What the Flood Did Not Drown
On the Nefilim, the Arizal, and the Mythology of Bashert
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It is late when the shadchan’s phone rings, and she already knows what the call is going to be, because she has taken this call before — the mother on the other end, trying to sound calm and not quite managing it, telling her that her daughter has come home from the third date and said he was nice but she does not think he is for her. The mother does not say what was missing, because the daughter did not say either. The daughter said only that something was missing, and when pressed said she did not feel it, and when pressed further stopped speaking about it at all and asked if they could talk about something else. The shadchan listens and says the right things and hangs up and sits for a minute longer than she meant to, because she has taken this call, in some form, several hundred times, and it ends the same way every time. The young man has done nothing wrong. The young woman cannot say what is wrong. And the call ends, and the shidduch ends, and another decent match dissolves into a sentence no one in the conversation can finish.
There are two separate questions a frum reader ought to be willing to sit with, in two separate registers, before this conversation can be understood — and they are questions that the seforim have already asked, long before the shidduch crisis was named that. One question is about the standard she is measuring against: where it comes from, whether it belongs to a world that actually exists, whether the Torah gives us any reason to think the young woman in the back seat of her mother’s car was ever supposed to be using the measurement she is using. The other question is about the structural assumption underneath the standard — that somewhere out there is one exact person created for her before the beginning of time, and that her job is to recognize him. These are not the same question, and they come from different places in the tradition, and they are answered by different seforim. What they share is that both of them, followed carefully, land in roughly the same place.
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I. The Archetype and What the Flood Did Not Drown
The Torah gives the event that preceded the flood a brief, strange, and much-argued paragraph at the beginning of the sixth chapter of Bereishis. Vayiru bnei haElohim et bnot ha’adam ki tovot heinah — the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful, and they took for themselves wives from all whom they chose.[1] What bnei haElohim were, the Torah does not say in terms that would settle the matter. The tradition does not speak with one voice about it either, and the honest thing is not to collapse the disagreement but to let it stand.
Rashi reads the phrase in the sober register. Bnei haElohim — the sons of the princes and the sons of the judges.[2] On this reading, what the verse describes is the corruption of human authority in the generation before the flood: men whose standing in the order of things had grown so inflated that they could take whomever they chose and no one would stand in the way. There is nothing celestial in the story. The corruption is entirely human, and entirely familiar, and the flood is the response to it.
The older midrashic tradition preserves a different reading, and Ramban, in his commentary on the verse, records it alongside Rashi’s without dismissing it.[3] Here the bnei haElohim are not princes but descended beings — figures whose proper place was not on the earth, who looked down and decided that human flesh was worth the descent. Targum Yonatan on the next verse names them explicitly as Shamchazai and Uzziel, who fell from heaven; the tradition is preserved in the same form in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer and in the Yalkut.[4] This reading was not invented in the commentaries; it is already present in the earliest Aramaic paraphrase of the verse. It is not the only reading in the mesorah, and it is not obligatory to follow it against Rashi. But it is a reading with roots.
What the verse that follows tells us, on any reading, is that the offspring of that generation were called Nefilim — hanefilim hayu va’aretz bayamim hahem vegam acharei chen — the Nefilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward.[5] The Torah repeats itself in those last three words, vegam acharei chen, and they are the words that have unsettled the commentaries, because they acknowledge without explaining that something of that generation was not fully confined to that generation. The flood ended many things. Vegam acharei chen is the Torah telling us that not everything ended.
The Torah itself names the concrete textual bridge. At the end of the third chapter of Devarim, Moshe describes his encounter with Og melech haBashan, and the verse records almost as an aside that ki rak Og melech haBashan nish’ar miyeter haRefa’im — for only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of the Refa’im.[6] Of the giants known to that world, only one was left — one figure, already old by the time Avraham met him, surviving into the time of Moshe. The Gemara in Niddah asks how, and answers plainly: Og is the survivor of the flood. “And the survivor came and told Avram the Hebrew,” says the verse in Bereishis 14, and the Gemara identifies the survivor as Og — zeh Og shepalat midor hamabul — this is Og who escaped from the generation of the flood. In the same sugya the Gemara records that Sichon and Og were brothers, and that both were sons of Achiya ben Shemchazai.[7] Shemchazai is the same name the older midrashic tradition gave to one of the descended beings of Bereishis 6. Og, in other words, is the named pre-flood survivor, and his grandfather in the Gemara is the named figure of the older tradition of bnei haElohim.
This is as textual as it gets. The Torah names a remnant of the Refa’im; the Gemara names the remnant’s survival and his lineage; the tradition that connects his grandfather to the verse in Bereishis 6 is preserved in Targum Yonatan on the verse itself. One can read the whole thing at the level of named historical fact and stop there: Og lived through the flood, carried the lineage of something that had preceded it, and appeared again on the far side, in the time of Avraham and again in the time of Moshe. That the Torah troubles to mention him at all, and that the Gemara troubles to identify him with Avraham’s informant, suggests that the persistence of that pre-flood figure into the post-flood world is not incidental to the Torah’s account.
What can be said, then — carefully, and without stepping past what the sources actually say — is that something of that world did not end with the flood. At the level of sheer biographical fact, Og walked out of it; and the tradition identifies him with a lineage the older midrashic reading connected directly to the descended beings of Bereishis 6. Beyond Og himself, whatever one wants to call it — an image, a memory, an archetype, a motif planted in the inherited material of human imagination — outlived the water. The Torah does not explain how; it simply acknowledges, in vegam acharei chen, that this was so.
An archetype, once implanted, does not need to be consciously transmitted in order to persist. It becomes available — to poetry, to myth, to unexamined assumption, to the quiet imagery a community uses when it tries to describe what it is waiting for. The pre-flood archetype is of a being beyond human proportion: taller, stronger, more luminous, more complete, not subject to the ordinary decay of the human condition. Whether one arrives at that archetype through Rashi’s reading (the great men of that generation who could take whomever they wished) or through the older midrashic reading (the descended beings who came down because the daughters of men were tovot), the image left behind is the same in its shape. It is the image of one who is more.
The shidduch world did not produce that image. What the shidduch world has done — quietly, piously, with the best of intentions — is give the image Torah language. In the conversation among mothers and shadchanim and singles, in the vocabulary that has grown up around the process over the last several generations, the archetype is no longer called by its old names. It is called bashert. It is called the one. And once those words have entered the conversation, every actual human being who is going to sit across from that young woman at a table in a hotel lobby has, in some quiet sense, already been pre-disqualified, because the one, by the shape of the image, does not have an off day, does not come tired, does not say the wrong thing, does not require anything of her except that she recognize him on arrival.
Nothing in the Gemara, nothing in the Rishonim, nothing in the poskim requires that a young Jewish woman marry only a man whose presence produces that kind of recognition. What exactly is imported into the conversation when bashert is used in its popular sense is not a halachic standard but an image — one that the tradition itself records as having preceded the flood and, in some residual form, survived it. The image is available because it never fully left. Its presence in the grammar of contemporary shidduchim is not evidence of its Torah pedigree. It is evidence of what an archetype can do when it is not seen as an archetype.
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II. The Arizal and the Collapsed Match
The second question belongs to an entirely different sugya, and comes from an entirely different register in the mesorah. The first question was about the standard: where its shape comes from, whether the archetype it invokes belongs to this world at all. The second question is about the assumption underneath the standard — that the match, whatever its shape, is out there, already appointed, waiting to be recognized. The seforim that address this question are the kabbalistic writings on gilgul, and the central text is Sha’ar HaGilgulim, compiled by Rav Chaim Vital from the teachings of the Arizal.
Rav Mordechai Eliyahu zt”l — the Rishon LeTzion, posek hador — once told his granddaughter something about shidduchim that the frum world has not absorbed. He told her that there are no soulmates today. Not in the way the word is used in the drawing rooms and the seminaries. Not the original pairing: two halves of one soul, created together before the first descent, waiting for each other across the generations until the appointed moment.[8] The statement lands hard on a young person raised on the bashert mythology, and the temptation is to file it under the comfortable category of gedolim saying surprising things. The teaching it reflects, however, is not an isolated provocation. It is the straightforward implication of what the Arizal laid out four hundred years earlier in the hakdamot of Sha’ar HaGilgulim, and Rav Chaim Vital wrote it down.
The eighth hakdama of Sha’ar HaGilgulim describes the first pairing, zivug rishon, as the pairing that comes easily. A soul enters the world for the first time; its match is born with it; Heaven arranges the meeting without difficulty; the marriage comes without struggle. There is no accumulated history between the two of them, and nothing is in the way.[9] This is the configuration the bashert mythology is describing when it describes the one. The Arizal does not deny that this configuration existed. He affirms it — for the first incarnation.
The same hakdama then teaches that from the first gilgul onward, the match may not descend with the soul. The Arizal derives this from a verse in Mishpatim — im b’gapo yavo, b’gapo yeitzei — as read by the Zohar in the Sabba d’Mishpatim, which understands the words not as a law about servants but as a statement about souls: if he came by himself, he shall go out by himself. The soul that returns in gilgul may return alone. The Arizal names three conditions under which the original bat zug does not accompany the returning soul. She may have completed her own tikkun in a previous lifetime and have remained above, in Gan Eden, with no need to descend again while he still has his work to complete. Another soul may have preempted the match through tefillah — that is, someone else, praying with enough intensity and merit, may have moved Heaven to rearrange the pairing before it could be made. Or her soul-root may belong to a class of roots whose female counterparts cannot emerge into this world until the coming of Mashiach.[10] Three conditions, and the effect of any of them is the same: the soul descends without her.
The Arizal names the example that should have settled the question. Even Aharon HaKohen did not marry his original bat zug. The Arizal locates the reason in the root of Chur ben Miriam, whose female counterparts, he teaches, will not emerge in this world until the time of Mashiach.[11] Aharon was Kohen Gadol, brother of Moshe, the man whose essence was ohev shalom v’rodef shalom; Elisheva bat Aminadav was his wife, and she was great, and she was the mother of the priesthood, but she was not — in the Arizal’s framework — the half with which his soul had been created. If the Kohen Gadol did not receive his original match in this world, the question of who was made for whom is not a question that opens onto an answer available in this world.
The Arizal develops the framework further in the twenty-second hakdama, where he describes specific consequences of specific transgressions that do not merely separate a soul from its match but alter the structure of the soul itself on its return.[12] The Chesed L’Avraham of Rav Avraham Azulai discusses, in the same tradition, the possibility that a male soul may return in a female body.[13] These are not peripheral details. They mean that in the Arizal’s framework the mere restoration of a match is not always structurally available even in principle — the soul that was matched before the first descent is not, in every case, the soul that is now standing here, because what stands here has been reconfigured by what it went through in between.
What the eighth hakdama adds, and what closes the loop, is the teaching that when a soul marries in any lifetime — whether the woman is his original bat zug or not — the chuppah creates a bond that does not dissolve at death. When the soul returns through gilgul, the wife from the previous lifetime returns with him, carried forward by that bond, even when she has no independent need to descend.[14] The Arizal places no limit on how many times this may occur. A soul that has been through several gilgulim carries the pull of several prior marriages, layered under each other, shaping the way certain other souls feel familiar or unfamiliar to it in the current lifetime, without the conscious person having any access to why.
The original bat zug — assuming the conditions of the eighth hakdama would have permitted her to descend at all — has undergone her own accumulation from her side. The Arizal does not map her history in symmetrical detail, but the mechanism he names is not a mechanism only half the souls of the world are subject to. The clean unity that defined the two of them at their root has been overlaid, in the current incarnation of each of them, by centuries of separate consequence. The soul made for you before the first descent may still exist, somewhere in the ledger of creation; the person it would now be in this world is not necessarily the person it was then.
The same hakdamot also contain a teaching that the frum world has missed in the other direction, and it is worth naming because the mythology of bashert uses the term zivug sheini pejoratively, as though it meant a second-best match. The Arizal uses it in a much more specific sense: two souls, created as one before the first descent, meeting in their first lifetime as zivug rishon, and meeting again after gilgul in a later lifetime as zivug sheini. And in the twentieth hakdama, the Arizal writes — in a clause the mythology has not wanted to absorb — that in practice many second pairings are greater than first ones, as is seen with the eyes.[15] The refinement the souls have undergone between the first and second pairings is not loss. It is preparation. When two souls that were created together finally meet again, after lifetimes that have shaped each of them, the pairing can go deeper than the untested first one could have gone. The second pairing does not announce itself with fireworks, however, because the souls meeting each other again are souls that have each been through a great deal, and the meeting has to occur between the people they have become, not the souls they were at the beginning.
The Gemara in Chagigah preserves the story of Elisha ben Avuya, who entered the Pardes and emerged a heretic; his name was erased from the mouths of the Sages, who called him only Acher, the Other.[16] When he died, and his student Rabbi Meir urged him to teshuvah, Acher wept; what the Gemara does not tell us is what happened to his soul afterward. The Arizal’s framework illuminates it. Because Elisha was a great Torah scholar, the fires of Gehinnom could not purify him — Torah protects its learner from that form of rectification — and the tikkun had to come through gilgul, which may require many descents. The Zohar in the Sabba d’Mishpatim offers the structural description of what a soul returning through gilgul without its bat zug has become: b’sod achorayim — an aspect of the back, turned from face to back, carrying within its own configuration the aspect it was meant to find outside itself. The Zohar’s word for this condition is the same word the Sages used for Elisha: Acher.[17] The teaching in the Zohar is not, on its face, a teaching about Elisha alone; it is a teaching about what a gilgul soul without its match has become. The practice, the Zohar says, is that such a soul, in its current incarnation, takes a match that was made for another. And when the other soul finally merits its own match in a later gilgul, the rearrangement required is what the Gemara in Sotah describes when it says that zivugim are as hard before HaKadosh Baruch Hu as the splitting of the sea — v’kashin l’zavgan kikriyas yam suf.[18] Not because the mathematics is difficult, but because restoring one match requires displacing another.
Rav Chaim Vital, the man who recorded this entire framework, lived inside it. The Arizal told him — Vital records this himself, in the twentieth hakdama — that his wife Chana was not his bat zug. She was, according to the teaching, the gilgul of Kalba Savua, the father-in-law of Rabbi Akiva, and the Arizal described what that meant for their household in terms Vital set down plainly. Vital’s true bat zug, the Arizal told him, would come only after he completed the rectification of his Nefesh and received his Ruach — and when she came, she would arrive intertwined with the soul of Rabbi Akiva’s true wife.[19] The man whose life’s work was to record the seforim of the Arizal on how souls find each other across lifetimes was told by his own teacher that the woman he had married was not the woman he was made for, that the match he had been made for would arrive only under conditions he could not control, and that even then she would arrive carrying another soul’s history inside her. This is not a peripheral detail of his biography. It is written into the work.
The practical consequence of the framework, for the twenty-four-year-old woman whose shadchan took the call at the beginning of this piece, is that the feeling she is trusting as a criterion — the recognition, the click, the pull, or its absence — means something different in the Arizal’s framework than the bashert mythology has taught her to read it as. Where a soul encounters someone and feels a pull that seems like more than ordinary attraction, the recognition is often real; but in the framework it is not, in almost any case, the recognition of the half she was created with. It is, much more often, the recognition of someone her soul was once married to — a bond formed through gilgul, not through creation. Real history. Genuine pull. The chuppah of a previous lifetime still exerting itself. But not the original configuration. And the absence of that pull, where she feels none, means less than the mythology has taught her to think it means — because the absence of gilgul-pull is a different thing from the absence of match, and may in some cases be closer to the condition zivug rishon described in the first place: two souls without prior history between them, meeting without the weight of old entanglement.
The Arizal does not leave the framework in despair. The twentieth hakdama teaches that at Techiyat HaMetim — when the gilgulim come to their end, when the final birur is complete — every soul will be joined to its true zivug. The sin of Kayin and Hevel mixed the souls of humanity within the klipot, good entangled with evil, and the entire work of generations is the slow extraction of the sparks from the husks; when the last is refined, the klipah collapses, having no life-force left within it.[20] The match exists; the reunion is guaranteed. But the guarantee is not available in this world, and the twenty-four-year-old woman is not standing at Techiyat HaMetim.
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III. Where the Two Sugyos Meet
These two sugyos come from different places in the tradition, and they are in dialogue with different questions. The first belongs to Chumash and its commentaries, and to what can be said about an archetype the Torah itself acknowledges was not fully confined to the generation before the flood. The second belongs to the Arizal and to Sha’ar HaGilgulim, and to the specific structural account of how a soul finds its match across lifetimes. One analyzes the shape of the image that has colonized the shidduch conversation. The other analyzes whether the configuration that image implies — one exact person, available to be recognized in this lifetime — is structurally available at all.
They converge because they make the same standard untenable from two different directions. Follow the first one carefully, and the image of the one — the figure against which every actual human being is measured — turns out not to be a Torah category but an inherited archetype whose Torah language is borrowed. Follow the second one carefully, and the assumption that there is one exact person available to be recognized turns out to be a condition the Arizal himself locates before the first descent, not now. The mythology of bashert, as it is used in the contemporary shidduch conversation, does not survive either reading, and it survives the two together even less.
What remains, once both sugyos have been followed, is a much smaller set of questions than the bashert mythology has trained a generation to ask. The question of who she was made for at the beginning of time is not available to her; that information belongs to the level of the soul before the first descent. The question of which of her previous bonds is reasserting itself in the recognition she is feeling or in the absence she is noticing is not available either; the entanglements of prior lifetimes do not announce themselves. What is available to her is something the mythology has trained her to consider too small to matter.
Does she want him. Does he want her. Is there enough between them, when they sit across from each other and talk about ordinary things, that the two of them, with the actual souls they have in this lifetime, can build a life. Not whether he is the one. Not whether something cosmic rings when she looks at him. Whether the two of them, given the time and the proximity and the slow unfolding of familiarity into attachment that every real marriage depends on, can make something real together. This is not settling; settling would mean accepting less than what is there to be built. In both sugyos — the Nefilim sugya that clarifies where the image came from, and the Arizal sugya that clarifies what the structural match actually is — what remains after the analysis is the thing that has always been within reach and that the mythology has always minimized: two people, present to each other, given the conditions to become something to each other.
An archetype from before the flood can be carried into the sheitel store on a Tuesday afternoon without anyone in the room recognizing it as an archetype. The Arizal’s framework can be invoked as proof of the bashert mythology by a person who has not read what the Arizal actually said. These are the conditions under which the call comes to the shadchan at eleven at night, and the daughter cannot say what was missing, and the decent young man goes home and does not hear back. The woman sitting across from him on that third date was real. What was being measured against him was not.
[1]Bereishis 6:2.
וַיִּרְאוּ בְנֵי־הָאֱלֹהִים אֶת־בְּנוֹת הָאָדָם כִּי טֹבֹת הֵנָּה וַיִּקְחוּ לָהֶם נָשִׁים מִכֹּל אֲשֶׁר בָּחָרוּ.
[2]Rashi to Bereishis 6:2.
בני האלהים — בני השרים והשופטים.
[3]Ramban to Bereishis 6:2 — discusses the phrase bnei haElohim, records Rashi’s reading (princes and judges), and takes the older midrashic tradition of descended beings seriously enough to set it down alongside. The midrashic tradition itself is preserved in Targum Pseudo-Yonatan to Bereishis 6:4 and in the Shamchazai narrative of Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer ch. 22 and Yalkut Shimoni, Bereishis remez 44. (Hebrew text of the Ramban in the printed Mikraos Gedolos, ad loc.)
[4]Targum Yonatan (Pseudo-Jonathan) on Bereishis 6:4 names Shamchazai and Uzziel (in some editions Aza’el) as having fallen from heaven, and identifies the resulting offspring with the Nefilim. English rendering via Sefaria; Aramaic text in the printed editions of Targum Yonatan ad loc.
[5]Bereishis 6:4.
הַנְּפִלִים הָיוּ בָאָרֶץ בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם וְגַם אַחֲרֵי כֵן אֲשֶׁר יָבֹאוּ בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים אֶל־בְּנוֹת הָאָדָם וְיָלְדוּ לָהֶם הֵמָּה הַגִּבֹּרִים אֲשֶׁר מֵעוֹלָם אַנְשֵׁי הַשֵּׁם.
[6]Devarim 3:11.
כִּי רַק־עוֹג מֶלֶךְ הַבָּשָׁן נִשְׁאַר מִיֶּתֶר הָרְפָאִים.
[7]Niddah 61a.
סיחון ועוג אחי הוו דאמר מר סיחון ועוג בני אחיה בר שמחזאי הוו.
וַיָּבֹא הַפָּלִיט וַיַּגֵּד לְאַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי — ואמר רבי יוחנן זה עוג שפלט מדור המבול.
[8]Rav Mordechai Eliyahu zt”l, as cited by his granddaughter, that the original zivug of two halves of one soul created before the first descent is not available in our generation. The teaching follows the framework of the Arizal in Sha’ar HaGilgulim.
[9]Sha’ar HaGilgulim (Rav Chaim Vital, recording the teachings of the Arizal), Hakdama 8: a soul that descends for the first time (zivug rishon) is accompanied by its true bat zug, and the match comes easily. From the first gilgul onward, the Arizal derives from “im b’gapo yavo, b’gapo yeitzei” (Shemos 21:3), via the Zohar in the Sabba d’Mishpatim, that the soul may return without her.
[10]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 8, names three conditions under which the original bat zug does not accompany the soul: she has completed her tikkun and remains above; another soul preempted the match through tefillah and divine mercy; or the female counterparts of certain soul-roots cannot emerge in this world until Mashiach.
[11]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 20, regarding the root of Chur ben Miriam, whose female counterparts will not emerge in this world until the coming of Mashiach. The Arizal applies this to Aharon HaKohen as the reason he did not marry his original bat zug.
[12]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 22, describes specific reincarnation consequences attributed to specific sexual transgressions. See the printed edition for the text itself.
[13]Chesed L’Avraham (Rav Avraham Azulai), Mayan 2, on the possibility that a male soul may be reincarnated inhabiting a female body.
[14]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 8: the chuppah creates a bond that does not dissolve at death; when a soul returns through gilgul, the wife from the prior lifetime accompanies him, even when she was not his original bat zug and even when she has no independent need to descend.
כאשר חטא ונתגלגל, מגלגלים עמו לאשה הזאת, אעפ”י שהיא אינה צריכה לגלגול, ואעפ”י שאינה בת זוגו ממש. (Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 8, as quoted from the printed edition.)
[15]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 20, on the possibility that a second pairing (zivug sheini, between the same two souls meeting again after gilgul) may in practice be greater than the first, based on the refinement the souls have undergone.
[16]Chagigah 15a–15b, the account of Elisha ben Avuya (Acher).
[17]Zohar, Sabba d’Mishpatim (Zohar II, Mishpatim), on the soul that returns without its bat zug as an aspect of achorayim — the back — and identified with the term Acher; cited in Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 8.
[18]Sotah 2a.
אמר רבה בר בר חנה אמר רבי יוחנן, וקשין לזווגן כקריעת ים סוף.
[19]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 20, on the Arizal’s instruction to Chaim Vital regarding his wife Chana as the gilgul of Kalba Savua, and the conditions under which Vital’s true bat zug would come. See also Hakdama 38.
[20]Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdama 20, on the birur of the souls mixed within the klipot through the sin of Kayin and Hevel, and on the restoration of every soul to its true zivug at Techiyat HaMetim. See also Hakdama 8.