Parshas Noah - Language

Have you ever noticed that certain biblical narratives gain more notoriety than others? For instance, the story of the Tower of Babel has entered common culture not only as a story but with a whole level of understanding distinct unto itself. To Babble is to talk rapidly or meaninglessly, and Babbel. com is a language learning program. For all that the narrative of Migdal Bavel, as it is called in Hebrew, has gripped our imaginations, most people do not realize that it is a mere 9 verses in the Torah (Bereishis 11:1-9). Those few verses, however, are rich with subtext. 

It is a common concept within Divrei Torah to talk about the generation of Bavel and compare it to the destroyed generation of Noah and comment on how this demonstrates that Hashem is far less worried about humankind insulting or fighting against Him than He is about humanity destroying each other. The generation of Noah was destroyed because they had managed to create a world of total chamas, violence – defined by the sages as a world of selfish grabbing whatever they wanted. The generation of Bavel, on the other hand, worked together and was, therefore, spared destruction. 

Let us divert a moment to speak about the concept of unity. Unity is a very important concept in Judaism, and we are inundated with messages about the importance of Jewish unity (although it is a goal we still struggle to achieve). Even as we long for a time when Klal Yisrael will be united, to the time of Moshiach, we do not discuss it as an era where all of humanity will be united except for in one thing, which is the innate knowledge that Hashem is the King of Kings. 

But unity was not what was expected of these immediate descendants of Noah’s sons. The Dor Haflaga, the generation that was scattered (meaning bavel), was not meant to be a steadfast settlement of people who stayed together. Rather, they were meant to fulfill the blessing/command the Hashem gave to Noah and his three sons when they returned to land: “Be fertile and increase, abound on the earth and increase on it” (Bereishis 9:7).

The fourth verse of the narrative relays: “And they said, ‘Come, let us build us a city, a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered over the world” (11:4). On this verse, the Rashbam* points out: “…their principal sin was in not fulfilling G’d’s basic directive to be fruitful, to multiply, and to populate the whole earth, not just a small valley. Their declared objective had been not to scatter (verse 4). The fact that G’d forcefully scattered them afterwards shows that their sin must have been their failure to do so voluntarily” (translation on Sefaria.org).

If God wanted them to spread out, to be fruitful and multiply and to have dominion over the earth, why did they fear being scattered? Why did they desire walls to keep themselves together if already Hashem has promised that “The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky—everything with which the earth is astir—and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand” (9:2) – that the natural world would be easily ruled by humankind. Whom did they fear if everyone on earth was unified in their actions, as is implied in the verse: “Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words… and they said to one another…” (11:1,3)”? The Netziv** notes in Haamek Davar, “And it is understood that this [their fear of being scattered] was related to the uniformity that was among them. And since the opinions of people are not identical, they feared that people might abandon this philosophy and adopt another. Therefore, they sought to ensure that no one would leave their society” (sefaria translation). 

It is interesting to note that while we think of the narrative of Migdal Bavel being the first place to mention language, this is not so.  Bereishis 10, which is a list of genealogy, discusses languages three times. Each time noting the descendants of the sons of Noah and how they became specific clans and languages. The word for language used in Bereishis 10, however, is lashon, associated with tongue. The word for language in Bereishis 11 is safa, associated with lips. “Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler*** explains the difference between these two terms as follows: One’s ‘lip’ is an external feature of his body, while one’s ‘tongue’ is an internal feature. Consequently, one can only refer to a language as a lashon (‘tongue’) when its speakers embody the inner meaning of that language. By contrast, a language can be called a safa (‘lip’) when its speakers embody only the technical, external features of the language, but not its core values” (taken from Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, “Speaking in Tongues” ohr.edu, December 23, 2017). 

Here what I say may be radical, but perhaps now we can understand why Hashem saw the need to knock down, so to speak, their tower. Hashem saw, perhaps that they were all speaking to each other in the plural tense – “Let us build a city and a tower… let us make a name for ourselves,” but Hashem knew that in their hearts each one was striving to rule the other. (Certainly, this fits in with the personality of Nimrod, whom the Midrash tell us was the leader). Following the idea that Hashem could understand that their seemingly plural-unified language was false was perhaps why Hashem, the One God, used the same syntax to announce His plan. “Let us then, go down and confound their speech” (11:7). He was revealing to us that He understood the true meaning of their words. 

Hashem destroyed their collaboration because He understood that each man involved (and numerous commentaries suggest that there were specifically 70 as in the 70 nations of the world) were determined to set themselves up as “a name.” They each thought that they could take over as the diety, for it is generally understood that their building of the tower was with the aim of supplanting the angels and overthrowing Hashem. The idea that a human could think of themselves as Divine seems ludicrous only to those ignorant of history. 

Today, our power struggles are far less overt. However, the lessons remain the same. We live in an era where we truly war with and on words. Right now, in the 2020s, we have become experts at manipulating language, but the language that we share is most often safa, that which is meant only externally rather than revealing our lashon, the language of our honest, most spiritually connect selves. If we wish to rebuild a world we find broken by safa, we must learn to speak with our lashon. 

This week’s Dvar Torah is dedicated to a refuah shelaima for Dovid Chaim Hacohen ben Tzipora.  

*Rashbam: Rabbi Samuel ben Mair (1085-1158)       ** Netziv: Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (1816-1893) ***Rabbi Dessler – Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (1892-1953)

Not Too Earthy (Noach #2)

Parshas Noach’s famous narrative is, obviously, the great flood that destroyed the world. As detailed as the narrative is (look at the measurements of the ark and the specification of the numbers of the animals), there are quite a number of pieces to the story that beg for questions. For instance, what actually was so special about Noach? Sure the text says straight out that he was a righteous man in his generation and a man who walked with God, but, to be honest, that doesn’t really give us much insight into what Noach did to be considered righteous and to walk with God. Another interesting question is why a flood? Being perfectly frank, couldn’t God have just clapped his anthropomorphic hands and made everything disappear?

Have you ever noticed that parshas Noach actually begins in parshas Bereishis? The text read for parshas Noach begins with the ninth pasuk of the sixth perek. Perhaps the sages divided it this way to encourage us to look backwards and gain a deeper understanding.

When studying the parshiot, it is very easy to gloss over the long, somewhat repetitive-feeling family trees. Father-son-father’s death, father-son-father’s death … repeat and repeat. Between the begetting and the begats (and of course the truly exciting parts of parshas Bereishis – creation, Adam and Chava, Cain and Hevel), the final portion of parshas Bereishis is easy to miss. And yet Noach’s birth actually has more written about it than just that he was begot: “When Lemach had lived 182 years, he begat a son. And he named him Noach, saying, ‘This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands, out of the very soil which Hashem placed under a curse'” (Bereishis 5:28-29). It then states, after recounting Lemach’s years and death, that “when Noach lived 500 years, Noach begat Shem, Cham, and Yafet” (5:32).

Noach was born with a mission, at least according to his father. One could infer from this that Noach held himself aloof from his fellows because he believed that he could be more, that he could make a difference. Indeed, there is a very interesting commentary about the fact that all of the other fathers listed before him named one son and then it is written about them that they “begat sons and daughters.” Noach appears to have only had his three sons. Don Yitzchak Abarbanel says: “Had Noach been given many sons he would have been unable to keep a watchful eye on them so that they don’t mix with their contemporaries and emulate their corrupt ways. He would be unable to raise them in the discipline of self-restraint that was necessary in order to offset the indulgences of that generation.” 

But there is, perhaps, even more one can glean from Lemach’s statement upon naming his son Noach. The populace of the earth, the descendants of Adam and Chava, were struggling. They felt, on a daily basis, the traumatic effects of Adam’s curse. “Cursed be the ground because of you; By toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field; By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground— For from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Bereishis 3:17-19).

Taking a step back, let us remember that Adam was created from the adama, the earth, and given a Divine spirit with the breath of God. According to tradition, until he ate from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, his physical and spiritual sides cohabitated perfectly, so to speak. Once Adam and Chava ate from that fruit, their spiritual side was, one might say, suppressed by their physical side. Perhaps this was why Hashem punished Adam by cursing the earth, because now that the physical was his dominant aspect, Hashem did not want to make it too easy for Adam to allow his more natural – perhaps more animalistic – side to conquer his being all together.

Living in the wake of this punishment was difficult, and we can’t really imagine how difficult. One could speculate that perhaps the corruption of humankind was a result of “cursed be the ground because of you.” It was too hard. Life was too completely physical with its toil. Perhaps they lost any spiritual/moral compass because their spiritual side was suppressed and their physical side was disconnected and at odds with its source (the earth).

This is the significance of the flood. As noted in many places, water is often connected, metaphysically, to Torah, which is the apex of spiritual power in the world. God sent the rain…so much rain that the whole world flooded. What happens during the flood? The topsoil was washed away. The adama, the land, cursed by Hashem was cleansed by its immersion in Heavenly water. In washing away the effects of the trauma of Adam, Hashem preserved the one man and his family whom he knew could survive the transformation of the world because this was the relief he had been striving toward his whole life. This was the goal he had taught his sons and trained them to seek.

When Lemach named his son, his words were like a prayer. He knew that this son would be part of a generation that would not have seen Adam, not have been affected by understanding what they had lost. More than that, as the commentator Chizkuni points out: “Seeing that he had been born after the death of Adam, the curse decreed on earth as being effective during Adam’s lifetime could now be lifted.”

Many people assume that Noach’s name refers to comfort. However the Malbim points out that it can also be connected to the root of the verb for changing a mindset (one’s own or that of another). “The general concept of nechamah as a change of attitude is the clue to Lemach’s prayer … Lemach hoped and foresaw that his son Noach would work to inspire mankind – mired as they were into emptiness and depravity ten generations after the Creation – to turn their actions around. Lemach prayed that Noach would reverse the curse of the ground, a curse which resulted from the deterioration of people’s behavior.”

The words of Lemach at the birth of his son add a wealth of insight into our understanding of Noach. Noach’s father seems to have raised him to be less physically rooted than his peers, allowing his spiritual side a little more space. This freedom for his soul was, perhaps, the reason that he could “walk with God,” and that characteristic offered God the opportunity to “wash the earth,” for he knew that from Noach there might come the people who could bring back the equilibrium of body and soul.

Ten Generations (Noach #2)

At the end of parshas Bereishis, the Torah records the genealogical line from Adam to Noach. Adam (1) - Seth (2) – Enosh (3) – Kenan (4) – Mahalalel (5) – Jared (6) – Enoch (7) – Methusaleh (8) – Lamech (9) – and Noach (10). There were 10 generations between Adam and Noach. When you think about it in the context of over 5,000 years of human history, 10 generations is actually not such a big span of time. Indeed, for those who marry and procreate young, ten generations from now may be only a little over two hundred years.

This may seem like just a quaint and interesting idea…until one recalls that the sages state the “deadline” year for the arrival of Moshiach is the Hebrew year 6,000. One month ago, the Jewish New Year 5780 began. So that’s just 220 years left until 6,000 – approximately 10 generations!

Can the two generations at opposite ends of the arc of time be compared? That might be a bit of a terrifying thought given what everyone knows about Noach’s generation, that “God saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but wicked all the time” (Bereishis 6:5). There are many commentaries about what exactly was meant by their “wickedness” (ra’ah), although most of these are connected to verse 6:11 and the Torah’s statement: “The earth became corrupt before God, the earth was filled with lawlessness. God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth.”

Rashi explains that this corruption infers lewdness and idolatry and that lawlessness means robbery. Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch says more clearly, “Shachas (corrupt) is the conception of corruption, not destruction. It is the overthrow of a good condition, and the impeding of progress, and the changing into the opposite of anything which was meant to thrive and prosper.…Chamas (lawlessness) is a wrong too petty to be caught by human justice but if committed continuously can gradually ruin your fellow-man.” Knowing that the world was full of corruption and lawlessness, one can better understand Rav Hirsch’s comment on verse 6:5’s use of the word ra’ah (wicked), to which he says: “In the word ra’ah lies the conception of ‘broken,’ in contrast to shalaim (complete) and tamim (whole)…. God had created the world and set Man to be his representative, His agent, on it. But, through what was happening, a ‘large break’ had been made in the harmony of the world.”

What did mankind break that it can be called ra’ah? To understand this, it is important to recognize that Hashem created the world with a balance of justice and mercy. He created humankind because He wanted to give to them, and He created them in His image so that they could connect to him through the shared capacity to give and to create. The wickedness that God saw was a subtle build up of the chamas, lawlessness. Don Yitzchak Abarbanel explains it beautifully:

A wicked person who has acquired a wicked trait, and has allowed it to permeate his character until it has become his second nature, will not see any wrong in his wicked behavior. On the contrary, in his eyes it will be normal, and he will pursue it, and will look with disdain at all the people who refuse to emulate his lifestyle. Furthermore, he will justify his behavior by finding rational excuses for it, in order to convince himself and others that it is the right way of life. Such is the progression of sin, once people develop the habit of sinning, they gradually lose their shame, and their immoral behavior becomes the accepted norm…On this type of behavior the Torah says, “the earth became corrupt before God,” meaning before God it was corrupt but not before the people, because they had lost all sense of right and wrong, and had sunk down so low in their sinful ways that this corruption seemed all but normal in their eyes.

Before contemplating whether the lawlessness of the dor hamabul (generation of the flood) has any reflection on our generation, it is interesting to also note that Nimrod, Noach’s great grandson (3 generations later) was responsible for the building of the Tower of Bavel. Bavel was an incredible moment for humanity, for all of the people were unified and working together – unfortunately they were doing so with the intention of going to war against God. In contemplating the inversion of the generations, it is a little startling that just this past week was the 50^th anniversary of the creation of the first iteration of the internet, which has unquestionably brought people together across innumerable international borders.

What the internet has also started to do is to break down societal standards of right and wrong. Some of those standards were twisted and harmful, but some of those standards were boundaries that have defined civilization from the beginning of time. This is not a declaration that the world is completely corrupt or that the internet is bad. But isn’t it interesting how our society is now driven by likes and popularity? If enough people share a lie over social media, that lie becomes truth. If enough people condone an act that is clearly unjust, somehow it is no longer considered wrong.

One could certainly ask the question: Can we go back? There is no foreseeable way to alter the course of modern technology. But we can recognize that we only have a limited expanse of time before Hashem will send Moshiach, and it is our actions that will determine whether the entry into the next stage of the world is gentle and calm or harsh and destructive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Hirsch, Rabbi Samsom Raphael. The Pentateuch: Volume V Deuteronomy. Translated by Isaac Levy, Judaica Press, LTD, 1999.

Abarbanel, Isaac. Abarbanel: Selected Commentaries on the Torah, Volume I Bereishis/Genesis. Translated and Annotated by Rabbi Israel Lazar, Self Published with CreateSpace, 2015.

Humans, Not Animals (Noah)

The generation into which Noah was born was a generation of corruption. Throughout rabbinic literature and Biblical commentary, one can find discussions of what it means that the people had become corrupted. They stole from each other. They took each others’ spouses. They were violent in their dealings. But one of the most interesting Midrashim is one that explains that God decided to wipe out ALL flesh (kol basar, not just all of humankind) because man’s behavior had begun to corrupt the behavior of other species. I am not going to explore the details of what behavior this midrash is inferring, but it goes along the lines of interspecies cohabitation and such.

So how could humankind have such an influence over animal-kind. How did man corrupt beast? The fact is that we do not (and perhaps cannot) understand humankind’s relationship with animals before the flood. In one particularly interesting set of verses in parshat Bereishis, Hashem determines that “it is not good for Adam to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him” (2:18). Hashem then brings all of the animals to man “to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name...but for Adam no fitting helper was found” (Bereishis 2:19).

According to one Midrash, Adam lived closely with the animals, which is why he was able to name them. Only when it was obvious that Adam was different from all the rest did Hashem create the division of Adam and Chava, so that now they were a pair. And while God gave them dominion over the land and the animals (“Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth” - 1:28), perhaps they were still closer in nature to the other creations. Indeed, perhaps this is why they could communicate with the snake.

There are lots of current discussions about what separates humankind from animal-kind, and the list of abilities often include speech and reason and discourse. Speech and reasoning and discourse...is it possible that these distinctions were the result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad?

Perhaps the generations just before the flood could have such influence over the animal kingdom because they did not distinguish themselves from them. After the flood, however, Hashem gives Noah and his family a new understanding of their relationship with the animals they had just preserved: “The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky – everything with which the earth is astir– and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand. Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these” (9:2-3).

It is very hard for us, today, to understand both how Adam could have named the animals and how the animals could have been corrupted by a generation (and, one could add, how Noah and his family dwelt in a boat with all of the animals). Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsh points out that herein: “the attachment between man and animal is broken. Animals fear man, he is no longer their guiding master. Man has unlearnt [sic] to understand animals and they keep fearfully away from him.” He later adds, “the bond between humankind and the animal world is torn, and humankind is primarily directed to work on itself and for itself.”

These ideas are particularly fascinating in the 21^st century, in a world where people might have …an emotional support squirrel? PETA? Equivocating animal rights to the Holocaust and perceiving animals to be no different than humans? If world history is an arc, with the end being the coming of Moshiach, and we are in the final centuries before the messianic era, than perhaps there is a reason that people are once again blurring their understanding of the difference of humankind (made in the image of God) and animal-kind.