The notion of chosenness – that God selected one preferred nation from the entire humanity – is a central theme that runs through the Torah. Taking a step back this is not a simple concept to understand: why would God have sought only one nation to be the bearers of His word?
Judaism Reclaimed tackles this topic in several of its chapters, starting with parashat Noach. The sin of Adam and Eve, understood in various ways by the classic commentators, impacted humanity and its ability to perceive and relate to God. Midrashim indicate that the role of the Torah was to guide mankind back to its previously idyllic state in the Garden of Eden. This, however, would be no quick fix.
Parashat Noach proceeds to record the initial failed efforts to accommodate this new mission, first in Noach’s generation and then many centuries later at the Tower of Babel, failures which would lead to a further restructuring of the divine plan for humanity. Noach lived in the tenth generation after the Creation, halfway between Adam and Eve, who had squandered the opportunities initially afforded by their privileged status, and Avraham who sought and rediscovered God.
In the first chapter of the Kuzari, R’ Yehudah Halevi relates that, in the 20 generations between Adam and Avraham, there was a steady supply of righteous individuals who taught this new mission with which humanity had been charged. However, these individuals were unable to influence the world around them by spreading this message and building a society based upon its values.
Rav Hirsch understands parashat Noach to be describing the first attempts of mankind to develop a universal cohesive community which could potentially have fulfilled this function of collectively receiving and reliably transmitting God’s word. Noach's generation failed as a society because of the selfishness of individuals. A midrashdescribes how people deviously stole amounts that were so trivially small that they would be beneath the lower limit for invoking the jurisdiction of the courts. This is the kind of underhanded greed that erodes societal cohesion, nullifying the benefits conferred by the community.
The attempt of the generation of the Tower of Babel to build a community, by contrast, suffered from the opposite problem, placing an over-emphasis on the interests of the community at the expense of the individual. Another midrash depicts vividly how this apparently unified and caring society was more concerned with the loss of building materials than by the death of any of its individual members. Rav Hirsch derives from a close reading of the Torah’s text the notion that the Tower of Babel was intended as a monument to the absolute importance of the community. But this was a community which crushed rather than enhanced the potential of its individuals in a manner which may remind the modern reader of the 20th century societies that sought to enforce the collective principles of Communism.
These failures to construct a society which could advance humanity's mission resulted, writes Rav Hirsch, in the fragmentation of the world's population into a multiplicity of nations, each with its own language and culture.
In an ideal world, mankind would have served God collectively as a single unified society. After the failure of the generation of the flood, however, and God’s assurance that mankind would never again face annihilation, the world's population had to be dispersed and then kept apart, thereby removing its potential to deserve a second collective fate. God therefore fortified his promise to Noach by introducing a significant change of nature, as the world splintered into distinct countries, climates and continents. As R’ Hirsch eloquently put it:
“Never again does God want to destroy mankind. Rather, He wants to educate humanity through its experiences, to self-knowledge and knowledge of God. Nevermore will mankind as a whole be allowed to sink to the ultimate depths of degradation reached by the generation that had perished. Therefore, mankind must be dispersed, lest the human species, gradually spreading over the earth, constitute but one single family, in which corruption festering at one end would quickly infect the whole… In order for this educational plan to be possible, the earth emerged from its devastation in a different form, diversified in climate and soil, intersected by a web of seas and rivers, mountains and deserts.”
This disintegration of the previously united world community was completed by the split of languages and cultures following the failure at the Tower of Babel. Following this geophysical and cultural realignment, fulfilment of man’s mission would now necessarily be reassigned to one specific group, and the Avot succeeded in forging the only nation that was both sufficiently interested and suited to this task.
The dispersion of human civilisation across a wide range of places and cultures may have prevented a repeat of the flood’s devastation, but it also correspondingly lowered mankind’s potential for perfection. Rambam describes in numerous places how peace and justice are prerequisites if people are to be able to focus on developing their character and intellect to achieve the restoration of Gan Eden’s ‘ultimate perfection’. The natural consequence of this fragmentation, however, was to create rivalry and warfare, which would inevitably disrupt the efforts of any single society to fulfil mankind’s mission.
First posted to Facebook 23 October 2022, here.
