~ What was, according to you, the sin of the people around the Tower of Bavel? There are many possibilities, so look closely at the text as we are reading it.
(Multigenerational, multivocal, composed in Talmudic Israel/Babylon, c.630 - c.1030 CE)
Rabbi Phineas said: There were no stones there where-with to build the city and the tower. What did they do? They baked bricks and burnt them like a builder (would do), until they built it seven mils high, and it had ascents on its east and west. (The labourers) who took up the bricks went up on the eastern (ascent), and those who descended went down on the western (descent). If a man fell and died they paid no heed to him, but if a brick fell they sat down and wept, and said: Woe is us ! when will another one come in its stead?
~ First possibility: the construction itself became more valuable than human life.
(1) שפה אחת ONE LANGUAGE — The Holy Tongue (Hebrew) (Midrash Tanchuma, Noach 19). (2) ודברים אחדים AND ONE SPEECH — They came with one plan, saying: “He has no right to select the heavenly regions exclusively for Himself; let us ascend to the skies and make war upon Him”. Another explanation (of דברים אחדים which is taken to mean “words referring to “One”): words regarding the Sole Being (God) in the Universe. Another explanation of ודברים אחדים is: they spoke דברים חדים “sharp” words; they said, “Once in every one thousand six hundred and fifty six years (the period that elapsed from the Creation to the Flood) there is a heaven-shaking, just as there was in the days of the Flood. Come. then, and let us make supports for it” (Genesis Rabbah 38:6).
~ Rashi, of course, asks the question: what language could they possibly be speaking? Hebrew, of course. But the "Holy Tongue" does not help to make the purpose holy. It is not the externals that matter.
A second idea: lack of trust begets lack of trust - the people are easily moved with an idea of holding up the sky.
Rabbeinu Bahya imagines something similar: the fear of a "deluge of fire".
וע"ד השכל ונעשה לנו שם, היו אנשי הפלגה רשעים משכילים בכל חכמה ועשו העיר והמגדל כדי להנצל מהמבול של אש, מפני שכבר ראו אבדון העולם במבול של מים, פחדו לנפשם והוצרכו לעשות בנין מקום שאם ירצה להביא מבול של אש ולשרוף את העולם שינצלו מהם ולא תקרב האש בגבולם....ולקשור חלק מיסוד האש שלא יוכל להתקרב אל העיר, כשם שמצינו אף בדורנו זה קצת החכמים שיודעים כח לקשור חלק אחד מן הברק. [והוא הידוע כעת בשם "דאננעראבלייטער" ונמצא רושם מזה גם בתוספתא שבת פ"ז]
( Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, 1255-1340, Spain)
Looking at this story from a rational point of view, the words “and let us make a name for ourselves,” must be understood thus: the people of that generation were very advanced in matters of philosophy and even technology. However, they used their intelligence in a sinful manner. They constructed the city and tower to protect themselves against a deluge of fire, seeing that God had promised not to again bring a deluge of water....They tried to isolate and tame the power of fire in order to neutralize its deadly effect so that it could not engulf their city, as we have found also in our generation that some scholars [scientists] know how to harness some of the strength of lightning. [Editorial note by translator, R. Eliyahu Munk (1998): This is know in our time as "lightning rod," and we can find a mention of this also in Tosefta Shabbat, Chapter 7.]
Necessary background: God has told the descendants of Noach to spread out and multiply.
(Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, France, c.1080 - c.1160; a grandson of Rashi)
Let's build a city - if, according to the plain meaning and the commonly held opinion, the people of that time were punished for their grandiose plan of building a Tower which was meant to reach the heaven, what are we to make of Deuteronomy 1:28 in which Moses described cities of the Canaanites as having walls as high as the heaven? Why were these walls not destroyed by God? We must revise our opinion of why the people were punished, and accept that their principal sin was in not fulfilling God’s basic directive to be fruitful, to multiply, and to populate the whole earth, not just a small valley. Their declared objective had been not to scatter (verse 4) The fact that God forcefully scattered them afterwards shows that their sin must have been their failure to do so voluntarily.
~ The problem, according to the Rashbam, is not the construction project itself, but the idea that they were so intensily married to the idea of not scattering that they wouldn't reproduce: the scattering was supposed to be voluntary.
The Tanchuma, below, takes the tower constructors to task: the first possibility is their unwillingness to learn from history.
(Multigenerational, multivocal, composed in Talmudic Babylon/Israel/Italy c.500 - c.800 CE)
Similarly, the generation of the separation failed to learn from the experience of preceding generations. Hence it is written: Though you should pound a fool in a mortar with a pestle among groats, yet will not his foolishness depart (Prov. 27:22). What is meant by among groats (harifut)? This refers to the men of the generation of the separation, who blasphemed (m’harifin bepihem) the Unique One of the world.
~ The second idea is the unwillingness to accept that there is a power above human power. This might remind us of the discussion of last week regarding the "children of the powerful" and the "daughters of men" as the spark for God's anger regarding the generation of the Flood.
Similarly, the men of the generation of the flood proclaimed: “Come, let us build us a city (Gen. 11:4), so that He may descend to earth and we may ascend to heaven. But if He should not descend, then let us wage war against Him.” The Holy One, blessed be He, did not restrain them, but declared instead: Do whatever ye desire, as it is said: And now nothing will be withholden from them, which they propose to do (ibid., v. 6). He that sits in heaven laughs,Ad-nai has them in derision (Ps. 2:4). Had He not permitted them to build the tower, they would have claimed: “If we had built the tower, we would have ascended and waged war against Him.” Therefore, He allowed them to erect the tower. After that, He looked down upon them and scattered them, as is said: From there Ad-nai scattered them (Gen. 11:9). He rebuked them, saying: You declared Lest we be scattered over the entire earth; therefore you shall be scattered over the face of the earth. Hence it is written: The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon them (Prov. 10:24).
~ Finally, Tanchuma brings the possibility of lack of justice.
Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (1816 in Mir, Russia – August 10, 1893 in Warsaw, Poland), also known as Reb Hirsch Leib Berlin, and commonly known by the acronym Netziv, was an Orthodox rabbi, dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva and author of several works of rabbinic literature in Lithuania, including Haamek Davar.
שפה אחת. זה גרם לחטא א׳. היינו שיסכימו לשבת כולן בקבוץ אחד. וזהו נגד רצון ה׳ שאמר שרצו בארץ ורבו בה היינו להתהלך לארכה ולרחבה כי לשבת יצרה:
One language - that is what caused the first sin. This is that they agreed to stop in one single place. And this is against the will of God that said to "fill the land and replenish it" (Gen. 9:7, command given to Noah's children) - that is, to walk to all its places, since the land was created to be settled.
And the same words - The text did not explain what those words were, rather, it leaves as a hint, as explained in midrashim. But the words themselves are not explained by the text, it just tells us that they were the same words, to teach us that it wasn't because of the content of the words themselves that the Holy One of Blessing was distressed. They were what they were, and in its simplicity there is not sin, and on the contrary all appears well. But here what happened is that all thought the same thing, and this came to be the problem of the settlement.
Rachel Anisfeld insightfully connects the fact that the same sounds (B,V,N,L,S,SH) keep repeating over and over again throughout the story to the predicament of oppressive uniformity: “All of these repetitions create a throbbing, hypnotizing rhythm and a grating sense of sameness. All the people speak in the same manner, saying the same things with the same words because this is the communal refrain that has been inculcated into their consciousness through mesmerizing repetition.” Rachel Anisfeld, “The Generation of Bavel: A Misguided Unity,” Bikkurim: Midreshet Lindenbaum Torah Journal (May 1990), p. 9, cited in Klitsner, Subversive Sequels, p. 43.
The phrase kol ha-aretz appears five times in the nine verses: all three-, five- and especially seven-fold repetitions in a biblical passage signal the presence of a key theme.
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
(W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939;
full poem at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/september-1-1939)
Also, note that there are no names in this story. Before and after there are names given, but both in the story of the generation of the flood and in this story the names disappear. It is significant that in a place where all think similarly, names do not matter. In a place that all move together, names do not matter. In a place where a brick falling is more important than a person falling, names do not matter.
That is why Abraham comes after this story: neither Abraham nor his descendants are commanded to convert the world. To the contrary, they are charged with the task of being different, of accepting those who want to join but not imposing Judaism in the rest of the world.