In our portion this week, God decides to cause a flood that will destroy the world, sparing only Noah's family and the animals that Noah gathers together on the ark. Life starts over again after the Flood. The Noahide Commandments are listed, and God uses a rainbow to make a symbol of the first covenant. People start to build a city and the Tower of Babel. God scatters the people and gives them different languages to speak. The ten generations from Noah to Abram are listed.
Lesson:
The Burj Dubai, a tower to the heavens, appears in our Torah portion this week!
After the story of the flood, and the appearance of the rainbow, comes the story of the Tower of Babel. The people decided to build a tower that reached up into the heavens. Seeing the tower, God decided to scatter the people’s all over the earth and make them speak different languages. The city where all this takes places is called Babel, which means “confused” or “mixed up” – an appropriate description of the entire story!
As we read our story we might ask: “What was wrong with building a tower as tall as the heavens?” Many of our skyscrapers seem to be attempting that goal! And also, “Wouldn’t we be better off if peoples everywhere spoke a common language? Wouldn’t that improve communication and lead to enhanced cooperation and maybe even peace?”
The rabbis in our tradition ask similar questions and wonder what did the people of Babel do wrong?
Abravanel, a Spanish/Portuguese commentator from the 15th century explained that the people of Babel got along just fine until they started building the tower. Then they began to argue about every detail…who would bake the bricks, who would carry them, and who would place them on the tower. Each one wanted the credit. The project led to jealousy and eventually hate. We’re told that they weeped when a brick fell and was lost but when a person fell to his or her death, they were immediately replaced without a second thought. Instead of building for good the people of Babel ended up competing for fame.
A more modern Biblical scholar from the 20th century, Beno Jacob, suggests the failure of the tower was because the people of Babel were working for the wrong goal. Instead of using their talent and wealth to improve the lives of those in the city, creating housing for the poor, sick and aging, they used their resources to build a tower for their own fame. The terrible mistake was to use their wealth for pride and vanity instead of using it to improve the quality of life in their city.
Sforno, a famous Italian commentator of the 16th century, taught a different lesson. The real crime, he argued, was the desire of the builders to ensure there would be one religion for everyone, one point of view on the world, one political way of doing things. The builders were fearful of diversity in opinion and belief, opposing freedom of thought and discussion. Thus, when God saw that the builders of the tower were crushing individual freedoms, it was necessary to intervene and scatter human beings throughout the world.
We continue to build taller towers and yet the questions of Babel still echo for us. Are we using our wealth for the good of society or for our own fame? We speak many languages, however, are we open to a diversity of thought and discussion? It could be that God saved us from ourselves by destroying the tower, dispersing us around the world with many languages! The story of the Tower of Babel comes to teach us to build for positive and not for selfish reasons and to understand that our differences in language, culture and traditions can lead to strength and blessing for humanity.