The Folly of Imagining There's Only One Path (Noach 5779)

Tower of Babel by Dr. Seuss

This week JCHS welcomed undergraduate guests from Shalem College in Israel, whose motto is "leadership for Israel begins here." We enjoy our annual encounter with these students because, in a country where many college students specialize as undergrads, Shalem undergrads dedicate themselves to four years of conversation across the ages and disciplines. 

For them, “shalem” (lit. completeness) does not come from developing expertise in a single academic or professional discipline or following a single path, rather it comes from integrating diverse disciplines, being in conversation with a diversity of voices and perspectives. We love hearing that their JCHS visit is a highlight of their Bay Area tour because of the school community's vibrant, living laboratory of intellectual and Jewish pluralism. 

All of that is amplified by an infamous story in this week's Torah portion: The Tower of Babel. Its infamy always has intrigued me because the Tower could easily have been swallowed up by the even more famous introductory story this week's Torah portion: Noah and the Flood. Torah's Noah narrative is told over four full chapters with lots of detail and drama. By comparison, the Tower tale uses a mere nine verses. 

In the Tower story, the generations after the Flood unite to build a tower reaching toward the heavens. But, in the end, the Tower is destroyed, they are scattered, and their speech is confounded. Nachmanides (13th century, Spain) draws our attention to a keyword in this story, "valley." According to the narrative, the generations after the Flood came to a valley and settled there. From there they built the famous Tower (Genesis 11:2). 

Nachmanides refers to a Talmudic passage (Sanhedrin 109a), which calls this verse laughable. Nachmanides points out it is laughable, folly to imagine starting in a valley to build a tower whose purpose is to reach the heavens. If the ancients truly wanted to build a tower to heaven, they would start on the top of the highest mountain, not some lowly valley. Similarly, Nachimindes suggests, it is folly to imagine building only a single tower in a single location that all humanity could use to access heaven. How is that even possible?!?

In other words, it is folly to imagine that there is only one path to heaven, or the Eternal, or our goal toward perfecting the world. Perhaps, the generations after the Flood were given different languages in recognition of the reality that we need to able to understand different voices. It is foolish to imagine that all of us see or understand the world the same way. Or think or speak the same. The beauty of our world comes from its diversity, not its uniformity. 

I learned this lesson in powerful ways as a congregational rabbi in Beachwood, Ohio. The congregation I served in Beachwood moved there in the 1950s when hardly any Jews lived in that Cleveland suburb. Back then there still were restrictive covenants in some property deeds prohibiting home sales to Jews, Blacks, and other minorities. 

Today, Beachwood is proudly full of Jewish life. But when the first synagogue bought land to build there, the village elders blocked them. They refused to let the synagogue be built. That case went up to the Ohio Supreme Court, which chided and overturned Beachwood's civic leadership, permitting the Reform congregation to build. It grew to become the largest synagogue in Ohio. Jewish life was attracted to Beachwood. Fifty years later even the Beachwood public schools were about 85% Jewish. 

But over that same time, as detailed in Samuel Freedman's book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle For the Soul of American Jewry, some in Beachwood grew afraid of different types of Jewish life there. Ironically, having set up a thriving Jewish community in an American village once hostile to any Jewish institutions, some Jews grew hostile to other groups of Jews in their community. As in the Tower story, some acted as if there was only a single path toward meaningful Jewish life. 

Fortunately, as with the Tower, the folly of that perspective failed. Today, all types of Jewish life are thriving in Beachwood: from a Jewish community center and day camp to Jewish schools of different types ranging from community-based to modern Orthodox, vibrant synagogues across a similar range, a Jewish museum, and even the Jewish community federation -- all calling Beachwood home. Even the public schools there offer Hebrew as a world language, alongside Chinese, Spanish, and American Sign Language. 

There is no single language, or voice, or way of seeing the world. This week, I challenged JCHS students to make room for others to think differently than they do, or act differently, or speak differently, or dress differently. I challenged them to avoid the impulse to stifle or crush differences, instead to celebrate those differences and the diversity of our world. May each of us have the wisdom this week to treasure that diversity and the strength to celebrate it. 

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*I am grateful to the Koret Foundation for supporting Shalem's visit to the Bay Area for deepening the sense of peoplehood and build bridges between Israel and the United States.