This week’s parshah contains one of the better known stories in the Torah. The name kind of gives it away, it is, you’ve guessed it the story of Noah. It has many influences in modern culture, not least the song ‘the animals went in two by two’ (hoorah!), but it also establishes the first real set of laws about how to live accoding to the law of God, these include don’t murder, don’t eat the meat from an animal while it is still alive, and be fruitful and multiply. Pretty basic, but good advice none the less.

Noah however is not what I find too interesting this week. For me this week, my interest lies in nine verses towards the end of the weeks reading, in the story of the Tower of Babel. This whole episode raises many questions for me, and also judging from the volume of work coming from it it also created a lot of questions from the Rabbis of old. My main questions are what was so wrong about trying to build a really big city with a tower and why did God destroy it so viciously?

The problem isn’t in the building of the city and tower. I think their motivation for this was understandable, they were a large number of people that wanted to live in one place, so they built a big city. Also God could have destroyed it at any time, so if the problem was the concept, or the blueprints, God could have swooped down and mashed them up much sooner.

A clue to the reasoning lies in the text (as it occasionally does) ‘let us make ourselves a name’ (Gen 11:4) the people say as they are building. They bring a selfish element into it. The Rabbis tell us that as the tower grew and work became more perilous, the bricks became more important to the builders than the lives of those that fell in the building of it. Not only that, but the builders began to regard the tower as ‘theirs’ and not as a communal project. It became ‘my tower’ rather than ‘our tower’. That was why God had punished them, not with death as he had with Noahs generation, but with confusion and dispersion, a much more non-lethal punishment than world wide flood.

If any of you read The Times on Thursday some of this may sound familiar. A 77 year old correspondent wrote the following (full letter here): “it occurs to me, at 77, that the most significant change in the last ten years is the use of the “my” word. Turn on the computer — MyComputer, MySpace ... In every area of our lives it’s all about “me”. It annoys me intensely. Whatever happened to “our”?”

I’m not suggesting that this person is a prophet in the ilk of Noah, predicting catastrophe. But, as is traditionally taught, the Torah is relevant for all generations and there is something to learn from this. This week we learn that the selfish attitude can lead to disaster. We are told this twice in one week! So maybe it is time to take a step back, look around, open yourself  up to the needs of others, and try to build the city of ‘us’ rather than the city of ‘me’

By Adam Berkley

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