https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6lIard9owSY
the sons of Noah That went fourth of the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth and Ham is the father of Canaan These are the three sons of Noah and of them was the whole earth overspread and Noah began to be a Husbandsman and he planted a vineyard and he drank of the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent and Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without and Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and Covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward and they saw not their father’s nakedness and Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him and he said Cursed to be Canaan a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren and He said blessed shall be the Lord God of Shem and Canaan shall be his servant and God shall enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem and Canaan shall be his servant and Noah lived after the flood 350 years and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died and The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. Okay, so I Remember thinking about this story It’s got to be 30 years ago And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me sometimes When you read complicated material sometimes a piece of it will stand out. It’s for some reason It’s like it glitters. I suppose that might be one way of thinking about it. It’s It it you’re in sync with it and you can understand what it means I’ve really experienced that reading the Dao Te Ching which is a document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point because some of the verses I don’t understand But others stand right out and I can understand them And I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant and I think it means you know we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve and The idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability the physical your physical boundaries in time and space and your your your your physiological your fundamental physiological Insufficiencies as they meet might be judged by others So there’s biological insufficiency that sort of built into you because you’re a fragile mortal vulnerable half insane creature And that’s that’s just an existential truth and then of course even Merely as a human being even with all those faults there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be Judged harshly by the group well might be will definitely be judged harshly by the group and so to become aware of your nakedness Is to become self-conscious and and to and to know your limits and to know your vulnerability and that’s what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked and so the question is What does it mean to see your father naked and it seems to me and especially in an inappropriate manner like this it? It’s it’s it’s as if ham He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth when when time out and absolute give rise to the first gods There they’re the father of the eventual deity of Redemption Marduk they’re very careless and noisy and they kill AP su their father and Attempt to inhabit his corpse and that makes time out enraged and so she Bursts forth from the darkness to to do them in it’s it’s like a precursor to the flood story or an analog to the flood story And I see the same thing happening here with ham is that he’s he’s insufficiently respectful of his father and And the question is exactly what does the father represent and you could say well there’s there’s There’s the father that you have and that’s a human being that’s that’s a man like other men a man among men But then there’s the father as such and that’s the spirit of the father and in so far as you have a father You have both at the same time you have the personal father That’s a man among other men just like anyone others father but in so far as that man is your father that means that he’s something different than just another person and what he is is the Incarnation of the spirit of the father and To see that to take it to what to disrespect that carelessly maybe even like Noah makes a mistake, right? He Produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say well You know if he sprawled out there for everyone to see it’s hardly hams fault if he stumbles across him, but The the book is laying out a danger and the danger is that well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you’re disrespectful Then you transgress against the spirit of the father and if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose Spirit of the father and lose respect for the spirit of the father then that is likely to transform you into a slave That’s a very interesting idea, and I think it’s particularly interesting Maybe not particularly interesting, but it’s it’s particularly germane I think to our current cultural situation because I think that We’re pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father so to speak because of the intense criticism that’s Directed towards our culture and the patriarchal culture so to speak we’re constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and let’s say nakedness and There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff It’s not to burn everything to the ground right it’s to say well We’re going to carefully look at this we’re going to carefully differentiate We’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad But the point of the criticism isn’t to identify everything is bad It’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it and To be careless at that is is deadly because you’re inhabited by the spirit of the father right insofar as you’re a cultural construction which of course is something that the that the postmodern neo-marxists are absolutely Emphatic about you’re a cultural construction insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the father and to be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are Certainly certainly not all of what you are but a good portion of what you are insofar as you’re a socialized cultural entity and if you pull out the If you pull the foundation out from underneath that what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own You know it’s just not possible. You’re a cultural creation and So ham makes this desperate Error and is careless about Exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father something like that he does it without sufficient respect and the judgment is that Not only will he be a slave, but so all of his descendants and he’s contrasted with the other two sons who I Suppose are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt something like that and so when they see him in a compromising position They handle it with respect and And don’t capitalize on it and and maybe that makes them strong That’s what it seems to me And so I think that’s what that story means You