NOACH: What really happened at the foot of the Tower of Babel?
At the conclusion of a Torah reading when the scroll is lifted, our custom is to point towards the open scroll with our little finger and declaim lustily Vezot HaTorah asher sa Moshe .lifnei bnei Yisrael …. “This is the Torah which Moses placed before the children of Israel from G-D’s ‘mouth’, by Moses’ hand”
In some cultures, were one to point to a sacred object, particularly with one’s pinkie, one might run the risk of having one’s head severed from one’s body – or at very least being clapped into gaol! In those cultures, pointing to a sacred object is regarded as akin to blasphemy.
In Japan it is considered rude to blow your nose in public, to pour soy sauce on your rice or to pour yourself a drink – behaviours which are regarded as pretty standard here in Australia!
The art of effective international communication is one of the hardest skills in the world to muster! An innocuous act or gesture in one society, culture or language may be interpreted as singularly insulting in another.
We’ve probably all grown up with a childlike perspective of what happened at the foot of the Tower of Babel when language became confused. The simplest explanation is that everybody spoke the same language until people gathered amid the plains of Shinar and plotted together to try to build a literal skyscraper as a provocative symbol before G-D of the power of human achievement.
But to get to the very heart of this Tower-Power phenomenon, we need to take a look at the Hebrew. Twice the Tower people use the same introductory word in egging each other on, namely hava, a word used in both in classical and modern Hebrew to mean “come on!”. Yet its root meaning is “to give”. I believe hava is used here as a sort of buzzword. Because, declares the Midrash, the builders of the Tower of Babel had indeed convinced themselves that they were actually performing a service for humanity, that they were giving of themselves for the betterment of the human race.
What was the nature of their delusion? Well, counting from the Creation of Man, the year of the Great Flood was 1656. Came along the international think-tank, the delegates of the seventy original nations – who elected them we’re not sure – they made a G70 summit, and they said in true UNESCO style: you know what? It must be that once every 1656 the heavens crumble and cause a natural global disaster such as a flood. So come on, let’s give ourselves over to this project of securing the heavens so that another such disaster won’t happen again in another 1656 years!
I have just cited the essence of a Midrash dating from the 6th century! Cited by Rashi. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!
We see here, as we do today with societal radicals, an extraordinary mixture of positive and negative. On the one hand, it’s the first example in the Torah of social conscience, public-spirited altruism, tikun olam, coming together to try to mend what they thought was a fragile world, the ancient equivalent of attempting to protect the ozone layer or arrest climate change. Certainly the builders of the Tower are being portrayed here in this Midrash as folk wishing to give of their time and their expertise for the survival of the human race.in a remarkable show of unity.
Meanwhile, Rashi lets us in on the hidden agenda, the manifesto that was squirreled away in their secret files. It said Lo kol heimenu shemavor lo et ha’elyonim. G-D doesn’t have exclusive rights to the higher realms, na;’aseh le-rakia ve-na’aseh imo milekhama. Let’s make the building of this tower our unilateral declaration of war against G-D and religion.
So which of these Jekyll-and-Hyde scenarios really sums up the dor ha-flaga, the generation of Babel.
Perhaps the most revealing insight into their true motivation can be seen by looking at the consequence of their actions. The Torah tells us that G-D came down and confused their language. What does that mean exactly?
Again let’s shed our childhood preconceptions and let’s examine a remarkable and not-often-quoted statement in the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud in Tractate Megila. But first, let’s remember that the men and women of antiquity had phenomenal, well-developed minds when it came to mentally storing information and data. At a time when oral communication reigned supreme, this was essential. Forget about the myth of primitive cavemen. Declares the Yerushalmi: At this early time in human civilisation, everybody spoke all seventy languages of the world.
Basing himself upon this statement, the commentator known as the Bechor Shor, a 12th century rabbi from Orleans in France, extrapolates what actually happened at the foot of the Tower of Babel. He says: as they were plotting to overthrow G-D as it were, every plotter suddenly found himself unable to articulate in any language except his own native tongue. He forgot his communication skills in all the other 69 languages and was able to communicate only in his own!
In other words, reading between the lines in a deeper sense, the project which started with such co-operation and such unity of purpose floundered in the end because each and every participant forgot his or her original supposed motive for participation, namely the betterment of society, and became concerned only with his or her own nationalistic self-interest – he was only “able to speak his own language”. As a consequence, all dialogue broke down, and the project came to a catastrophic end.
How could it be that a project founded on such a motive of giving, such a spirit of co-operation and harmony should fail so badly?
A citation from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ commentary on an earlier Torah passage sheds light on our question. The incident he comments on is the murder of Abel by Cain – the first murder in human history.
Rabbi Sacks says the following: Supposing you offer somebody a gift and the person rebuffs you? You can react in one of two ways. Either you can ask yourself, “what did I do wrong? why was my gift rejected?” Or you are angry with the person to whom you offered the gift, fretting: “how dare he refuse!”
Says Rabbi Sacks: if you respond in the first way then it is obvious you were genuinely wanting to give to the other person to please the other person. If you react in the second way, with anger, it becomes obvious that your concern was not with your friend but with yourself. You were trying to assert your own dominance by placing your friend in your debt. In other words: when refusal of your gift causes you anger, it shows that the prime motive in offering the gift wasn’t a desire to give but a form of control. I give, therefore I rule.
Concludes Rabbi Sacks: such a motive must have governed Cain when he offered his gift to G-D of the fruit of the soil. He craved control. The gift wasn’t offered out of a love for G-D or out of a real desire to give. Its rejection infuriated Cain, leading to violence of the most extreme kind. If he could have killed G-D he would have done: instead he killed the brother created in His image.
Perhaps the same sort of motive governed the Tower people. They deluded themselves that they wanted to work in harmony to make the world a better place, to share their expertise – but when things started to go wrong, the result was anger and confusion. Says the Midrash, one person would ask for a brick and the other would bring clay – and in a rage the first man would throw a brick at the second one and kill him. All communication breaks down, all co-operation ceases. The inevitable consequence is fragmentation and dispersion of society to the farthest ends of the earth. It becomes obvious with hindsight that the original motive was self-interest and not the interests of others, not looking to give of oneself to others but rather seeking to control others and, in the process, aiming to usurp the true Controller of the universe!
I will leave it to my readers to consider for themselves the many and varied ways in which in 2026 secular Western society is still standing at the foot of the Tower of Babel!