Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

The Torah portion for this week contains two stories, one of destruction and one of dispersal.

In the story of Noah, God regrets that he has created humankind. The Torah tells us that the “earth was filled with lawlessness”. According to the sages, a merchant would bring a cartload of grapes through the marketplace. This one would steal a few grapes, and another would steal a few grapes. None would steal enough to be liable for punishment, but at the end of the marketplace, the merchant would have no grapes.  In this way, the people evaded justice and made a mockery out of the law. 

In the story of the Tower of Babel, all the people of the world gathered to build a great city and a tower that would reach the heavens. What is so bad about that? According to the sages the builders would bring the bricks up on a staircase from one direction and descend in another direction.  If a man fell and died during the construction, the people paid no attention to it. If a brick fell, however, the people would sit down and weep – “Woe to us. Where will we find another brick to replace it!”

The stories of the sages may seem fanciful, but they impart a serious message. The stories represent two polar extremes of societies.  In the flood story, each individual is out for themselves. There is no social cohesion.  There is no sense of responsibility to others, or to society as a whole.  In the Tower of Babel story, there is no value placed on the individual.  All that matters is the goals of society.  The individual can be sacrificed for the so-called “greater good”. 

Societies must strike a balance between individual liberties and the needs of the society.  Where societies strike that balance determines how successful they will be.  G-d’s punishment fit the crime. The generation of the Flood would never coalesce into a functioning community.  The individuals in that society were corrupted by selfishness and greed. Therefore, each individual had to be destroyed. In the story of the Tower of Babel it is the society as a whole that is the problem. Therefore, the society needed to be destroyed by dispersing the individuals to the far corners of the world.

G-d decides to start over with Abraham.  Abraham would build a new society, where the value of the individual was balanced with the needs of the community. This is the society that the Torah envisions would endure.

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