Dvar Torah on Parshat Noach

Then I came back/ From where I'd been/ My room it looked the same/ But there was nothing left between/ The nameless and the named. Love Itself; Leonard Cohen In this week's Torah portion, Noach, we read, after the story of the flood, about the Tower of Babel. Noach and his family have emerged from the ark, had children, and these children have all settled down together very nicely. As the Torah puts it: "And the whole earth had one language and one set of words. And it happened, that when they traveled to the east and they found a valley in the Land of Shin'ar, and they dwelled there." But then, things happened: "And they said, one to the other: come let us make bricks and burn them in the furnace. And for them, the bricks were like building stone and bitumen was for them like mortar. Now they said: let us build for ourselves a city and a tower, rising up to the heavens, and let us make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth. And God came down to look at the city and the tower that they were building. And God said: here they are one people, with one language for them all, and this is what they have started to do, and now there will be nothing at all that they will not be able to do?" The rest is history: God mixes up the language of the people as they are building the tower, and, no longer able to understand one another, they scatter all over the earth. The story is an extraordinarily difficult one, and deserves a lot of thought. I would like to focus on one aspect: the motivation of the builders of the tower. The way the Torah tells it, the entire project was technology-driven. The discovery and mastery of the brick-glazing process seems to motivate the people to embark on the tower project. What were they trying to accomplish by building it? What were they hoping to gain? It would seem that what they were trying to do was, in fact, no big deal, nothing new. The Bible has already told us that the people lived together and spoke one, unified, language. After the introduction of the brick-making technology, their goal seems to be to simply go on doing what they were doing already: they want to build the tower and the city in order to make for themselves a name, in order that they not be scattered around the earth. But, as the Torah told us, they already were dwelling together as one; what they want to do by building the tower is really no change in their status or situation at all. So, why all the fuss? Why does God not like it? And why does its being built result in precisely what it was meant to prevent: their being, in fact, scattered? I would like to suggest that the Tower of Babel story, like the Garden of Eden story, is about the loss of innocence. A civilization that is unified, together, speaking "one language and one set of words", is a great thing. However, what was really great about it is that it was that way naturally. No one decreed that there would be one universal language. No one demanded that everyone agree with everyone else, or that they all live together. They just did. When, at some stage, and for reasons which are not totally clear to me but which seem to be connected to technological advances (the bricks, the furnaces, the bitumen), this civilization becomes self-conscious of who they are and what they are all about, they attempt to name it, and to render it permanent, through the use of their new-found technology - "let us build for ourselves a city and a tower, rising up to the heavens, and let us make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth." They were not really proposing anything new, but with this self-conscious act, that which had been un-named became named, that which was natural and instinctive became a construct - literally a building - and therefore lost, forever, its naturalness, its innocence, and its intrinsic power. The unified inhabitants of the earth are then scattered to its four corners: the unselfconscious reality they originally lived in is now, as the Garden of Eden was to Adam and Eve, lost to them, because they are aware of it, have named it, and are working towards building a monument to it. It is no longer their natural state It is no longer who they really are, because it has been named, worked at, built. It has become theirs to win or lose, and so, naturally, inexorably, they lose it. I don't know if any of us can distinguish between who we really, naturally, and intrinsically are, as opposed to the various constructs we have created (or that others have created for us). I would like to think that a "real" us - both as individuals and as societies - does exist; that there is something within us from before names, from before we started building monuments to who we think we are, before we started explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. And that we can somehow access that something. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix