The Tower of Babel: God’s third and final attempt at social engineering

Bereishit 1:29-30

Bereishit 9:3-4

Bereishit 11

“… It is “as the earth is filled with injustice because of them.” What is injustice and what is stealing? Rabbi Ḥanina said: Injustice involves less than a peruta and robbery involves a peruta. …less than the amount for which one would be able to collect compensation in court

Bereshit Rabbah 31:5

In Bereishit 1, God creates man to be vegetarian. Humankind is ordered to till the soil in order to eke out a livelihood. Humans, indeed even animals, have no right to consume the flesh of other living creatures.

This sounds very noble and high-minded. Indeed, it sounds very much like the preachy, self-righteous talk one often hears from diehard vegans. They claim the moral high ground by dint of their abstaining from anything that might be construed as the exploitation, let alone the consumption, of any living creature.

In Bereishit 9, after the Flood, God executes a perfect U-turn virtually commanding humans to consume the flesh of “Every moving creature that lives”. This would appear to be counterintuitive. After all, now that all the evildoers have been eliminated, one would assume the surviving few – who were spiritually distinct from the drowned masses – would instinctively eschew a comestible that resulted from physical violence and premeditated death. And yet, God orders them to become carnivores.

Baffling!

Baffling, that is, until we examine the causal relationship between human abstinence from meat and a proclivity for human cruelty to fellow humans – homine hominem lupus.

Apparently that ideal vegetarian lifestyle had deprived humankind of a needed outlet for its innate aggression. Like hyper energetic children (and not just children) who need the outlet of competitive sports in order to harness their aggression, all human beings are born, to at least some degree, with an impulse for aggressive behavior. Harnessing that aggression is only possible by redirecting it in a manner that causes the least harm to fellow human beings.

What brought the generation of the Flood to the nadir of human intercourse was not so much the consumption of too much grains and fruits, or the absence of meat per se from their diet. What was missing was the activity that is required in order to put meat on the table. The brute actions of hunting, trapping, netting, piercing, disemboweling, eviscerating … the wiliness, and craft, and strategies needed to succeed in the hunt … it was these that was missing from a community that was restricted to a vegan diet.

And yet the repressed aggression that is so integral to the human condition remained, finding no outlet other than the mistreatment of other humans.

I do not normally go by Midrash, but here and there one finds a fascinating and instructive, if not provably factual, point.

The Torah tells us that God planned to destroy humankind because of their wicked ways. And it wasn’t just humans, but all animals, beasts and other living creatures other than the few who would be spared aboard the Ark.

Bereishit 6:!1-12

Instinctively, we would assume that murder, rape and violence were rampant, in order to merit such a harsh judgment. And, indeed, there is no shortage of Midrashim which say exactly that.

However Midrash Bereishit Rabba 31:5 says something entirely different. According ot Bereishit Rabbah, humankind behaved exactly as one would expect from less noble vegans. They had become passive-aggressive sneaks, petty criminals who limited their hostility toward others to acts of the pettiest, non-violent theft.

Their crime, and it was the universal norm says the midrash, was to swipe less than a prutah worth from every sale, transaction or opportunity. Such a paltry sum was not even actionable in a court of law, nor was it of any serious material benefit to the thief. It was theft for the sake of theft. An outlet for an aggression that had no outlet because hunting and fishing were prohibited.

With the generation of the Flood, God realizes that humankind needed some serious recalibration. It was necessary for Him to ordain an outlet that would allow humans to expend their aggression overtly and directly, not passive aggressively. This could only be achieved by ordering the consumption of meat, i.e. the result of the complex, physically and mentally exhausting activity involved in the hunt. It is no accident that the mighty King Nimrod who exemplified this ethos is described as a “hunter before the Lord”.

Native Americans – and surely others – have a custom of thanking the animal they kill for food. And I have known hunters who, likewise, commune with their quarry. Indeed, I met one woman who hunts only with bow and arrow. She would only eat the meat of an animal she had hunted and killed herself. She respected her food, and disdained those whose idea of consuming meat is a cellophane-wrapped steak from an antiseptic supermarket. And she is hardly unique.

Most of us today are behavioral vegetarians. We may eat steaks and hamburgers, yet we are totally divorced from the actual process of bringing meat to the table. And we behave accordingly. Passive-aggressive behavior, pettiness, white-collar crime, cutting corners — these are universal vices that would more typically be the benchmark of vegan pacifist misconduct.

I have met any number of (mostly) men who enjoy boxing as a sport. I have found them, with few exceptions, to be the most gentle, considerate, polite, thoughtful people outside the boxing ring. Why? Because they do not need to chisel another person in order to vent their aggression. And if this is true for pugilists, it is surely true for hunters who limit their hunting to game they actually plan on eating. (I do not in any way include sport hunting and trophy hunting in this category.)

Back to Parshat Noah, God has clearly spared some animals in order to make it possible for Noah’s offspring and their progeny to have what to hunt for. Absent animals, people would remain vegetarians and the whole cycle would inevitably repeat itself.

Yet even the new plan did not work out as God intended. Yes, it was clear that extreme universal veganism had resulted in humans turning against one another. Only now, the green light – indeed the command – to engage in hunting resulted in a very opposite problem.

By becoming active hunters of prey, humankind became united in peaceful fraternity to a degree that also threatened its existence. Apparently, a totally carnivorous diet was also psychologically unhealthy, and caused mankind to lose sight of the importance of agriculture and the need to develop and till the soil.

By ignoring the field, humans lost the competitive instinct needed to achieve personal success and progress for the species. Instead of being farmers they said “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into the sky. Let us make ourselves a name”.

City life is hardly the ideal. Indeed, it is unsustainable unless it is fed and supplied by farming. Worse yet, urban culture will inevitably – and we certainly see this today – yield a society that is obsessed with verticality, that defines itself by how tall the building is, on how high a floor one’s condo is situated. And such obsession is totally divorced from ay recognition of, and appreciation for, the activity of the farmer and rancher which sustains life even – especially – in the penthouse.

This was the generation of the Tower of Babel, a harmonious fraternity of people who spoke the same language, shared the same thoughts, aspired to the same meaningless and non-sustaining monumentality. There was no competitive spirit. There was nothing to prompt the society to actually consider what they were engaged in doing and how it would inevitably result in its demise.

And so, for the third time, God now has to re-engineer human society by undoing a halcyon but unsustainable unity of purpose.

By breaking society down to different, mutually unintelligible languages, humankind would move away from the ideal city, and once against conquer the land. And while tribal and, ultimately, national divisions would inevitably result in occasional wars and bloodshed these – like the tides of the oceans – would go only so far before receding to a benign level. Meanwhile the desire to compete successfully would drive humankind’s ambition and creativity, which would, hopefully, yield positive progress and thereby turn people into God’s partners in the never-ending process of creation