The flood waters had covered everything. Noah had been sealed in the ark for months — the rain, the silence, the slow recession of the water, the waiting. Then the text says simply: "And God remembered Noah" (Genesis 8:1).
Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai turned that phrase over like a coin. When a person is righteous, God "exalts them higher than the mountains" — your righteousness matches the mountains, which is the highest praise Psalms knows how to give (Psalm 36:7). But when a person sins, the same verse turns in the other direction: "your judgments are like the great deep." The same God, the same measure, pushed down into the depths of punishment instead of raised up in blessing. The rabbis called this the principle of divine precision — not arbitrariness, but exact proportion. What you bring determines what returns to you.
Noah survived the flood not because God forgot him and then suddenly remembered — that reading would make God seem capricious. Rabbi Shimon reads "remembered" as a kind of divine re-attention: the waters subsided, the world was silent, and then God turned His full presence back toward Noah as an act of compassion. Righteousness had been tallied, suffering had been weathered, and the accounting came due. The mountains of his righteousness exceeded the depths of the world's punishment. And so the waters fell, and the dove found the branch, and Noah's long patience was answered.