Noah - "Political Babel"

Parashat Noah 5769 – November 1, 2008

Political Babel

We may not always have the same principles or even the same language with which to express our ideals, but living in a democracy demands that we once again learn to talk to one another.

If only we could stop this partisan bickering and come together as one nation to achieve a common purpose? We hear this sentiment expressed often these days. The pundits, pollsters, and politicians themselves tell us often that Americans are tired of the rancor and maneuvering of “Washington politics as usual” that puts ideology and party above pragmatic solutions to the problems that face us. We don’t want all this ideological fighting; we want leaders who have good ideas, right?

In the abstract, this desire for unity and pragmatism is understandable. Most of us don’t take pleasure in arguing with our friends and neighbors… though watching some of you debate at kiddush, one might think otherwise… we want to get along and work together. Or, perhaps, we just want to be left alone and avoid discord. You might be tempted to throw the remote at the TV every time you see a new political ad.

Perhaps this yearning for unity and mutual understanding is natural in us. Indeed, it seems like a universal impulse. So much so, that we find this theme in the most ancient stories known to humanity. Many of us know the story of the Tower of Babel. Similar stories can be found in other ancient Mesopotamian cultures as well. In the Torah, it comprises just nine short verses and it is often overlooked by commentators. But, I find the story of Babel fascinating because the people of Babel also express the human yearning for unity. Verse 4 of chapter 11 states: [The people] 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; lest we be scattered all over the world.” On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with their desire. They just want to put aside their difference and be unified.

At the beginning of the chapter we read that “everyone on earth had the same language and the same words.” But this seems odd in light of the chapter that precedes the story. The account of the generations after the flood clearly states that Noah’s descendants spread out over the earth, forming nations, each people with their own language. In fact, God explicitly commands Noah and his sons to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gn. 9:1). God, it seems, favors diversity and difference. God wants us to speak different languages and live in different cultures. But, in 10:8ff we read about a very obscure biblical character. His name is Nimrod and he is the first ruler of Babylonia. The Torah says he was the first “man of might” in the world. And that’s all we hear about Nimrod. Some commentators pick up on this thread of connection between Nimrod, the king of Bavel, and the story about the tower of Bavel. How, they ask, did we go from diverse people and languages to all the people of the world coming together in single-minded unity? The answer, they speculate, is that Nimrod was a totalitarian ruler who convinced everyone, through persuasion or force, to be the same and speak the same language. Therefore the sin of Babel is the sin of too much unity. That yearning for unity and agreement is perhaps natural and understandable – we long for a single social order and imagine that in the good old days there once was a simpler and clearer morality. But that desire for unity is also the impulse behind totalitarianism.

The Torah says that “Adonai came down to look at the city and the tower that man 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.” There are a number of interpretations possible to explain this story. I want to propose to you that the problem of the tower of Babel is the problem of totalitarianism and the worship of power. In the midrashic collection known as Pirkei de Rebbi Eliezer (24), the sages hint at this problem. The Midrash says that the tower reached so high into the sky that it would take a year to carry one brick up to the top. Therefore, a single brick became more precious than a human being. If a worker fell off the tower and plummeted to his death, no one would even pay attention – people were replaceable – but if a brick fell off, the people would sit and weep because they knew it would take a year to replace it. The tower, you see, the symbol of the people’s own might and unity had become an end in itself. When power is more important than people, when symbols of unity take precedence over the immeasurable worth of each human being, when diversity of thought and ambiguity is not tolerated, we call that totalitarianism and fascism.

Therefore, God’s solution was to force diversity upon the people of Babel by confounding their language. Now people spoke many different languages and thus they could no longer cooperate. They abandoned the project and dispersed throughout the earth. Perhaps this was a necessary corrective, but God’s solution also brought with it other challenges. In his book Ethics After Babel, philosopher Jeffrey Stout writes:

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.

In the world we have inherited, disagreement and differences are necessary. No one has unmediated access to universal truth and absolute morality. Yet, we are faced with real problems. There are needs in our communities that we cannot solve as separate individuals. We need to draw together and use our combined intelligence and power to solve these problems. And, there is no way to solve these problems without ideologies – after all, ideology just means a set of principles and a worldview that informs your decision making. It is a core set of values based on a thoughtful analysis of how the world works. But, the problem, Stout notes, is that we often lose the ability to even communicate with one another. We don’t share even a common language with which to discuss these important questions.

The problem with the politics of the day is not that it is too ideological, however. The problem is that it isn’t ideological enough. When politics is cleansed of principled discussion and ideological debates, it descends into the trivia and personal attacks we all detest. We can’t have total unity and single-mindedness. That would be totalitarianism. We also can’t afford to talk past one another. What we need is thoughtful, principled conversation. Sometimes we don’t have the same principles or even the same language with which to express our ideals, but living in a democracy demands that we once again learn to talk to one another.

Shabbat Shalom.