A Hundred and Twenty Years of Cedars
For a hundred and twenty years Noach planted and cut cedars in front of a mocking world, hoping that one question would lead someone back to Hashem.
The Midrash relates that Hashem did not bring the Flood at once. He gave the generation a hundred and twenty years to return, and He told Noach to build the teivah slowly, in front of everyone. Hashem could have saved Noach in countless other ways. The building itself was meant to be a call to teshuvah.
So Noach planted cedar trees. People passed by and asked him what the trees were for. "Hashem is going to bring a flood upon the world," he answered, "and He has told me to build an ark, so that my family and I may be saved." They laughed at him and went on their way.
Noach tended the trees until they grew tall, and the people asked again. He gave the same answer. Then he cut the trees down and sawed them into planks, and again they asked, and again he warned them. The Gemara records how they answered him: Old man, if it is a flood of fire, we have something to protect us from fire; if the water rises from the ground, we will cover the earth with plates of iron; and if it falls from the sky, we have something that will soak it up. Noach told them that Hashem could bring the water up from between their very feet.
Year after year he spoke to them with words that burned like torches, and year after year they mocked him. Not one of them listened. Yet the Midrash calls Noach Hashem's one herald in that generation, the man who never stopped calling.
Source: Midrash Tanchuma, Noach 5; Midrash Bereishis Rabbah 30:7; Gemara, Sanhedrin 108a–108b (with Rashi on Bereishis 6:14). English: Midrash Tanhuma-Yelammedenu, trans. Samuel A. Berman; The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah (2022); The William Davidson Talmud (Koren–Steinsaltz).
Noach kept answering the same question for a hundred and twenty years, without anger and without giving up. Think of one person you have stopped speaking to about something that matters, because they never seem to listen. This week, find a calm moment and say one kind, honest sentence to them again, without pressing. You are not responsible for their answer. You are only asked, like Noach, to leave the door open in case one day they decide to walk through it.