Dear friends,
This week we read Parshas Noach. After generations of the chaos and corruption recounted in last week’s parsha, God resolves to flood the Earth and destroy every living creature. God chooses Noach and his family as the sole survivors and charges them with building an ark to save a select number of every type of animal. They successfully weather the storm, the water recedes, God tells them to come out of the ark, and they settle and repopulate the world. The story of the flood and its aftermath is very rich and there is much to discuss, but I want to focus in on an episode that occurs towards the end of our parsha.
In the final reading, we are told about the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9): (1) Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. (2) And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. (3) They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.”—Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar.— (4) And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; lest we be scattered all over the world.” (5) God came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, (6) and God said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. (7) Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” (8) Thus God scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. (9) That is why it was called Babel, because there God confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there God scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
It is clear that God is upset with this project, and that it illustrates further human corruption even after the flood, but it is not immediately clear what the problem is. In many respects, the story reads as a utopian one. Everyone is working together and is united by a common vision. They are collaborating to build something grand and something meaningful to them. Perhaps the desire to build “a tower with its top in the sky” even reflects some yearning to connect with the Divine. Still, God essentially says that human beings were pushing too far and in a way that was dangerous. The answer was to mix up their language and scatter them over the earth.
I think we can find a number of clues in the text that point to what went wrong. I want to focus on two of them. In verse 4, we are given insight into the motivation for building such a city with such a tower. Concerned, ironically, by the prospect of being scattered over the Earth, we are told that these people wanted to build this tower to make a name for themselves. Rather than chasing the heavens with a desire to connect to something higher, they were looking to consolidate and project their own power in the face of heaven. Rashi, in fact, characterizes this as an explicit act of rebellion against God. They were acting out of self interest and self aggrandizement. If this is how people use the opportunity afforded by having “the same language”, then all bets are off and they will not think twice about doing anything that they deem necessary to further their own ends.
A second clue comes from the very idea of “the same language and the same words”. One way to understand this apparent redundancy is that not only could everyone understand each other (same language), but they were fully of one accord in thought, speech, and/or agenda (same words). In other words, they were uniform and unanimous. Again, on the surface this may not sound like a problem but I will point out that unanimity is essentially an anathema to Judaism and I would argue that it is truly an anathema to the human condition writ large. We are all familiar with the adage that if you have two Jews, you have three opinions (I’ve always felt you can even say one Jew, two opinions). Furthermore, in the halachos pertaining to the adjudication of a capitol court case, if the judges unanimously vote to condemn someone to death, that case is deemed a mistrial and is dismissed. More often than not, uniformity and unanimity stifle the ideas, dynamics, and explorations that are so essential in forming the actual collaboration and unity that uniformity and unanimity purport to produce.
We certainly find ourselves in an age of great divides and disunity. This rings true in large swaths of the Jewish world as well as large swaths of the broader world. We are right to bemoan the division that we experience. Our lack of unity impairs our ability to work together to build a world that we all know can be much better. At the same time, our parsha teaches us that unity alone is a secondary value. Unity is deeply important but it absolutely matters how we achieve it and what we use it for. A unity built on uniformity and unanimity is shallow and empty; devoid of true understanding. A unity used only to further self interest and self aggrandizement is evil, knows no limits, and must be broken. But if we can build a unity that has room for diversity, discussion, and dissent and if we can harness the power of that unity to pursue the Torah’s own truths, justice, and peace, then we can surely build an entire world that reaches the heavens of its own accord.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Birkeland
