Ahead of the Election: Parashat Noach and What the Tower of Babel

can Teach us About a Common Language and Democracy

Sunday morning, Noah will visit our Religious School to bless all the animals who come to pick up their humans at 11:30am, and those humans will be learning about the story of Noah and the flood. So tonight, I want to speak about the other, often overlooked, story in this week’s Torah portion

It begins this way:

“Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated…they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another… “Come, let us build a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world. And Adonai came down to look at the city and tower that humanity had built, and Adonai said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus, Adonai scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there Adonai confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there Adonai scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

To quote Torah scholar Judy Klitsner: “The Tower of Babel story is enigmatic. A group of seemingly well-meaning people seek to build a city and tower with ‘it’s top in the heavens’, so that ‘they can make a name’ for themselves and avoid being scattered. For reasons not explicitly stated, their actions elicit God’s anger and as a result their greatest fears are realized. They never complete the tower, and the only ‘name’ they acquire is one of confusion and obscurity. In the end, despite all their efforts…they are scattered over the face of the land.”

So, what was the sin? Rashi, our most famous and humane Torah commentator explains it this way: “They came with one counsel and said, ‘Not all depends on God [that is, God had no right] to choose for Godself the heavens. Let us ascend to the firmament and wage war with God.” Klitsner explains, “Although the people were remarkably unified, they harnessed their unity in order to rebel against God.” Rashi confirms the harmonious

nature of the generation while at the same time finding the origin of its sin…humanity, in its pride, sought to break the barriers between the human and divine spheres. The people’s tower, Migdal, phonetically plays on the Hebrew gadol, great, pointing to their goal of aggrandizement through building.”

Let’s recap. The people, feeling overconfident, have a grandiose vision. Together, they decide they will build a tower so high – to the very heavens - that it will make them famous and allow them to rival God’s power. God sees this and becomes angry at their chutzpah and ego and throws a wrench in things. Suddenly, a people who were filled with grandiose ideas of consolidating their power, lose their ability not only to speak to each other, but to hear each other. Their egotism and desire for power has led directly to estrangement, and isolation.

The Kabbalists teach that language creates reality. If so, it’s not a mistake that the story of Babel follows on the heels of last week’s creation story, a commentary on not just the uses of creative power and language, but the potential misuses. Babel is thus a darker version of the creation story, its inverse and a cautionary tale about how language, unrestricted power and outsized egos can collude to rip societies apart.

We see this in America right now. On Tuesday, all over this country, Americans will head to the polls, and if you believe the political scientists and historians, we have never been more divided as a nation, more unable to speak the same language. We watch TV stations that are echo chambers of our own beliefs, use social media that reinforces our biases, ideology and convictions, and most troublingly, believe not just that those who disagree with us politically are wrong, but that they are bad, even evil. It has become commonplace to refer to our fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle as idiots or stupid. Partly, it is the fault of certain press outlets, who have figured out that it is lucrative to endorse and elevate individuals who malign those on the other side of the aisle as stupid, morally bankrupt, or evil. It is also the fault of candidates or elected officials who routinely use antisemitic, racist, sexist, homophobic language to belittle or attack their opponents. As a result, extreme, nasty, and bigoted rhetoric has become acceptable in the public square in a way that would have been beyond the pale even a decade ago. And our inability to speak the same language has terrible repercussions – repercussions that, like in the story of Babel, mean we will no longer be able to build things together – healthy societies or the institutions that uphold them.

Professor Jeffrey Stout, a Professor Emeritus of religious studies at Princeton, has based his entire career on the aspiration toward a common language, and its necessity in sustaining healthy democracies. And he has famously argued that the survivability of democracy depends on ‘a background of agreement’, and common language. In his book, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents, he writes the

following:

“We disagree with each other on matters of moral importance–matters like abortion, nuclear weapons, the treatment of dying patients, and the distribution of wealth–and these disagreements can be painful. At times, failure to resolve them rationally leads to bloodshed. We, therefore, have good reason to be concerned with obstacles to rational persuasion. Yet, all too often, we fail even to understand what others are saying to us. Our differences go deeper than mere disagreement over propositions. Their concepts strike us as foreign. We do not speak the same moral language. Our capacity to live peaceably with each other depends upon our ability to converse intelligibly and reason coherently. But this ability is weakened by the very differences that make it necessary. The more we need it, the weaker it becomes, and we need it very badly indeed.”

Whatever we believe about our country, whatever political party we affiliate with, it is impossible to deny that we need a return to common language. We need it in the public sphere, and of course, in private spheres, or smaller communities, like synagogues, small towns, and even our families. And, as with the story of Babel, we will only be able to speak the same language, if we can check our own egos, and set aside our arrogance, and desire for power over others. This will require humility, curiosity, and the idealism that,

in the end, we might, once again, speak a common language.

As for election day, Cantors and Rabbis are not (and should not be) in the business of endorsing candidates or political parties from the Bima, and I have no interest in doing so. I know how well-informed our congregation is, and that you need no nudge to vote. I will however say this: as you consider for whom to cast your vote, there is a Jewish moral imperative to choose candidates who use language to build up and unite, who choose their words carefully, and whose rhetoric, rather than divide an already at odds nation,

works to bring us together.

Shabbat shalom