Noach: fear g-d not history
Gut shabes friends,
I'm drafting this newsletter on a quiet Sunday evening. I spent all morning grading assessments and preparing for my classes this week, and all afternoon re-reading Jade City (the third book in the series comes out in just a month!) Highly recommend the latter, if you are into wuxia or mafia-style stories at all, and the former if you are also a teacher.
There's a lot that happens this week in the Torah, and, as always, I'm not going to provide a full summary. There are plenty of those out there if you would like -- The Torah Studio does a nice summary email and drash, for example. But, in short: there's an ark, a flood, two covenants, a big tower, and a dispersal.
As always, some general and non-exhaustive content warnings: Israel/Palestine talk, internecine queer conflict
Let's start near the end of the portion. All people, we are told, had one language and one set of words. Already, we have a classic Jewish conundrum: if we know all people have one language, why must we specify one set of words? In a stunning turn of events, the Rabbis do not have just one answer to this question. Perhaps it means
they had one plan (Rashi)
they were all of the same opinions (Or HaChaim)
they had no distinction between the language of learned and ignorant (ibn Ezra)
nu, who knows, exactly, but whatever this means it certainly distressed the Holy One of Blessing (Haamek Davar)
Or, perhaps (Breishis Rabbah 38:6 quoted in Rashi) it means they spoke
דברים חדים “sharp” words: “Once in every one thousand six hundred and fifty six years (the period that elapsed from the Creation to the Flood) there is a heaven-shaking, just as there was in the days of the Flood. Come, then, and let us make supports for it”
I find this last midrash both beautiful and tragic. The Flood was an apocalyptic event -- can anyone blame a generation not too distant for fearing that it would repeat? Or for trying to build supports to stop it from happening again? Of course, as you may know, all does not go to plan when they start building their support-tower to reach the heavens:
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 may 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.
It interests me that this is often framed as a punishment in the Rabbinic literature. But G-d does not say: "look at this evil they are doing for which they must be punished" or issue them a command to stop. Indeed, at least in the text at hand, humans are not even permanently banished from the city or commanded to never build a tower again ("if they had desired to return [to the remnants of babel] they could have returned").
Not only does G-d not issue any direct commands or punishments, G-d does not act alone! Before the Flood, G-d speaks in the first person singular ("I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created") but here in the plural ("Let us, then, go down and confound their speech"). Perhaps G-d recognizes that the trauma of the Flood cannot be erased with a simple statement of covenant or issuance of command, that after abusing authority as in the Flood, G-d must act more subtly and (importantly) not alone.
So why act at all? Why not let humanity build the tower? Perhaps because G-d understood that an obsessive fear of history repeating itself leads not only to the building of protection-towers but also inevitably to violent destruction -- as Rabbi Alan Lew has said, sometimes it is those who do know history who are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps G-d understood that the words the people were speaking were indeed דברים חדים, sharp words, that protect but also harm. The Netziv teaches exactly this in Haamek Davar, [commentary] mine:
If they finish the tower they will come to a second thought, to prevent by force other thoughts than this one [we must build this tower to prevent calamity]. And this is a thing [of] killing, and violent destruction of the settlement, and it does not help that at this moment they are together with one opinion.
It's difficult to read this text and not think of Israel, a country I am so often told is being built for my protection from a repeat of historic destruction. A country whose attempts to forge a unified language and culture has led to the diminishment of so many diverse Jewish languages and cultures. A country whose obsession with the one thought of protection from catastrophe has indeed led to the Netziv's second thought, and to killing and violent destruction.
A few weeks ago I spent several hours watching the public comment session on Burlington, VT's proposed BDS resolution. There were a couple arguments that kept being raised by people opposed to the resolution:
every Jewish congregation or organization in Vermont is opposed to this resolution, and
passing this resolution will cause an increase in campus antisemitism (Burlington is a college town.)
There were 2-3 Jews who spoke in favor of the resolution, and one local Rabbi who mentioned that her congregation contains varying viewpoints on it. But the overwhelming message was that the Jewish community of the state has one voice on this matter, and that voice is motivated by the danger Jews are in. I don't want to argue with either of these points here (I have had this discussion many times elsewhere). I do want to mention what happened (at least online) to the Jews who spoke in favor of the BDS resolution: they got called fake Jews and traitors. They must be. After all, we are building a tower to prevent cataclysm and there can be no other language, no other words.
This same phenomenon happens in queer communities, where some queer and trans people are expelled and labelled traitors out of the fear that their way of being queer (their words for being queer) would give ammunition to our oppressors. And so Gay Inc expels trans people, True Transsexuals expel Tenderqueers, and inevitably the one thought of our tower of safety leads to the Netziv's second thought. We try to build a language and theory and community so pure and unassailable and unified that we cannot be attacked, and so we attack each other, and our supposed unity rots from within. I am not free of this aveira. I wonder if anyone is.
The problem, of course, is that this fear is a true fear, this danger is a true danger, and there is nothing a priori wrong with being cautious or trying to protect ourselves. I honestly don't blame the generations after the Flood for fearing another catastrophe from the heavens, even with G-d's promise to never do so again. Kal vachomer (even more so), how could I blame modern generations of Jews and queers for fearing history will repeat when it has repeated so often before, and we have no similar divine promise of an end? But if our response to this fear is to build towers, we are responsible for the violence that results. Perhaps the lesson of this Torah portion is that closing ranks out of singleminded fear will only get us so far. If G-d had allowed us to build that tower, we would never have progressed beyond the need for it, and would have destroyed each other in its maintenance.
Practice
I don't want the takeaway from this to be (g-d forbid) that we should simply throw caution to the winds or never criticize other members of our communities. There's caution, and then there's building a tower, you might say. There's criticism, and then there's expulsion and false claims of unity. I'm just at the beginning of understanding this, so I think to start I need to become more aware of my own actions in this regard. Reb Zalman (among others) teaches that we should go over our day each night before bed: what we did right, what we did wrong, what we should forgive, and what we need forgiveness for. I don't do this usually! But perhaps I'll focus on this, for a week: during this day, did I do any tower-building? And what could I have done instead?
Correspondence Corner
In response to last week's discussion of Adah and Tzilah, Noach bes Malka writes in about a modern-day analogue:
I am a media scholar and when you posed the question of what happens to Adah and Tzilah after they leave Lamech I couldn't help but think of Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway, who were both involved with Dr. Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, fictionalized in the film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Where Elizabeth supported the family financially, and Olive cared for all the children and then started her own writing career, William Marston was a bit of a mess -- intermittently employed, had a bad temper, and seems to have not been the best partner. After his death, Elizabeth and Olive lived together for decades. Interestingly, something not captured in the movie version is that Olive was related to Margaret Sanger and the history of birth control (with all of its complex connections to eugenics and forced sterilization) is also part of the background of the Wonder Woman comics. Jill Lepore's book goes into those connections more deeply.
In any case, I appreciated your reading of this story as one that is about solidarity and care between women rather than the easy and typical perhaps rabbinical interpretation of jealous wives. And by connecting the story to this more contemporary history I'm finding myself thinking about the ways that people can refuse to be defined by how others perceive them or try to use them, and the power of storytelling to amplify those narratives and transform our perceptions of ourselves and each other (until recently, Olive and Elizabeth's role in the Wonder Woman comics was obscured by Marston's reputation).
Thanks so much for writing in! I'm adding this to my list of "things to learn more about" -- a beautifully long list that gets longer every day.
If you too have thoughts you'd like to share on on the Torah portion or my commentary, or any general questions/comments/criticism for me, please feel free to write in by replying to this email (or emailing me directly at quasiada@gmail.com). I won't publish anything without permission, and love having private one-on-one conversations with people.
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Gut shabes,
ada