“Politics has stopped being about how to govern a shared country and is more about a naked, “Lord of the Flies”-style struggle for power.”
-Henry Olsen, The Washington Post, 1/1/2021
This week’s Torah portion, Noach, describes a society which works well, seems unified, and can build great towers, but fails because it is focused on power as an end in itself, rather than a means to a greater good for individuals.
“And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.” The Lord came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the LORD said, “They are one people with one language for all, and this is what they have begun to do?… 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.”
What’s wrong with building a tower? Are our towers not a testimony to the strength and dignity of human endeavor? The answer I think is that this monument is not a monument to an accomplishment, or one with a higher goal, but an end in itself: to make a name for themselves and to be powerful. Such unity is superficial and will quickly be unmasked for what it is and descend into totalitarianism. The Midrash (Pirke d’Rabbi Eliezer) describes this when it describes that quickly the Tower of Babel project became so obsessive that no one cared who fell off to their death or upon whom a brick fell.
But how do we know if we are truly unified for a greater good, or if we have fooled ourselves and are really only jockeying for power and making a name for ourselves? The answer is we must look down and see whether the common project has eclipsed the welfare of individuals. Do we mourn those whom the falling bricks hit? Do we care who falls off the tower?
I suspect the conformity of Migdal Bavel, the Tower of Babel, was not the product of unity, but a result of doing away with those who did not speak the language, those who did not agree, those who did not work well enough to build the tower.