig, rolling in his own filth. And when he's properly drunk, he's a monkey, dancing around, babbling, making a fool of himself in front of everyone.
I want to be fair to Noach getting drunk. Some commentaries suggest that he simply didn't know what wine could do. Others say he was trying to drown out the trauma he'd experienced. He had heard the screaming of dying people outside the ark as the waters rose. He had warned them for 120 years, and they laughed at him, and then they drowned. And he heard them drowning. If anyone in history had a reason to reach for a bottle, it was Noach.
But there's a deeper lesson here. As it turns out, the flood was not Noach's greatest test. There is a strange clarity to a crisis like an impending flood. You build the boat, you feed the animals, you get through the day. The real test comes afterward, when the water recedes, when life is quiet, when nobody is watching, when you are no longer saving the world, and you have to decide who you are going to be now.
Shakespeare understood what happens to a great man when everything that held him up is taken away. There's a moment in King Lear when the old king, who once ruled all of Britain, finds himself out on the heath in a storm, stripped of his crown, his power and his dignity. He looks at a half-naked beggar and says: "Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." And then he starts tearing off his own clothes.
Unaccommodated. Noach has just walked out of the most famous accommodation in history. For a whole year the ark told him who he was: feed the lions, patch the leaks, keep everyone alive. Now the ark is empty, the job is done, and the greatest man of his generation is useless – a poor, bare, forked animal lying exposed in his tent. That anticlimax may have been more devastating than the screams of the dying, or a year in a floating zoo.
And now the real story begins. Because the Torah isn't actually all that interested in why Noach got drunk. The Torah is more interested in what his children did about it.
וַיַּרְא חָם אֲבִי כְנַעַן אֵת עֶרְוַת אָבִיו וַיַּגֵּד לִשְׁנֵי אֶחָיו בַּחוּץ – Cham saw his father's nakedness, and he told his two brothers outside. The word at the end of that pasuk, bachutz, outside – is superfluous. What difference does it make if it was inside or outside?
The answer is that Cham went out to find his brothers to tell them. He took what happened in the privacy of a tent and carried it into the street. And he didn't tell it with tears in his eyes. Rashi brings an opinion in the Gemara that he did something far worse inside that tent, but even on the simplest reading, Cham's crime was this: he looked at his father at his lowest moment, and his first instinct was to broadcast it.
I want to share this crazy story with you. You may have heard it, or seen it on social media. In July 2025, at a Coldplay concert outside Boston, the stadium camera did one of those 'kiss cam' things, panning over the crowd and putting couples up on the giant screen. It landed on a man and a woman with their arms around each other. And the moment they saw themselves on the jumbotron, they panicked. She covered her face, he ducked out of the shot. And Chris Martin, on stage, made a joke: "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy."
Within hours they'd been identified. He was the CEO of a tech company. She was the head of HR – at the same company. And they were married – but not to each other. The clip got over 90 million views on TikTok alone in a matter of days. He resigned. She resigned. And last December she gave her first interview, to the New York Times, and described what came next. Up to 600 phone calls a day. Paparazzi parked outside her house. Death threats.
I'm not judge and jury, but there is an important point here, notwithstanding the fact that infidelity is wrong. She said it: "I made a bad decision… and it's not nothing. I took accountability and I gave up my career for that." But then she said something else, and it cuts to the heart of what happened afterward. She said: "I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don't have to be threatened to be killed for them."
My friends, the modern world has become Cham. Every one of us is walking around with a jumbotron in our pocket. Somebody falls, somebody stumbles, somebody gets caught at a bad moment doing something wrong, and before they've even had time to stand up or do anything, 90 million people have gathered bachutz, outside the tent, to watch and laugh and share.
And we tell ourselves it's justice. Or maybe we just say it's justified. Or it's not serious, and we are just having fun. And of course we tell ourselves that free speech is important. And so it's totally ok. So you should know: It's not ok. That's the message of Cham. It's not ok.
Meanwhile, what did the other two brothers do? וַיִּקַּח שֵׁם וָיֶפֶת אֶת הַשִּׂמְלָה – Shem and Yefes took the garment, laid it across both their shoulders, walked in backwards, and covered their father. And then the Torah adds a phrase that sounds unnecessary: וּפְנֵיהֶם אֲחֹרַנִּית וְעֶרְוַת אֲבִיהֶם לֹא רָאוּ. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness.
Why do we need that? If they walked into the tent backwards, obviously they didn't look and didn't see. The Torah is telling us something about where they chose to point their eyes. They knew exactly what had happened. They didn't pretend their father was sober. They simply refused to make his worst moment the thing they looked at.
Oscar Wilde put a line in the mouth of Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan. "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Noach was in the gutter that day. That's not in dispute. The question the Torah asks is what his sons chose to look at. Cham looked at the gutter and ran to tell his brothers. Shem and Yefes turned their faces toward the stars, and backward into the tent, and covered their father's shame.
In a world that has a jumbotron in every pocket, we get to choose every single day which son we are going to be.