Dvar Torah on Parshat Noach

Towards the end of Parshat Noach, after the flood is over, and after Noach, his family and all the animals have left the ark, humanity rearranges itself, and we read the story of the Tower of Babel: "Now all the earth was of one language and one set of words. And when they traveled from the east, and they found a valley in the Land of Shinar and they dwelt there. And they said, each one to his fellow, come let us bake bricks and let us burn them in fire, and the bricks were for them as stones, and the clay was for them mortar. And they said, come let us built for ourselves a city, and a tower, with its top in the heavens, and make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of the earth." God sees this activity, is displeased, and confuses their languages, so that one could not understand the other, and, in fact, does scatter them over the face of the earth, ending their building project, and making their worst fears a reality. The Midrash and the later commentaries all struggle with the question of what was so wrong with the plan to build the tower; what was the underlying intention in its construction and why does God feel he must stop it? Answers cluster around notions of arrogance, rebellion, and totalitarianism, and range from seeing the project as an attempt to storm the heavens and conquer them, to trying to build support for the heavens so that they will not fall down in the form of a flood again, to planning to set up some sort of all-powerful, totalitarian, idol worshipping world-state, one which would be too strong and centralized to ever again be punished by God. In all these explanations, the technology used in burning the bricks, mixing the mortar, and building the city was conceived of to serve one or another of these rebellious, arrogant purposes. However, in reading the story, one is struck by the fact that the order of things, as presented in the Torah, is problematic. The builders do not say: "come let us make for ourselves a name" or "come let us prevent ourselves from being scattered over the face of the earth", or "come, let us somehow storm the heavens and depose God, ruling the earth ourselves, so that he will never again punish us with a flood or any other means", and then come up with the appropriate technology. On the contrary: first they propose the baking of the bricks and the making of the mortar, and then they propose the building of the bricks and mortar into a city and a tower, and only then do they articulate the point and goal of all this activity: to reach the heavens, make a name for ourselves, and prevent ourselves from being scattered, which is understood by the commentaries in the various negative ways I described above. It seems to me that this order of things may well be telling us that the original discovery and perfection of the technologies used for the building of the Tower was not the result of a desire to achieve these inappropriate goals, but, rather, was their cause. The story begins with the making of the bricks, and then introduces the idea of using them for a tower. This would seem to indicate that first the technology was in place, and only once that technology made it possible to imagine challenging and rebelling against God did the idea actually occur to people. The technology, rather than being driven by legitimate - or even illegitimate - needs on the part of the community, existed for its own sake, and, once it existed, that technology drove the community to conceive and articulate its goals and values in the terms which the technology made possible and, in fact, dictated: if we can build a tower that high, then I guess we can reach the very heavens, conquer them, own them. We can reconfigure life here on earth, and remake it in the image of what our technology can do. After all, does not this awesome technical ability point to the limitless and unassailable nature of our power, of our dominion? Should we not behave accordingly, with complete autonomy and freedom? And so, rather than being rooted in independent, a priori moral determinations, their world view and their value system were products of their technology - which was (is), after all, just mud and bricks - and were driven by it. The sin of the generation of the Tower of Babel was this: they abdicated their right and obligation to make independently arrived at moral-ethical decisions to their technology - its demands and possibilities. If our technology enables us to do something, they said, then we will do it, and our value system - more than that; the very definition of who we are -will be determined by that simple, seemingly inexorable, logic. Now that's certainly something that should be stopped! Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix