Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

Hello to all the parents and wider community of Emanuel,

As I took up my position as Head of Jewish Life at Emanuel school this past week,  I was struck by the prescience of a story that takes place in this week’s Parsha; one that talks to us about  themes of pluralism and difference.

At the end of Parshat Noach, we are living in a post-flood world and humanity is rebuilding itself. We read, ‘Everyone had the same language and oneness of words (d’varim achadim)….’They said, “come let us build a city with a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves, else we shall be scattered all over the world”.’ (Bereshit, Chapter 11)

God comes down to look on these builders and has some concerns. To paraphrase slightly, God muses that if as one people with one language, the people have dreamed up this plan, there is nothing they will not be able to achieve.

As the story goes, God thwarts the builder’s ambitions by creating many languages among them so that they are no longer speaking ‘oneness of words.’ Unable to communicate, the building project fails and the people are scattered across the earth.

We may want to ask, what is going on here?!  Are we to presume that God dislikes human striving? Do architectural  ambitions towards skyscrapers threaten God’s power?  Put differently, what’s ‘so wrong’  about the builders’ project?

Rashi, the Jewish commentator from the 11^th century weighs in on some of what made these people’s ambitions so problematic. When the Torah writes that the people were of ‘one words’, ‘dvarim achadim’, Rashi explains that these people came with a singular idea. They said God rules the sky and we rule the earth, let us conquer the sky and take it away from him. Rashi offers a second explanation around oneness or singularity. He says the people came with words about ‘the One (Hashem).’ They claimed to know God and, as it were, to label God, to reduce God to a particular identity.

Rashi’s explanations uncover the deeper ambitions of these builders: they were too singular; intent on the utter conquest of God and focused on singular labels or ideas about God that reduced God’s infinity. 

Sometimes to get something done, it helps if everyone ‘speaks the same language’ or is ‘on the same page.’ Uniformity can greatly assist in efficiency and goal- attainment. And uniformity is effective precisely because no one is challenging or arguing back. But it seems as if God doesn’t want a world that is predicated on this kind of singular mindset – even if it leads to the greatest skyscraper ever!

And so God brings to this people who have singular ideas, speech babble, language confusion. This is why the story becomes famously known as The tower of Babel! Rashi again opens up for us how this looked for the builders.  

‘One would ask for a brick and the other would bring him lime: the former therefore attacked him and split open his brains.’ In the story of Babel, we see how misunderstanding was deeply fatal.

But what if God’s introduction of multiple languages was not so much a punishment as a declaration of values around diversity – to the builders and to humanity. The French philosopher Emanuel Levinas, who was witness to the rise of totalitarianism and Nazism in Europe writes that when we claim that we ‘know’ a person or a people, we are in danger of committing a form of violence to that person. And, if we can release the need to know, label or pin a person down to ONE particular identity, we enter into what he calls ‘ethical relationship’ to the Other.  This is how we discover  the infinite possibilities inherent in humanity.  

The Babel builders sought to build through singular, totalitarian oneness. God invited the people to engage with each other’s difference and multiplicity… and build from there!  

In Mary Oliver’s poem Song of the Builders, she writes an ode to all the builders of our world, she writes:

Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

Oliver clearly thinks that to build our world, we need individuality. Like Levinas she references human mystery, our ‘inexplicable ways.’

Like the Babel builders we might think that singularity of purpose can support achievement and greatness. But this story invites us to consider that perhaps there is a deeper power in learning to communicate and build from our differences. In bringing our differences, respecting each others’ differences and showing curiosity about them, we might still build skyscrapers, or better yet we may continue to build…a school and a community known as Emanuel!

Shabbat Shalom