We can learn some of life’s most valuable lessons from mistakes that others make. Take Noah. The Torah calls him “righteous in his generation.” He built an ark, saved his family, and rescued the animal world. Yet the Jewish story begins not with Noah but with Abraham. Why?
The difference lies in how each carried his pain. Noah sought escape; Abraham sought renewal. For a generation still reeling from war, that contrast offers a quiet invitation: not only to survive, but to live again.
Noah walked off the ark into a world erased. His response was to plant a vineyard, drink the wine, and collapse. His family found him naked and humiliated. Noah, the man who carried humanity through the storm, ended his life diminished and ashamed.
Abraham’s story is different. His life is a cascade of challenges: leaving home for an unknown land, surviving famine, watching his wife taken by Pharaoh, enduring the test of binding his son, and mourning Sarah’s death. Yet after each test, he begins again. He buys land, digs wells, plants trees, marries Ketura, and fathers more children. Abraham lives as if the only way forward is, well, forward.
This contrast speaks to what I call the “Seven Facets of Healing: Family, Friends, Fun, Fitness, Function, Finances, and Faith.” In my new book, I explain that these are the building blocks of resilience.
On “Family,” Noah falters. His drinking shatters his relationship with his sons. Abraham, by contrast, keeps his family at the center of his story – negotiating over Isaac’s marriage, raising new children even in old age. Even Ishmael, his estranged son, is reconciled and eventually comes home to bury his father. After two years of war, many Israeli families are living with absence – the empty seat at the table, the unanswered call. Healing begins when we choose connection over silence, when we forgive, reach out, and rebuild the bonds that hold us.
On “Friends,” Noah walks alone. The text never mentions companions who support him. Abraham fills his life with people – allies, guests, and even rivals. He makes room in his tent for strangers and turns them into friends. For us, too, the lesson is clear. In these years, we’ve seen how friendship sustains a nation – neighbors caring for displaced families, volunteers showing up with meals and supplies, soldiers forming lifelong brotherhoods. Real friendship is not a luxury; it is the fabric that keeps us whole.
On “Faith,” Noah looks backward. He tries to replant what was lost, trying to reconstruct a vanished world. Psychologists often tell us to “process the past.” Eastern faiths tell us to “live in the present.” Yet neither approach really works for trauma.
In my trauma, following the brutal murder of my wife, Lucy, and daughters, Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, in a terror attack, I learned that what matters most is faith in the future – the belief that something new can still be built.
That’s what I learned from Abraham.
He leaves home, steps into the unknown, and trusts in a better tomorrow. Today, our challenge as Israelis is not only to defend what we have, but to imagine what comes next – a country strengthened by compassion, creativity, and unity. Healing means having the courage to believe in a future that does not yet exist, and to start building it together.
Abraham goes even further and embodies the other facets that Noah ignores.
“Function”: Abraham’s life has purpose. He opens his home, serves meals, and brings people closer to God.
“Fitness”: At over 130 years old he climbs Mount Moriah, strong in body and spirit.
“Finances”: Abraham is a successful cattle farmer, using his wealth to care for his household and negotiate with kings.
“Fun”: Abraham’s hospitality is full of joy – feasting, celebrating, and laughing with his guests.
Noah numbed his pain while Abraham transformed his.
That is the difference between surviving and living.
We can learn these lessons from more recent Jewish history. After the Holocaust, Jews could have chosen Noah’s path – drowning their grief in wine, retreating into despair, and cursing the world that cursed them.
Instead, most Holocaust survivors chose Abraham’s path. They built families and businesses, revived the Hebrew language, tilled the soil, and planted vineyards. They were not trying to forget the past but to build a better future. Out of history’s darkest trauma came one of its most astonishing renewals: the birth of the State of Israel.
That is what separates Abraham from Noah: The willingness to step forward. Noah clung to what was lost, but Abraham accepted that the future must be different from the past. That is why the Jewish story begins not with Noah, but with Abraham.
As I write in my new book, The Seven Facets of Healing: “Trauma narrows your world, but resilience expands it. By leaning on Family, Friends, Fun, Fitness, Function, Finances, and Faith, we can build not the world that was lost, but the world that is waiting to be created.”
Ours is a generation that has seen both heartbreak and heroism – soldiers who stood for life itself, families who opened their homes to strangers, communities that refused to give in to despair. We have learned that survival alone is not enough; the true test is whether we can take the pain we have lived through and use it to build something more compassionate, more united, and more enduring than before.
Sometimes the secret to survival isn’t the ark that you build, but what you do when the flood is over.
The writer, a rabbi, has written a new book The Seven Facets of Healing (available on Amazon and Bookpod.co.il). It sets out a framework for resilience that often runs against conventional wisdom. He speaks worldwide on the process of healing.