Shabbat shalom.
Our portion contains a story most of us learned as children, and we learned it as a story about punishment: the story of the Tower of Bavel. The whole world spoke one language. The people got proud, they built a tower up to heaven, and God, annoyed, scrambled their language so they couldn’t understand each other anymore. And that, says the children’s book, is why there are so many languages in the world. Diversity as a curse. Babel as babble.
So tonight I want to share that I don’t think the Torah tells it that way at all. It is true that if you are going to take the story from its context, you would begin with “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one set of words.”
But before we get to that verse, let’s look at what comes right before it. This is a chapter almost nobody reads, a long list of names, the generations of Noach’s sons, Shem, Ham and Yefet. We skim it. It’s genealogy. But when we read it slowly, we find a repetition that is very important.
After the sons of Yefet: ish lil’shono, le-mishpechotam, be-goyehem, which means – each with its own language, by their families, in their nations. After the sons of Ham: le-mishpechotam, lil’shonotam, by their families, by their languages. After the sons of Shem: le-mishpechotam, lil’shonotam, by their families, by their languages. Not once, but three times the Torah tells us: after the flood, humanity spread out over the earth, and they spoke many languages.
So when we get to chapter 11, “and the whole earth was one language,” careful readers know something is wrong. The world of chapter 10 had many languages. Where did this one language come from?
And having many languages was not a curse. God had said to Noach and his sons when they came off the ark: pru u’revu u’mil’u et ha’aretz, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Chapter 10 is that blessing coming true: we read about families, groups, languages, filling the earth. Diversity in the Torah is not a punishment. Diversity is the plan.
Now, chapter 10 hides a clue. In the middle of that long list, one person gets more than a name. Nimrod, the mighty hunter. And the Torah tells us: the beginning of his kingdom was Bavel, and Erekh, and Akkad, in the land of Shinar. And from that land Ashur went out, and built Nineveh. Bavel. Akkad. Ashur. Nineveh. The Torah is pointing us toward Mesopotamia. Toward the land of the first empires.
Now please, let me tell you about one of those emperors. Thanks to excavations in the 19th century, we know that seven hundred and twenty years before the common era, Assyria was the superpower of the world. Its king, Sargon the Second, is the same Sargon who carried off the people of Samaria, our own ten lost tribes, this Sargon decided to build himself a brand-new capital. He called it Dur-Sharrukin which translates to Fort Sargon. A city named after himself.
And in the foundations of that city, he buried clay cylinders with an inscription. In those cylinders we read taht he brought there peoples from the four corners of the world, people of foreign tongues and strange speech, people of the mountains and people of the plains, all of them captives. And he made them one mouth. And he sent Assyrian officials to teach them how to fear god and king.
One mouth. Safah echat. That was the Assyrian empire’s answer to difference: erase it.
Tear people from their lands, mix them together, and make them speak the language of the king. Akkadian, the language of the very Akkad our parasha names. One language. One set of words. One approved way of thinking.
Now let’s listen to what the people of Bavel say in our portion: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
What are they afraid of? They fear the very thing God blessed. Filling the earth. Being many. Spreading out. They want one city, one tower, one name, one language. They wanted what Sargon wanted.
Now we learn from history that Sargon never finished his city. In 705 he died on the battlefield, his body was never recovered, the worst fate an Assyrian king could imagine.
His son abandoned Dur-Sharrukin and moved the capital to Nineveh. The great city of one language stood unfinished. In our text, the Torah says: And they stopped building the city.
Whether or not the author of Genesis had Sargon himself in mind, and modern day scholars debate it, the Torah’s story reads like protest literature. A small people, a people that was itself carried off by empires, telling the superpower: your tower will not stand. God does not want one mouth. God’s answer to Bavel is not a curse. It is a restoration. It sends us back to chapter 10: back to many families, different lands, many languages. Back to the blessing of diversity.
Now one last detail: the people inside the city of Bavel say to one another: Come, let us make bricks. The narrator’s voice interjects: And the brick became their stone.
Think about the difference between a brick and a stone. A stone is found. Every stone is different. Its shape, its weight, its color, the way it fits against the stone beside it. Now a brick is different. Every brick comes out of the same mold. Every brick is interchangeable with every other brick. That is the whole point of a brick.
The midrash in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer saw where that leads. As the tower rose higher, if a person fell and died, no one paid attention. But if a brick fell, they sat and wept: when will another one come up to take its place? When a society builds with bricks, it starts to see its people as bricks. Replaceable. Uniform. Worth something only as long as they fit the mold.
Much farther down in the Torah, when we get to how to build an altar to God, it says: build the altar with whole stones. Not cut. Not shaped to match. By which it means: not bricks – but stones, each one different from another.
That is what a community is supposed to be. And it is harder than it sounds. Because the spirit of Bavel doesn’t only live out there, in empires. It lives in every one of us. It’s the little voice that says: wouldn’t it be easier if everyone here did Judaism the way I do it? Prayed the way I pray, cared about what I care about, spoke my language? A synagogue can turn into a brick factory without anyone noticing.
Ours, thank God, is a building of stones. Every age, every background, every road into Judaism, every way of giving. And this Shabbat we get to honor two of those stones.
Melissa Olczak and Ruth Borsuk are our Volunteers of the Year. And I want to say something about the fact that there are two of them.
Because they are not the same, and that is exactly the point – as Honor will tell us later, they come in two very different shapes. Each brings different languages of chesed, of lovingkindness. Neither of them could ever be replaced by a brick out of a mold. If either one were missing, there would be a gap in our community shaped exactly like her.
So I want to say – personally – Melissa and Ruth, thank you. You keep building this house the way God asks an altar to be built: with whole stones, bringing diversity and the whole of who you are.
The builders of Bavel wanted to make a name for themselves, and they built a tower that no one remembers who built. We need archeology to maybe point out – and if it weren’t for the excavations done in the 19th century, we would never have proof that Sargon II existed – he is mentioned in the book of Isaiah.
And next week, in the Torah reading, God will say to a man named Avram: I will make your name great. A name is not something we build by making everyone the same. It is the blessing that comes when each of us brings what only we can bring.
So may we build like the children of Noach in chapter 10, and not like the builders of chapter 11. May we be a community of many stones, connected by one heart – the heart that loves diversity. Not bricks, but stones. Whole stones. Shabbat shalom.