Hashem had other options. Fire had already proven itself at Sedom, and would again. To cleanse a world drowning in its own corruption He chose water, and the choice is the whole lesson.
Look at what water did on the third day of creation. Yikavu hamayim, let the waters be gathered to one place, and let the dry land appear. Until that moment water was everywhere. Its first act in the world was to pull back. Water made room. Nothing could stand on the earth until the water agreed to stop filling it, and in that withdrawal the land was born. The first creature to perform a tzimtzum was the sea.
Now look at the generation of the flood. The Torah does not call them idolaters. It says vatimalei ha’aretz chamas, the earth was filled with violence. Their corruption was not appetite, it was ownership. They took whatever they could reach because they recognized no limit on themselves, and so they filled every space there was. They were the opposite of water. Where the sea had contracted so that something else could exist, they expanded until nothing else could.
So the water came back. Not only as a punishment, but as a correction. The one element that knows how to withdraw returned to a world that had forgotten how.
Notice who survived. Chazal teach that the fish were not included in the decree (Sanhedrin 108a). Why should they be spared? Because a fish never leaves its place. It does not lift its head above the water to be seen. It has no name to make and nothing to prove. The animals of the land, and the people who ruled over them, drowned in the very thing the fish breathe. Humility is not a smaller life. It is a life lived in water.
This is the nerve the Mishnah presses on:
Me’od me’od hevei shefal ruach, shetikvat enosh rimah.
Be very, very humble in spirit, for the hope of a human being is the worm.
Pirkei Avot 4:4
Take the word tikvah, hope. It is built on the root kuf, vav, hey, the same root as yikavu, the gathering of the waters on the third day, and the same root as mikveh. Yirmiyahu calls Hashem Mikveh Yisrael, which means both the Hope of Israel and the Mikveh of Israel, and on that verse Rabbi Akiva taught: just as a mikveh purifies the impure, so does the Holy One purify Israel (Yoma 85b). In Hebrew, hope and immersion are the same word, because both ask you to let go of the ground you were standing on.
That is the work the mikveh does. Everything that distinguishes you comes off first, because nothing may come between you and the water. You go fully under, into a place where you cannot breathe, cannot speak, cannot be seen, cannot survive. For one moment you are nothing. Then you rise, and you are changed.
Ego is the faculty that makes us forget who we are and before Whom we stand. Water is the answer because water remembers how to contract.
A mikveh requires forty se’ah. The rain fell forty days
Anna Sarah (Vladi) Cevallos
