Shabbat shalom. I want talk about some of the questions about how righteous a person Noah really was. One of the questions that comes up is, did Noah do enough by building the ark and saving his family and the animals as God commanded? Should he have done more?

In one of the commentaries that I was reading, the eighteenth-century Chasidic master Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk said that there are two different kinds of tzadikim. One of them is “genuinely righteous” and the other is a phony tzadik. Both of them are like people who are suffering a cold winter and need to keep warm.  Rabbi Elimelech taught, “One will go out and collect wood for a fire.” And the other one “will wrap himself in his fur coat.” The one who starts the fire “invites others to warm themselves in the fire. He not only warms himself but others too”  while the other “tzadik” in the fur coat is only warming himself, and the others around him will freeze.