Ararat and Sinai

And God remembered Noah, and all the beasts and livestock that were with him in the ark; and God made a wind blow on the earth, and the waters began to subside.               Genesis 8:1

“And God remembered Noah:” What did He remember? The arrival of Israel at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. For, at the end of the month of Iyyar (the month prior to Sivan) the forty days of rain and the one hundred-fifty days during which the “waters surged on the earth” [Genesis 7:24] concluded and “the waters receded.” [ibid. 8:3]  The waters threatened to shatter the ark, and the Holy One, blessed be He, remembered the arrival of His sons at Sinai to accept the Torah, as the verse states: “In the third month (Sivan) from the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt, on this day (our Sages [Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 86b] taught that this was the first of the month) they came to the wilderness of Sinai.” [Exodus 19:1] On this day God performed miracles for Noah and the threat to the ark was ended.                              Midrash Aggada

            Quite clearly, the Midrash does not intend to convey the simple meaning (pshat) of the verse, which states explicitly that God remembered Noah. Rather, it would seem that the intention is that the Divine salvation of Noah and all that was in the ark with him constitutes, as it were, a re-creation of the world, and just as the first creation was for the sake of Torah, as our Sages taught [Midrash Yelamdenu, Parashat Kedoshim, quoted by Rashi in his commentary of the opening verse of the Torah], so too, necessarily the re-creation of the world was for the sake of Torah. If not for the fact that the descendants of Abraham stood at the foot of Mount Sinai to accept Torah, it is likely that Noah and his family would not have been saved from the flood, and would have been unable to save the planet.

            It was specifically when the earth dried out and Noah and his family left the ark, that the seven mitzvot which are incumbent upon all mankind were presented. We may suggest that presenting the Seven Mitzvot of the Sons of Noah, the portion of Torah and mitzvot which applies to all nations, is also intended to stress that the entire cosmos is dependent upon fulfilling the Torah.