October 30, 2008
The narrative of the flood and the family of Noah occupies much of this week’s Torah portion. In the context of the previous portion, which dealt with the Creation and the family of Adam and Eve, these early chapters of the Torah deal not with the ancestors of the Jewish people but rather with the generic ancestors of all humanity. Adam and Noah represent a vision of creation that extends from a single person out to humanity at large. By the time we reach next week’s portion, the focus of the Torah shifts to one family within that common humanity, the family of Abraham, who will become the Jewish people.
The transition from the universal narrative of Genesis 1-11 to the particular story beginning with Genesis 12 is almost imperceptible and occurs at the very end of the portion for this week.
In urban culture, the powerful prevail and the powerless suffer.
The familiar narrative is the story of the Tower of Babel. The story sits in a curious position. Genesis 10:32 tells us that “these are the groupings of Noah’s descendants, according to their origins, by their nations; and from these nations they branched out over the earth after the Flood.” But immediately following, the text reads: Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.” (11:1-2)
Although some commentators read the swarming in Shinar as a critique, the plain sense of the sentence sequence is that after dispersing “over the earth” the many peoples for some reason began to contract to one shared space. There, they decided to “build a city” within which would be a tower “with its top in the sky.” (11:4) The Torah represents God as distressed and suggests that God disrupts the unified language of the diverse clans and peoples.
The common way this story is remembered is that with the peoples now unable to communicate, the construction of the tower comes to a halt. The common explanation for God’s subsequent punishment of those clustered in Shinar is that they presumed to be godly by breaching the heavens. Their sin, then, would be hubris, the effort to displace God.
The text, however, does not support that common understanding. While we tend to focus on the tower, the Torah seems more concerned with the city. Note the sequence: “Come let us build us a city and a tower….” (11:3) “The Lord came down to look at the city and the tower….” (11:5) “The Lord scattered them from there…and they stopped building the city.” (11:8)
There is a powerful voice throughout the Hebrew Bible, evident especially in such narratives and in the books of several of the prophets, that sees the urban aggregation of a city as antithetical to the preferred pastoral profile of the field, the tribe, and the clan. After the murder of Abel, Cain is exiled to the land of Nod (Genesis 4:16) where he “then founded a city.” (4:17) The progenitor of urban culture is thus the first person in history to commit murder — hardly a ringing endorsement.
From this perspective, the concern of God seems not to be the hubris of the builders of Babel but rather the creation of an urban culture.
While the pacific profile of the pastoral life implicit in the critique of the urban environment is an idealized one, it continues to be a powerful inspiration. In contrast, urban culture is more often characterized as stratified by economics, class, employment, housing, and a host of other concerns. The powerful prevail and the powerless suffer.
So it is not surprising that when at the end of this week’s portion the Torah introduces Abram (Abraham) (Genesis 11:27) that it represents his father, Terach, taking the clan to “Haran.” According to the Etz Hayim commentary, Haran was some 550 miles from the city of Ur, with a name meaning something like “route, journey, caravan.” (Humash Etz Hayim p. 62). In other words, the progenitor of the Jewish people will come not from a city but from a transient place far from an urban setting.
In modern times the majority of North American Jews have lived in urban, suburban, or exurban locations. With the exception of some parts of early Zionism (such as the kibbutz movement), the biblical preference for the field over the city has long since been eclipsed. But implicit in the early chapters of Genesis is a concern that remains a challenge: how to make urban culture a more balanced and equal setting in which people of various traditions can share more equitably.
Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.
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