From the Sources
This week’s Parsha tells the famous story of Noach and the Ark. Hashem tells Noach to build the Ark. He does, for 120 years. He is told to take two of each animal, and seven pairs of each kosher animal, into the ark, to re-inhabit the world after the flood. Then the rains come. It rains for 40 days and 40 nights. The waters take a full year to recede. Noach and his family leave the ark and he plants a vineyard.
The parsha finishes in shvi’i with the story of Migdal Bavel, the Tower of Bavel. The generation of the dispersion (dor haflaga) tries to rebel against Hashem by building an enormous tower. Hashem punishes them by mixing up their languages and scattering them all over the world.
How to eat it
There are some very obvious food choices here. Any cake can be decorated to look like Noach’s Ark. Think chocolate bars “glued” on with icing to look like the gopher wood beams. Animal biscuits coming on two by two, with seven by seven for the kosher animals.
You can see in the photo our fabulous home-made Noah’s Ark cake. Note the three levels, (animals should only be on middle level, but they didn’t fit!) Fish in the water.
It’s just a simple chocolate cake cut in three and glued together with store bought chocolate spread. That represents the “tar” with which Noach covered the Ark from inside and out.The animals are a simple packet of animal biscuits. On the top is a lollipop to represent the window/light source at the top of the Ark. The sea is made of lemon jelly with some blue food colouring added to make it a blue-green sea colour. Inside there are gummy fish to find. Yum! It looks very “home made” and that’s because it is! All the kids helped. We had fun. It does not matter that it does not look perfect. What does matter is that it helps us have a focus that can lead to discussing the Torah.
Other ideas you could use for the basic story include: something to represent the rainbow, like a very colourful salad, a rainbow cake, or, more simply, “fairy bread sprinkles” on challah. Or you could do a whole lot of small square cakes on top of each other represent the tower.