Noaj 5776 - English

By Rabbi gustavo Kraselnik

Kol Shearith Israel - Panama 

Barely nine verses (Bereshit 11:1-9) comprise the well-known story of the Tower of Babel.  The first four relate the initiative the human beings had of building in the valley of Shinar a city with a tower that would reach the sky.  The final five narrate the divine intervention that impedes the project by confusing their tongues and forcing their dispersion.  

One of the most fascinating aspects of this short tale is that it does not explain specifically what these people’s offense was that merited God’s involvement.  Throughout the centuries, there have been different answers.  Possibly the most famous one is quoted by the Midrash (Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 24:3), on how the builders valued bricks more than human lives: 

(The Tower) Had stairs to the east and to the west and those that brought up bricks climbed by the east and those that went down did so by the west.  If a man fell and died nobody felt it; but if a brick fell they would sit down and cry: Oh, when will another come up in its place!

The fact that the Midrash places an emphasis on the bricks does not seem a minor detail.  If we read the biblical tale attentively, we find that the initial proposal, before the construction, called for the making of bricks (Gen. 11:3):

They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard." 

Rashi explains that the need for bricks appears because the region of Babel is a valley and therefore has no stones.  However, we might go deeper and connect the bricks of Babel with the ones that later the Israelites in Egypt would have to make as part of their slave work.  (Ex. 1:14, 5:7-8 and 16-19)

The link is textual (only in those two stories in the Torah does the term Levenim/bricks appear) but also appreciatory.  In both tales, it takes a negative place as an instrument to show the arrogance of the mighty.  

There is something more.  Be it for geographical, technological or cultural reasons, the biblical world prefers stones to bricks (the word Even/Stone appears more than 250 times in the Hebrew Bible against only 12 appearances of Levena/brick).  From there, the central importance of the brick in our tale.  

Unlike stone which is created by God, brick is a human creation.  Each stone has its own shape and peculiarity, but bricks are homogeneous, they are all the same.  Here we find a significant fact: the use of brick by the builders of the tower seems to be their way of conceiving a world where we are all equal.  

If we accept the divine “punishment” according to the principle of “Midah Kenegued Midah” -something like “measure for measure”- where the answer corresponds to the action, this would mean that the confusion of tongues and dispersion could be the refutation of this attempt to homogenize by the builders of the tower.  

From this perspective, the grave offense of that generation was trying to achieve uniformity of the human species, where everyone would be the same, talk the same, think the same and act in an identical manner.  It is worth noting that the entire tale of what transpired in Shinar is written in first-person plural.  

Following this line of thought, the Tower of Babel would be nothing less than an ancestor to the panoptic theory mentioned by Michel Foucault in his classic book Discipline and Punish (an architectural proposal from the end of the XVII Century for the construction of prisons with a central watchtower that allowed the guard to control all the prisoners).

The bricks from our tale are not only a means for physical construction, but a metaphor for social construction.  Identical bricks for the tower, identical people for society.  

God’s decision to come down and take matters into his own hands gives the standard for the gravity of this threat.  A uniform, homogeneous and monotonous world is exactly the opposite of the divine plan.  

Idiomatic pluralism and geographical dispersion as expressions of cultural, political and religious diversity should not be seen as a punishment (although it was for that generation), but as an affirmation of the divine conviction that calls us to build a world where variety and heterogeneity enrich the different perspectives.  

Let us be stones and not bricks.  Let us appreciate each human being and his or her peculiarity and let us learn to celebrate the differences.  

Shabbat Shalom

Gustavo