In the months before my beloved father died, he suffered several falls and a bout of sepsis. Increasingly frail, but stubbornly resistant to professional nursing, my siblings and I decided to put together a rota in which each of us would look after him for a week at a time.
Inevitably, this entailed responsibility for his intimate care. Many adult children are brilliant at this, taking on the tasks – as my brother and sister did – with matter-of-fact kindness and good humour.
I failed miserably. Not only was I prey to mere squeamishness, the story of Ham “uncovering his father’s nakedness” haunted me with its murky suggestion of taboos that I was anxious not to break.
Of course, rationally, I could set aside lurid rabbinic speculation that Ham did not merely see Noah’s nakedness, but that he castrated or even sodomised him (Sanhedrin 70a). Yet there was no doubting that Ham’s gaze had profoundly dishonoured his father. It demoted Noah from the standing of a man so blameless that he walked with God – a man whom God had chosen to do nothing less than redeem human futurity itself – to an object of curiosity and ridicule.
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