Noach: The Tower of Babel

The last crisis of humanity before Avraham appears on the universal stage is that of the Dor Haflagah (the generation of the Dispersion), the generation of the Tower of Babel. Here is how the Torah introduces this generation: “The whole earth had one language and uniform words. And as they journeyed from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire.’ And the brick served them as stone, and the bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top reaches the heavens, and let us make ourselves a lasting establishment, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth.'”

“G-d came down to see the city and the tower that the children of men were building. And He said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language; this is what they have begun to do, and now nothing that they have planned will be beyond their reach. Come, let Us go down and confound their language there, so that one will not understand the speech of the other.'” What is clear is that the sin of the Tower of Babel is not explicit; we do not know what it really consisted of. For in the end, all that happened is that humanity devoted itself to developing technology on every front, and that a common language appeared: Vayehi khol ha’aretz safah echat u-devarim achadim — “The whole earth had one language and uniform words.”

Now, this safah echat — what is this language? Rashi says it is lashon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue. What, then, are the devarim achadim, the identical words, the united words? We understand that they are the different languages distributed among the seventy nations, the shiv’im leshonot (seventy languages), and that they are modes of interpretation, modes of perception. For we can always speak the same language and yet, as regards meaning, perceive it differently, each according to his sensitivity, his intellectual level — his finesse of mind, let us say. So these first generations after the Flood — we are four hundred years after the Flood — are the descendants of Shem, Ham and Yefet, the three sons of Noach. Just as at Creation there were four rivers that divided, that branched out from the Garden of Eden into four streams — one river dividing into four streams — so here humanity too divided into different streams: Shem, Ham, Yefet, and of course Noach, who was the father. But afterwards, the one who would take Noach’s place, as we have said, is Avraham. We will come back to the meaning of these four streams, which correspond to the four letters of the Divine Name, Yud-Heh… But the essential point is that there is an intuition of the sacred common to all of them. And we can understand this: these first generations were not as primitive as all that, for they did develop philosophy, mathematics, physics, commerce, industry, as we have seen. They also developed the art of music.

These are generations seized by a will to create and competing with one another in many fields. When we read the chapters preceding chapter 11, we see that there is nonetheless a difference between the first generations, from Adam to Noach, and the second series — the second set of ten generations that follow one another, from Noach to Avraham. And this begins already with Noach’s ark. You will recall that Hashem had asked Noach to take a pair of each species and gather it into the ark so as to perpetuate the species afterwards. That ark was a microcosm meant to ensure a new humanity, a new creation — as if the earlier creation had so far been only a draft, and now we were moving on to a new creation. For G-d could have eliminated that generation with an epidemic; there was no need to use a flood to wipe out humanity and return to the chaos that preceded Creation, when water covered everything. The aim was to launch a new creation. And that is why, unlike the single pair that represented each species, in Noach’s family there was not just one couple: there was Noach, his sons and their wives — two generations, not just one. And if one asks why, since a single generation would have been enough to perpetuate humanity, the answer is that from now on we are going to witness the birth of the family, of the collective.

There is an important detail in the first generations: when each child and his offspring were listed, they were not presented as attached to parents or grandparents. No — they were separate individualities. And then vayamot, “and he died,” and their death, as it were, left room for no inheritance. That is to say, from Adam HaRishon (the first man) until Noach, there was no family. People, even within the same family, lived as individuals. There was no father–child relationship, still less a relationship of children to parents or grandparents. After the Flood, on the other hand, what is said? First, when HaKadosh Baruch Hu (the Holy One, blessed be He) invites Noach into the ark — and it is a command — it says: Vayavo Noach u-vanav ve-ishto u-neshei vanav ito el ha-teivah mipnei mei ha-mabul.

“Noach came, with his sons, his wife and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the Flood.” The text should have said “Noach and his wife, the sons and the sons’ wives,” the daughters-in-law. But the text separated them, and our Sages say that it contains a recommendation — one we are familiar with — namely, that when an epidemic is raging, or when war is knocking at our doors, it would be better to refrain from having children. This is the only regulation of births, so to speak, in the Torah: when there is famine, when war threatens, and when an epidemic wreaks havoc, it is better to wait and to limit births. And where do we learn it from? From here — because it says Noach u-vanav, “Noach and his sons,” and only then ve-ishto, “and his wife.” The sons separate Noach from his wife, just as they separate the sons from their wives. That is while they are in the ark. But when they leave the ark, the text expresses itself differently. They do not need a divine command to leave the ark — or rather, if that divine command does appear, it is so that G-d may, in effect, reveal His laws to Noach and his sons.

Look at this verse, where it says Vayetze Noach u-vanav ve-ishto u-neshei vanav ito — “Noach went out, and his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives with him.” But at first, what is said? Tze min ha-teivah, atah ve-ishtekha u-vanekha u-neshei vanekha itakh — G-d says to him, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife” — that is, you may resume your married life — “and your sons and your sons’ wives with you.” Very good. But Noach would wait for some time, because considering the disaster of the Flood that had wiped everything out, he would ask himself whether it was still worth bringing children into the world. This had been the concern of Adam HaRishon when he saw how Kayin killed his brother, and he said: if this is what comes of bringing children into the world, better to refrain altogether. But what is important here is that for the first time G-d blesses Noach and his sons, and says to them Peru u-revu u-mil’u et ha-aretz — “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” In principle, prophecy is addressed to a person, not to a family. When G-d revealed Himself to an entire people, it was only at Mount Sinai. But it so happens that this new humanity, to which G-d is about to give His first revelation — and the first revelation is the seven Noahide laws — He addresses the whole family, and says to it u-mil’u et ha-aretz: above all, do not concentrate yourselves in one place; you must spread out over the earth, you must truly occupy the whole earth, and for that, be fruitful and multiply.

Very well. But this means that now the family is constituted, the family is consecrated. From now on we will witness parents who stand at the head of their children, children imbued with respect for their parents, and this is borne out when Shem and Yefet cover their father’s nakedness. And when the family is constituted, there is a will […]. This idea is important — so much so that in the list of the generations that followed, down to Avraham, the term vayamot does not appear. They begot sons and daughters, but the word “to die” is not there: there is no death when there are children who take up the relay. Having underlined the importance of these details, we see that now the society — or the constituted family — will set itself goals; it will indeed seek to preserve this unity through language: safah echat — Vayehi khol ha’aretz safah echat, “The whole earth had one language” (Bereshit 11:1). You know very well that every time the Torah says vayehi, it is an expression of woe. It announces an evil event. What harm is there in having one language? What harm is there in speaking the same tongue? And yet the Creator intervenes in such a way that He will scatter the families and force them to speak different languages.

We have seen something of what this word safah means, for when we say safah, what is the difference between safah and lashon? Both mean “language.” Safah is the lips; it is an outer language. Lashon, the tongue inside the mouth, is the one that refines everything — that is an inner language, lashon. Safah and lashon: safah has a numerical value of 385, lashon a numerical value of 386 — that is, 385 plus one. This would mean that lashon stands one degree higher, that it has the capacity to integrate all other idioms, all other languages; it can indeed bring them back to their source. And that is what makes the difference between lashon ha-kodesh and mere language.

This is important — let me open a parenthesis here — to show the difference between the Rambam and the Ramban in how they perceive language. What is language? Is it truly a social consensus, something that developed over time as people named objects in the course of their communication? Or is it truly a creation, the language of the sacred? The Ramban says it is the language of the sacred. The Hebrew language — note that “the Hebrew language,” ivrit, and yehudit designate the language of the Jewish people. In the Tanakh the word ivrit does not occur; in the Tanakh the Hebrew language is designated otherwise, for instance as “the language of Canaan.” It is in the Mishnah that we find lashon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue, and ivrit, the Hebrew language. This, then, marks the difference with the conception of the Rambam, who says that the Hebrew language has nothing of that at first sight, except that it is a clean language, which does not even have, for example, names for the carnal organs; there is no vulgarity, no coarse words in the language. It is a clean language, a clean language, and it is the purity, the cleanliness of its speech that raised it to the rank of holiness. Whereas for the Ramban, no: it is the language of the sacred, the language of G-d’s revelation to the people of Israel. What is more, there is a third idea: that the Hebrew language, the language of Creation, is a code — just as there are chemical formulas that designate compound or created substances, so it is with the Hebrew alphabet. Consequently, if the world was created through the letters, through speech, we should find in every common noun the components, the constituents, of each element.

But this is a parenthesis, opened in order to say that safah echat u-devarim achadim all depends on how one understands it. For if one goes along with the Rambam, there would have been an evolution of the language. If one adopts the position of the Ramban, it is rather a vulgarization of the language that took place over time. The Torah would originally have been given in the Hebrew language, and afterwards this language was transformed over time; it was translated into Aramaic, and in the time of Ezra it was restored to its value. So there was a loss of substance of the original language, and with the return of the exiles from Babylon there was a rebirth of this language, in what is called ktav ashuri — which is, moreover, the script in which the sefer Torah is written. But this script was not the original script; there was another script, which the Samaritans preserved in their writings. How is it, then, that we have given such importance to this script that if there is a break or a deformation in it, we do not use the sefer Torah, we say that the sefer Torah must be corrected and cannot be used as a reference in the meantime? It is because this “Assyrian” script, ktav ashuri, is the original script, but one that recovered its value, its origins, only in the time of Ezra.

Now I return to the text: Vayehi khol ha’aretz safah echat. The people had an intuition of the sacred in their language. For the difference between those first generations and us is that those first generations lived this nearness to G-d, this relationship to the sacred, this spiritual quest from within. It was not quite an intellectual approach as it is with us today — no, it was truly something lived from within, and for that reason the differences, the different perceptions, were varied. But when it becomes safah echat u-devarim achadim — when people begin to swear by a single interpretation, one single and unique interpretation, one single and unique perception of essence, one single and unique language, and the different sensibilities are killed off — then it is a misfortune. That is a misfortune. You see, then, that there is a sameness here — a sameness that prevents unity, if in the end everyone stands there thinking the same thing and feeding on the very same elements. Then what is the point of being a million, two million, three million people, since in the end we all resemble one another? And the midrash says it: the person no longer counted. He was less important than the machine being built, than the brick being made. When the building suffered a fall and a loss, people wept; but when a man fell from the scaffolding, he was replaced immediately. Why? Because man had lost his uniqueness, his personality, his own perception of things, which had been different. Yet there can be unity only if we are different from one another. If we are not different from one another, there is no unity either. What G-d will do is to make Avraham the unifier of all tendencies. That is why we are not inclined to convert the world to a single belief — not at all. The whole universe, all of humanity, does not have to be of Jewish practice. No: we must bring the different beliefs, the different individualities, to converge on that point where G-d is One and His Name is One.

And then, at that time, it will not be safah echat, not one single language; it will be az — “For then I will turn the peoples to a clear language” — because the values that are the cement of all these cultures, all these civilizations, all these beliefs are the same. The mode of perception is different, but there is a language capable of being the common denominator of all these sensibilities, all these interpretations, all these perceptions: it is the Hebrew language — just as Avraham would be for humanity: Ve-nivrekhu vekha kol mishpechot ha-adamah, “Through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” — all the families of the earth, with their different beliefs.

Yes, that’s right. So now we understand Vayehi khol ha’aretz safah echat. The whole earth was on one side, for safah — as in sfat yam, the seashore — is an edge. Safah echat: they were all on the same side. Devarim achadim: different perceptions, but secondary ones. And these different, secondary perceptions are the ones that would prevail over that intuition of the holy tongue, so that the generations, little by little, would each develop its own language, each its own sensibility; people would no longer understand one another’s language, communication would become difficult — but the spiritual quest would be the only cement that could truly unify everyone. And not, as the generation of the Tower of Babel wanted, to found this on the development of industry, technological success, concentration in one place — for what they were in effect trying to do was eliminate G-d’s presence from the development, from the march, of history.

That is the meaning of migdal ve-rosho va-shamayim: we are going to build a tower whose top will reach the heavens. We are going toward an ideology that will compete with the one that comes from Heaven, one that could occupy people’s minds and turn them away, little by little, from the intuition of the sacred they carried within them. That is the feat that Nimrod, melekh Bavel (king of Babel), would pull off. Nimrod is the first king in history, and he is the one who drives this consciousness of G-d out of the minds of the generations, by developing an industry. And it was he, indeed, who sought to throw Avraham into the fiery furnace, because there was a fundamental difference between him and Avraham. Avraham stood for variety, for the sheaf of beliefs unified like the rainbow, didn’t he? But for Nimrod, this ideology, this civilization, had at all costs to break humanity’s dependence on the Creator.

So what happens? It is when they distanced themselves from the Ancient One of the world — the Ancient One of the world — that is what the text says. Here I will read Rashi instead: Ba’u be-etzah achat ve-amru: lo kol hemenu she-yavor lo et ha-elyonim — “They came to a common counsel and said: it is not for Him alone to choose the upper realms for Himself.” Na’aleh la-raki’a — “Let us go up to the firmament”: we are going to explore space, we are going to build a tower into space — today it would be a rocket, like the ones we see in space — “and we will wage war against Him.” Another interpretation: against the Unique One of the world. And yet another: they said that once every 1,656 years the firmament collapses — the spiritual falls apart — so we will make sure these values do not fall apart, and we will prop them up artificially with our ideology, with our way of seeing things.

So there are, in sum, three ideas here — three ideas that Rashi highlights and that call for reflection. On the one hand, they want to wage battle against the Unique One, that is, against G-d. On the other hand, they want to prevent justice from being done, prevent there being any justice. How do they prevent there being justice? From the moment we are all […] — excuse me, the noise disturbs me — G-d is pushed away on one side, but the spiritual quest is sought elsewhere. It is sought elsewhere, in one’s own philosophy, in one’s own perception of things; that is, even the spiritual quest becomes subjective, each at his own level, each as he sees fit.

That is possible, but on condition that the person is not a captive. What is a captive? Today, a man who grew up […] in a place where there is no Jewish community at all, no Jewish structures, no Jewish schools. Well, it is not his fault. He landed — or grew up — in spite of himself in a place where, as for spiritual life, he knows nothing of it. We are not to judge him, we are not to condemn him, we are not to make him feel guilty. It is not his fault. So what Nimrod wanted was to create this void, so that people, busy with their daily bread, with their family problems, with the success of their plans for the future, would drift away little by little from this spiritual quest and adhere instead, let us say, to a spirituality of lesser demands.

He succeeded — he succeeded. And G-d is concerned, saying that if ever there is a single mode of thought, a single mode of practice, a single mode of purpose, then it is truly the end of any possibility of a union of humanity’s different energies. Yet the union of these different energies can be ensured only by the spiritual cement — each person’s search, each person’s quest. That is why He will scatter them across the world, scatter them through different languages, different cultures, so that they can develop their personalities. It will be, if you like, a secondary or accessory development, but the purpose of that development is to bring all sensibilities, all perceptions, to one single, unique perception that embraces absolutely everything: that of Avraham. I will stop here; if you have questions, please ask them. I will take up this text once more when we resume after the break, before moving on to the revolution that Avraham would undertake in relation to Adam and in relation to Noach. For we must not forget that in the same way, HaKadosh Baruch Hu considers Adam’s sin and condemns him to exile from the Garden of Eden. He does the same thing — undertakes the same thing — with the collective now, by dispersing it throughout the world. It is a world of exile: there, it was man as an individual who had to make the effort to rebuild himself; here, it is society that will have to take itself in hand in order to fulfill itself completely.