Course:Tower of Babel
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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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.” יהוה came down to look at the city and tower that humanity had built, and יהוה 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.” (Genesis 11:4-9)
As a child, I was sent to Christian school by my atheist parents; now, as an adult, I’m a Jewish convert. My partner was raised Reconstructionist, and I’ve been practicing Judaism for many years. I count myself lucky to be surrounded by a robust, diverse Jewish community that affirms my other identities and values as part of my Judaism, not counter to it. I believe that it is Judaism’s commitment to textuality and interpretation that have allowed me to use it as a lens to better understand and commit myself to things like my mixed-race identity or anti-Zionism. (I also believe that I was drawn to this aspect of Judaism because I was raised by two lawyers…but anyway.)
I can’t write an entry on Judaism, because it would go on forever. Instead, I want to talk about my favorite Bible story, which looms large in both my Christian-adjacent childhood and my Jewish adulthood.
The Tower of Babel is a story in Genesis in which the linguistic unity of a people inspires them to start building a huge city. This offends G-d, who splits their single language into many languages, preventing them from communicating with each other. G-d scatters them across the earth, demolishing the tower in the process.
As with anything else in the Torah, this story has inspired many interpretations and could inspire infinitely more. When I was a kid, Babel was presented to me as a parable about why different cultures speak different languages. Or maybe it’s about hubris–in my mind, it always feels linked to the Greek myth of Prometheus bringing fire to humans and being punished by having his liver eternally pecked out by vultures. Rav Abba bar Aybo, who lived in 3rd-century Asoristan, says: “As a result of the building of the tower, forgetting was introduced into the world” (Sanhedrin 109a:7), which I find beautiful and haunting. My friend Sam, who loves the Tower of Babel so much he made a ceramic sculpture of it, says that this story is his favorite because it reveals G-d as jealous and fearful of their own creation. All of these interpretations coexist in my mind. The Tower of Babel, like so many Bible stories (and so many poems!), is short, but it can hold all that and more.
Personally, I see the Tower of Babel as a story about alienation. Just as many of the stories in Genesis explain why things are the way they are, I think that Babel attempts to explain why we can’t understand each other, even when we try. Our single, perfect language was shattered, and now even people who speak the same language spend their entire lives trying to understand and be understood. I return to these themes again and again in my writing, and I think that writing as a practice is uniquely suited to explore them.
The friction of attempted understanding can be so painful, and yet it is also the thing that makes human relationships pleasurable and fulfilling. In a song, I recently wrote the line: “There can be no touch without separation.” In response to the invention of the struggle to comprehend each other, maybe we invented new kinds of love.
To end this entry, here’s a poem I wrote a couple years ago that I’m still proud of:
babel
is it true / about the tower / is that really the origin
/ not only of other languages / but times / our friends have turned away
in the green hours / of the afternoon / provenance evaporates
/ & what was that book / where did i get this jacket / where will it go
when i die / these things / when i die
/ no country / can be visited / except capitalism
i tell myself / to staunch the desire / to be alone
/ face impassive / bullet train / through the chest of a mountain
last time i did this / i looked into the black window / afraid that someone
/ would look back / and know / i was a man
but still wanting someone / anyone / to see
/ a mirror craves reflection / is it true / our faces were made for mirrors
no trick is any use / desire persists / after it is fulfilled
/ in the green hours / sometimes i still think / i want to be a man
i want to go work / for a summer / on that tower
/ to find out / how it feels
(PS: Ted Chiang’s story Tower of Babylon is one of my favorite short stories and deserves a mention in this entry for how it revisits the Babel story. You can read the whole thing online here!)