This morning, over breakfast, my daughter Ayla asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for.
“Abba,” she said between spoonfuls of cereal, “How did all those animals fit in the ark?”
I gave her the kind of answer that buys a parent a few seconds of peace. “Well,” I said, “It was a really big ark.”
But Ayla wasn’t done.
“What about the elephants?”
“Like really big,” I said.
“And the giraffes?”
“Yup—they fit in there, too.”
“And the lions, and the rhinos, and the hippos?”
By the time she got to hippos, I realized I’d been outmatched. My answers were shrinking while her imagination kept expanding. And it wasn’t until I humbled myself enough to realize that my stock answers weren’t good enough that we truly came to a new, more expansive understanding.
I realized Ayla wasn’t really asking for logistics; she was asking about limits. How, in a finite space like the ark, could God make space for infinite life?
According to the Torah, Noah’s ark was 300 cubits long, 50 wide, and 30 high; roughly 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet. Across its three decks, that’s about 95,000 square feet, the size of a modest warehouse.
That’s quite sizable, but hardly enough room for “two of every kind,” plus Noah’s family, and provisions for a year. Even if we treat the flood story as mythic, the question remains spiritual: How can something finite hold what is infinite?
With this lens, the ark becomes less a feat of engineering, and more a symbol of what it means to build capacity beyond what seems possible. It’s the first recorded act of Divine elasticity—God’s ability to stretch space, pause time, and play with the natural order of things.
Every day, we face a similar challenge. Our inboxes overflow, our calendars burst, our hearts feel too small to hold all the grief, love, outrage, and hope that the world demands. The ark reminds us that when we align our purpose with the work of preserving what most needs to remain, God partners with us to make more room.
Another example of divine elasticity shows up in the Talmud (Yoma 21a), which teaches that during the pilgrimage festivals, when the Israelites packed into the Temple courtyard in Jerusalem, it was impossibly crowded. Everyone stood shoulder to shoulder, barely able to move. But when the time came to bow before God, a posture that takes up far more room than standing, the space miraculously expanded. Each person had enough room to bow down fully.
It’s one of ten miracles that the rabbis say occurred regularly in the Beit Hamikdash, the Holy Temple. But it’s also one of the most human:
Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: When the Jewish people ascend to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage Festivals they stand crowded, but when they bow during confession they are spaced so that no one hears the confession of another. (Talmud Yoma 21a).
That’s not just about physical space. It’s about our heart’s spaciousness. When we insist on standing tall—on being right, being heard, being first, there’s never enough room. But when we bow—when we make ourselves smaller, when we hold back an opinion long enough to honor someone else’s, when we open ourselves up vulnerably, as in making confession, we create space.
In that sense, the Temple’s miracle wasn’t only God’s doing. It was ours. God didn’t expand the walls until the people had first bowed. The Divine expansion followed human humility.
We live, paradoxically, in the most spacious and the most cramped age in history. We can reach across the globe in an instant, yet we can’t seem to make room for one another in our own social feeds.
The floodwaters today aren’t made of rain but of noise. Of information, opinions, outrage, certainty. Every platform, every conversation, every community feels like the ark at full capacity: no more room for dissent, for ambiguity, for difference. We’re at full capacity at all times.
We hear the cultural version of Ayla’s question all the time:
“How can all these conflicting ideas fit in the same space?”
“How can we make room for people who believe such different things?”
Our reflex, like mine at breakfast, is often to answer pragmatically: “Just cut out the voices that bother you. They’re probably wrong anyway.” “Ignore the people you don’t agree with; it’ll make your days much easier.”
The Torah pushes back, imploring us to truly appreciate the miracles of Divine spaciousness and to say: “Let’s make room for them all.”
The goal isn’t to shrink the world down to fit our opinions. It’s to expand our souls to fit the world.
To survive a flood, whether it be of rain, of despair, or of division, we each need to build an ark. A space in our lives that can hold life, that preserves what matters, and that grows ever more spacious when called to do so.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that when the heart is narrow, even a small problem feels enormous. But when the heart is wide, even great burdens can be carried with grace.
That describes, for me, the miracle of Noah’s ark and the Temple courtyard alike: the heart that expands to hold more than it should be able to.
Our task at this moment isn’t to build bigger boats, but to cultivate more spacious souls that can stretch to include competing truths, inconvenient neighbors, and uncomfortable questions. Souls that know when to stand tall and when to bow down.
That’s what Ayla, in her precocious wisdom, taught me this morning. The real miracle isn’t that all those animals fit in the ark. It’s that each of them, from mice to mountain lions and everything in between, instinctively knew how to make space for others and trusted that the ark would grow spacious enough to hold them all.