The two predominant stories in this week’s parashah, the well-known story of Noah and the equally famous tale of the Tower of Babel, might feel almost like children’s tales. These are stories we often accompany with mental images from our childhood that have become part of our memory.
The midrash, those stories that fill in the blanks or offer interpretative layers abundant in the Torah, provides us with other types of imagery for these texts. The Torah presents Noah as someone whose main concern was himself. Though this isn’t explicit, it’s something we can infer. God tells him that He will destroy a humanity plagued by violence, and that he and his family will be saved. To do so, he must follow God’s instructions: build an ark, seal it inside and out, fill it with all species, take care of them, shut himself in, and wait to begin anew.
Yet the Midrash Tanchuma adds: “Make yourself an ark of acacia wood (Gen. 6:14). Rabbi Huna said in the name of Rabbi Yose: The Holy One, blessed be He, warned the generation of the flood to repent of their wicked deeds for one hundred and twenty years. When they refused to repent, He instructed Noah to build an ark of acacia wood. Noah arose, repented of his sins, and planted cedars. They asked him, ‘What are these cedars for?’ ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, intends to bring a flood upon the earth and has commanded me to build an ark so my family and I can escape,’ he replied. They laughed at him and mocked his words. Nonetheless, he tended the trees until they grew tall. Again they asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ He repeated what he had told them, but they continued mocking him. Eventually, he cut down the trees and fashioned them into wood. Once again, they asked, ‘What are you doing?’ Once more, he warned them of what was to come, but they continued to refuse repentance. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon them the flood, as it is written: ‘And they were erased from the earth’ (Gen. 7:23).” Midrash Tanchuma, Noah 5:6
The Midrash needs to emphasize that Noah did try to get his contemporaries’ attention. It wants us to know that there was a warning, one that humanity chose to ignore, stubbornly persisting in the errors that would lead to its destruction.
There is an eerie parallel with our current era. We receive warnings of all kinds and yet don’t listen. We insist on hatred and destruction. We insist on division instead of working together for greater goals.
And then comes the second story. What was the sin of those people? That generation ultimately only wanted to draw closer to God in their own way. Perhaps their approach was not ideal, but wanting to build a tower to reach Heaven doesn’t seem like such a grave sin.
Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, of blessed memory, an insightful modern commentarist, explains:
I believe that the decree of dispersion upon that generation was not a punishment but rather a correction for the good of humanity. The fundamental message of the story of the Tower of Babel has nothing to do with the construction of the tower itself. Rather, it concerns what is said at the beginning of the section: that the entire earth, the renewed post-diluvian humanity, had "one language and similar words" (Genesis 11:1). After the failure to build the tower, different languages emerged and, consequently, different words. I understand that the root of the sin of the “Generation of Division” lay in their desire to artificially unify all its members to preserve the reality of “one language and similar words”, something we would today call “Totalitarianism.”
Professor Leibowitz describes a society where the individual has no place, confined by a model that controls their life and expression. A model where diversity is, at best, a forbidden word.
The Jewish people and the modern State of Israel have been enriched enormously by multiculturalism. Across our many diasporas, we have absorbed Babylonian wisdom, Persian eschatology, Greek philosophy, Arab mathematics, and German and American academic rigor. This is what we are made of: a fusion of diverse cultures that has formed us into something varied. And yet, we still struggle to embrace diversity.
Both the story of Noah and that of the Tower of Babel are united by The Lord’s decision not to destroy humanity but to embark on a challenging, winding path of understanding differences without rejecting, mocking, or laughing at them, as those who watched Noah work on the Ark had done.
According to the Torah’s account, the divine decision was sealed with the appearance of the rainbow: a blend of diverse colors joining two distant points.
In moments like those we are experiencing now in Israel and around the world, and in times here in the U.S. when Americans face complex elections with uncertain national and global political consequences, we must remember the message of our parashah:
Only by working together in diversity can we hope to bridge the distant points. Only by listening, seeking information from reliable sources, and observing the overwhelming reality carefully, can we weather these floods. And then, surely, we will see the waters calm and the doors of our Ark open to build a better world.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Gustavo Geier