By Dan Weiss

Sabbat Shalom Chaverim! I am writing this in my room of the 62 Philly Bayit, and pretty soon, I’ll be on my way to the Montreal Bayit! Forgive me if this is scattered because there is a lot on my mind, and a lot I want to mention in this Parshat Hashavua. If you didn’t know, this week’s Torah Portion is ParshatNoach. It is filled with a lot of interesting content, focusing on acceptance, trust, and commentaries on human nature. There is so much to talk about and if I wasn’t heading out so soon, I’d spend a lot more time talking about it! But, for now I will focus on one small part of the Parsha, the “Tower of Babel” story (Gen. 11:1-9).

In this story, all of humanity lives in the same city and speaks the same language. They decide to build a tower in order to “make [themselves] a name,” and to make it so they don’t have to leave their city (Gen. 11:4). Then G-d comes and ruins the party by giving people different languages and spreading them to different areas of the world. It seems like a classic story talking about the origin of different races and languages, but I think there are also other, deeper messages to get from this very brief account.

I think that this story needs to be looked at within the context of G-d’s covenants. It is significant that this story comes right after the story of Noah (Gen. 8:1-9:29) and in between two genealogical lists (Gen. 10:1-32 and Gen. 11:10-32). The first thing that I want to look at is G-d’s covenant with Noah. After the flood, G-d speaks to Noah and blesses him, like he blessed Adam and Eve and will bless the Israelites, saying to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 9:1). In the story of Babel, the humans say that they want to build the tower because they are afraid that G-d will scatter them “over the face of all the earth” (Gen. 11:4). Piecing these two things together, it seems like what humanity was trying to do was to deliberately obstruct the blessing that G-d was trying to give them.

So, now we see G-d as trying to bring diversity to humanity and the humans as doing what they can to stay in one place. Looking at the beginning of the story brings a more sinister view to this tale. The text says that at this time “all the earth was one language and the same words” (Gen. 11:1). This could be interpreted as a simple signifier of human unity and the youthfulness of the human community, but I think it points to something else. If everyone is speaking the same language, and speaking the same words, is there room for creativity or individuality? We are looking here at an image of a uniform culture, a culture of totalitarianism. G-d wants humanity to spread out and to shine, both as a community and as individuals, but humanity is comfortable in a uniform world with no dissent. They want to make a name for themselves as a community, but can’t even make a name for themselves as individuals! This point is made even more poignant by the fact that there are no names in the story and it is between two genealogical lists that are pretty much only talking about names (ironically the second list is mapping out the genealogy of someone literally named “Name”).

Sometimes in the movement, we are scared to spread our influence. We worry if we try to expand we will have to water down our message, but at the same time, we believe that our message is important for everybody. We want to make a name for ourselves, but we don’t actually do the work that is required of us to bring our name to the community. We, as Habonim, are definitely getting better at this, as evidenced by the March for Minimum Wage, the Strike Camp in Vancouver, and countless other examples. But I think we constantly need to be asking ourselves, where do we want to expand and how will we need to change in order to do that.

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