Kehillat Ma'arav - Santa Monica, CA | Conservative Synagogue

Parsha by Gura

Home > Education > Parsha by Gura

Parasha Noach

Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer, a late rabbinic work utilizing many different sources, contains a remarkable, striking midrash basic on the line from Parasha Noach.

The story of the Tower of Babel is quite short, only the first 9 lines of chapter 11 in Bereshit. Everett Fox translates those lines as:

Now all the earth was of one language and one set-of-words.
And it was when they migrated to the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
They said, each man to his neighbor: Come-now! Let us bake bricks and let us burn them well-burnt! So for them brick-stone was like building-stone, and raw-bitumen was for them like red-mortar.
Now they said: Come-now! Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth!
But YH"WH came down to look over the city and the tower that the humans were building. YH"WH said: Here, (they are) one people with one language for them all, and this is merely the first of their doings-now there will be no barrier for them in all that they scheme to do!
Come-now! Let us go down and there let us baffle their language, so that no man will understand the language of his neighbor.
So YH"WH scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they had to stop building the city.
Therefore its name was called Bavel/Babble, for there YH"WH baffled the language of all the earth-folk, and from there, YH"WH scattered them over the face of all the earth.

The Rabbis pick up on the subtle uses of language that we often rapidly skip over: Why in verse 7 does it read: "Let us go down and there let us baffle their language"? Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer reports: "Rabbi Simeon said: The Holy One, Blessed be He, called to the seventy angels, who surround the throne of His glory, and he said to them: Come, let us descend and let us confuse the seventy nations and the seventy languages.

"Whence (do we know) that the Holy One, Blessed be He, spake to them? Because it is said, 'Go to, let us go down'. 'I will go down' is not written, but 'Go to, let us go down'. And they cast lots among them. Because it is said, 'When the Most High gave to the nation their inheritance.' (Deuteronomy 32:8). The lot of the Holy One, Blessed be He, fell upon Abraham, and upon his seed, as it is said, 'For the L-rd's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance (Deut. 32:9)." (Pirke De Rabbi Eliezer Sepher-Hermon Press, New York 1981, pg. 176-177).

One of the first rules of midrash is not to take them too overly seriously: one can often find a "counter" midrash. But this particular one has had interesting legs-it was folded into one of the most popular and widely spread devotional, exegetical works in Yiddish, Tzena U'Renah (Come and See, the title taken from Song of Songs, 3:11). The oldest existing edition extant was published in 1622, and we know that there were previous editions, and many, many subsequent ones. While Tzena U'renah was regarded with some disdain as "women's literature", it was probably widely read by both women and men. As a literary work in Yiddish, Tzena U'renah's influence reverberated up to the grand Yiddish literary explosion of the 1920's and 1930's, with the modernists grabbing it, the same way modernists in other Western literary traditions grabbed and re-stated well know works and forms.

So, this is not "just" a midrash, but a midrash that was well known, well read. Come and see how striking it is: G-d doesn't choose the descendants of Abraham, he wins them by chance, in a game of lots. We never quite know why the tower must be destroyed, at least it is not made explicit in the Torah text (because the builders of the tower starting growing towards evil? Towards hubris? Towards self-idolatry?). But we hear that G-d calls the seventy angels (seventy a number that specifies quite a number, many) to destroy the tower, scatter the people, and befuddle them with many different languages. Each angel, by lot, becomes, if you will, a guardian angel of one particular nation and language.

Is it by design or by chance that G-d "won" the Jews? In any event, the Jewish view, the view related so often to the Jews of Eastern Europe through the Tzena U'renah is that we do not necessarily deserve being chosen-it was, from our point of view, just chance. It could have been any one of the other groups descending from the builders of the tower at Babel-it just so happened to be us.

Henri Atlan, in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (edited by Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, 1987), writes "our uneasiness with regard to election must be viewed largely as a result of a Western semantic bias.Christianity and Islam have, in effect, taken up the plan of the G-d of Israel, while at the same time separating it from the historical and social context of the Jews.(Christianity and Islam imply) a theology where all others are relegated to the nonexistence of those who are not saved.The meaning of history is also changed in such a way as to exclude the majority of real human beings.That development is the reason for the scandal of the election of Israel, which is scandalous only in the context of the two monotheistic cultures derived from Judaism-cultures that, unlike the religion of their paternity, lay claim to a universal vocation"

If choseness, or election, is a problem for us, come and see how powerfully this midrash is a corrective: our choseness, an election by chance, is replete not with superiority, not with rights, but with duties, service and obligations, to G-d, to the world, to our fellow Jews. We were chosen not because of some innate superiority, some ingrained worthiness. We are not inherently better than any other peoples, nor is our way the necessary way for other peoples (although it is important to note that this parasha, in the form of the Noahide laws, delineates the basic requirements for a civil, humane society also: the particularity of our choseness is balanced by G-d's concern with all humanity, or rather, in the sequence of the Parasha, just the other way around.)

But, being chosen, we are also bound. Endlessly, we Jews debate the nature, means, ends of those ties to the Holy One. While we differ, we are also endlessly aware of those ties, even, paradoxical, those Jews who most stridently rejected theism, but still are compelled to bring their Jewishness, their Jewish values, into the world, into, often, some utopian dream. We are called to create holiness, among our own people, and in the world. Not because we are any more inherently holy, but because we are, by chance, chosen to bear the message of G-d's holiness. Knowing that we were chosen by chance perhaps that also gives us a way to see the unchosen holiness in others.

We contemporary religious Jews have two great tasks: how to retrieve (to loosely use the coinage of Rabbi David Novak, following French religious philosopher Paul Ricoeur) the concepts of Revelation and Election. This midrash helps us step that way.

Shabbat Shalom.

Dennis