Jen Cunnings sits in her back garden on a morning in late April 2020, the earth beginning to green around her, and tells a story about seeds. Not as a distant parable, but as an urgent whisper across centuries. The performance is modest in form—a minister reading aloud during pandemic lockdown on the eve of Earth Day's 50th anniversary—but the text she carries is radically generous. Prayer for the Earth: The Story of Naamah, Noah's Wife, written by Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso and illustrated by Bethanne Andersen (Jewish Lights Publishing, 1996), is a Midrash, a creative imaginative story that fills the silences the original Scripture left behind. And in this case, what it fills is vast: the invisible labor of the woman who walked across the Earth before the flood, gathering the seeds that would make a garden afterward.
At the outset of her reading, Cunnings explains the form itself: "This story is known as a Midrash and it's a creative imaginative story based on Scripture." The distinction matters. A Midrash does not replace Scripture; it sits alongside it, asking the questions the original text leaves unanswered. In the biblical flood narrative, Naamah appears only in passing—a name mentioned, a presence registered, but never given voice, agency, or work. Genesis tells us Noah built the ark. It tells us he gathered the animals. It does not tell us who preserved the seeds, who understood that without the botanical diversity stored safely below deck, there could be no garden when the waters receded. The original silence is profound. This Midrash speaks into it.
Sasso's retelling separates the callings. While God commands Noah to construct and preserve the animals, God turns to Naamah with a different charge: "Walk across the land and gather the seeds of all the flowers and all the trees. Take two of every kind of living plant and bring each one onto the ark." Then comes the crucial qualifier: "They shall not be for food but they shall be your garden to tend and to keep. Work quickly—the rains begin tomorrow."
What unfolds is not abstract instruction but embodied work. Naamah "tied an apron of many pockets around her waist and walked through all the Earth's fields and gardens. Her legs grew strong and her feet were as the wings of birds so she traveled far and never grew tired." This is the consecration of labor itself—the body that works rendered sacred through its dedication. She moves through the landscape not as a collector but as a witness, as someone who meets each plant where it grows.
The catalog of her gathering has the precision of a botanist and the poetry of a prayer: she finds moss spores in forest carpets, calls upon God to send wind so the redwood cones will fall within reach, picks acorns and nuts and winged seeds, lifts seedlings of cedar and cypress with care. She almost walks past the dandelions—the overlooked, the common—until God reminds her that all living plants must be counted. "Reluctantly," the story tells us, she gathers them too. And God makes a promise of consequence: "Because Naamah had ignored them, God made certain that dandelions would cover the earth." Even the weeds are honored. Nothing is beneath notice. Everything belongs.
On the ark itself, she becomes an archivist and gardener both. "She carefully arranged them into groups of families. The garbanzo beans and soybeans belonged in the family of legumes. Among the herbs she gathered oregano, rosemary, and thyme. Wheat, rice, and barley were in the family of grasses. The citruses boasted oranges, grapefruits, and tangerines among the family of live lilies sprouted onions, chives, and tulips." She makes a sign for this space: "Naamah's Garden. These plants are not for food." The organization is not mere logistics—it is knowledge, order, the mapping of creation's diversity into human memory.
Then the flood comes. For forty days and forty nights, the rains do not cease. The animals grow sick. The ark rocks violently. "The Coyotes howled. The snakes hissed and the peacocks shrieked. The noise never stopped." The smell is overwhelming. Despair has weight. But the story offers Naamah and Noah a refuge within the catastrophe: "Noah and Naamah would breathe the sweet aroma of the flowers and sit in the quiet of the plants that they called Naamah's garden. They prayed for the rains to stop." The garden is not decoration. It is not merely practical. It is a sanctuary of the senses, a space where spiritual practice—prayer, breathing, sitting in presence with growing things—becomes possible even as the world drowns.
This is significant. The Midrash suggests that in apocalypse, tending is not luxury but necessity. The work of cultivation becomes the work of survival, not in a physical sense but in a spiritual one. To sit with growing things when all else is chaos is to say: *Something will grow again. The diversity of Earth will persist. My work matters.* This is not denial of catastrophe. It is a refusal to let catastrophe have the final word.
When the waters recede and dry land appears, Naamah does not celebrate passively. The story continues: she "carefully placed all the seeds and seedlings in the deep pockets of her apron" and as "soon as she set foot on the new land, Naamah knelt down, put her hands into the soft moist earth and made small c[ircles]." She plants immediately. She is not waiting for instructions. She understands, viscerally, what must happen now. And God responds not with praise but with a new name—a renaming that marks transformation: "I will call you 'Maamah'—Mother of Seed."
There is profound theology embedded in this naming. In Jewish tradition, a name is not mere label but essence, destiny, calling. Naamah becomes Maamah—Mother of Seed—because she has understood the work of the future. She is not being praised for what she did; she is being called to what she now *is*. The name is both recognition and commission. It says: This is your identity now. This is what the world needs you to become and to remain.
The Midrash also performs a crucial theological gesture. The flood narrative in the Bible is often read as a story of judgment—God destroys creation because of human wickedness. But Sasso's retelling layers a counter-narrative on top of that one: the story is equally about *preservation, continuity, and the work of restoration after catastrophe.* It is not enough to survive; one must tend. It is not enough to save the animals; one must save the seeds. The sacred work is not just building the ark or commanding the waters to recede—it is planting after, nurturing the diversity that will grow again on new earth.
Cunnings reads this story on Earth Day 2020, during a moment when the world had paused, when human activity had stilled enough for people to reconsider their relationship to consumption and the natural world. The resonance is not accidental. She closes the reading not with "The End" but with a question posed directly to the listeners: "What kind of care can you give to the earth today?" Not eventually. Not theoretically. Today. Concretely. In your hands. In your garden or your home or your community. The question restores agency to the listener, just as Sasso's story restores agency to Naamah.
Seeds, in the logic of this Midrash, are not incidental. They carry the future. They are the genetic memory of what was and what can be again. A seed is a complete act of faith—the belief that if you place it in soil with water and light, something will grow. To tend seeds is to say yes to continuity, to diversity, to the proposition that the Earth is worth preserving and that preservation is sacred work. Naamah's apron, heavy with seeds of every type from "acacia to Sisyphus," from "amaryllis to vineya," becomes an image of abundance held carefully—abundance as responsibility, not as possession.
There is also something quietly but unmistakably feminist in this retelling. The original Noah story centers the male patriarch—the one who builds, who obeys, who leads the procession off the ark. This Midrash does not erase Noah, but it centers the woman's knowledge: botanical, organizational, ecological, spiritual. It suggests that the work of conservation has always belonged to those who plant, who tend household and earth, who remember the names and needs of growing things. This is not sentimentality. It is recognition of a long lineage of stewardship rendered invisible by narratives that privilege building and commanding over tending and knowing.
Why does this story arrive as a children's picture book? Perhaps because children still understand something adults have often forgotten: that a seed is a miracle, that growth is not guaranteed but earned through patience and care, that the future is not a birthright but something that must be worked for with one's hands in the soil. When Cunnings reads this aloud in her garden, she is not merely entertaining. She is transmitting a practice. She is saying: *This is how we think. This is how we care. This is what it means when we are called upon to tend.* The story, read aloud from a book, becomes a bridge between the ancient practice of Midrash—commentary, retelling, asking—and a contemporary Earth Day meditation on what ecological stewardship might look like.
