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Parsha Noach 5762. “United We Stand.”
“United We Stand.” How many times during the last few weeks have we either heard that phrase, or seen it on TV, on bumper stickers, or on the sides of buildings? “United We Stand.” Giving expression to our feeling that is important for us to be united, to work together, to not let the terrorists win.
The strength of unity was vividly shown in the movie we watched during Selichot, The Straight Story. There is a scene in the movie when Al Straight is sitting around a campfire with a runaway teenage girl, and he demonstrates that while it is easy to break a single stick, it is very difficult to break a unified bundle of sticks.
In this week’s Torah portion we also have an example of the power of unity. We have the story of the Tower of Bavel, or “Tower of Babble.”
Even though we are all familiar with the basic story, I’d like to read the story to remind us of the details. I’m using the JPS translation:
Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us make brinks and burn them hard.” Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.” The Lord came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the Lord said, “If as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they map propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
The midrash universally understands that what the people were doing when they said they were “making a name for ourselves” was idol worship. This is why the behavior merited such a strong condemnation from God. You shouldn’t, God forbid, think it was because God somehow felt threatened by the actions of the people. Naot Deshe, a contemporary Torah commentator, says that at the start of this story we had what sounds like a rare and ideal situation—there was one language throughout the land. The people hated argument and peace was great.
Naot Deshe asks what kind of peace is this that leads to such a serious sin, to idol worship? They were united by a love of a thing, by a will to accomplish a common thing, not love for its own sake. He explains that love that depends on a thing will be nullified, and the thing will be nullified. God confused the languages as a test: to see if despite the problems that go with the “language barrier”, the people would continue to act in unity…they failed the test. They were no longer able to work together without the simplification of a common language. They were better than the generation of the flood—at least they weren’t “chamas,” violent; but still their peace was not a real peace. You shouldn’t think that God rewarded their peace with argument, but rather He tested them to see if their peace was genuine.
The Chasidic Silonomer rebbe observed that unity tremendously increases your strength, whether for good or for bad. In our scene from The Straight Story, the bundle is stronger than the individual stick, and this would be true regardless of whether the bundle is being used to save a life or to kill someone.
I would like to suggest a novel interpretation to the reason God chose to disrupt the unity at Bavel: it was not punishment, and it was not a test. Rather, I believe that it was God’s way of solving the problem.
What exactly was the problem? The people were united, but they were united to an evil end. They needed a dissonant voice, they needed a dissenting opinion. They needed a conscience. When God said “If as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act,” I would suggest that God was bothered more by the fact that they were going down an evil path than by the fact that they were strong. It could be that when they quit thinking and speaking with one voice, someone was able to speak up, and say “hey guys, what you’re trying to do is WRONG!—it’s avodah zara, it’s idol worship—don’t do it!” They were scattered—or perhaps they scattered themselves. Is this such a bad thing? If they stayed in one place could they have been vulnerable to another despot who might come and unify them for his own negative ends?
In the last week or so we have started to see some cracks in the unity that the Western world has had toward the war on terrorists. There have been several demonstrations drawing hundreds of people in several European cities including Paris and Brussels protesting the US attack on Afghanistan.
I respectfully suggest that this is not a bad thing. We need to have dissenting voices to help prevent us from deluding ourselves into building a Tower of Babel. A few writers in the New Yorker magazine after September 11 commented that they were disappointed by the complete lack of dissenting voices in Congress when it came to formulating a response: there was only one voice in Congress that spoke up against the proposed military action. Surely such a tremendously important and monumental undertaking would have been worthy of a few hours of hearty debate, rather than a 15 minute rubber stamp.
It so happens that I agree with the action we are taking in Afghanistan, and I support the response that has been put together by our nation’s leadership. However, one could easily present some arguments that would at least merit consideration about the wisdom of our course. We declared war on a very poor and ravaged country not because they declared war on us, but because they refused to extradite a suspect—not convicted of the crime, mind you—in a terrorist attack. I would suggest that even though I 100% support the action we are taking, there is sufficient merit to the arguments AGAINST our action that they should at least be heard.
A “loyal opposition” is a good thing. We need dissenting voices. We need to be reminded that there may be unfortunate consequences to whatever course of action we choose to take. When we make decisions, they need to be informed by the best wisdom of not just people who agree with us, but of people who have different perspectives than our own.
When God confused the languages at Babel, he was saying we needed some additional voices. Overwhelming unity can be a very dangerous thing—you can have a society that marches off a cliff, or acts inhumanely because no one was willing to speak up, to be a lone voice in a crowd that does not want to hear dissenting opinions. It can lead to building a tower to idol worship.
I worry whether the unity our nation shows today is a true unity, or whether it’s what Naot Deshe called unity for a thing. If the only thing that unites us is a desire to rid the world of Osama bin Laden, we are not really united, and may have serious problems in the future.
Let us make sure that we are united for the right causes, and that even when we are united we have “many voices,” we are willing to listen to and to respect minority opinions. And may we apply this principle not only in Washington DC, but in our own lives and communities as well.
Shabbat Shalom