Today’s portion has two parts. First the Tower of Babel, and then the birth of Abram.

Part 1: The Tower of Babel story has always confounded me. It seemed cruel for Hashem to disperse the people and mess with their language. The people were unified. Why did Hashem break up their unity?

Rabbi Dov Baer Schneuri in the 19th century wrote (I’m paraphrasing here) about how the people’s greatest fear was being “scattered.” All the people gathered in one place (a valley in the land of Shinar) and settled there. They wanted to build the tower so they wouldn’t be scattered.

Rabbi Schneuri points out the generation understood that Hashem’s blessings would always flow to a place of peace and harmony, so they figured by staying together, they would physically prosper. Their fear of being scattered meant they were worried about the flow of “easy” blessings from heaven would stop if they weren’t all together in unity. The key to this unity was the language they spoke; Hebrew. The holy tongue provided a powerful tool to keep themselves unified.

My thought;

Growing up, I was always told (maybe I wasn’t directly told but it’s what my childlike ears and brain heard) Hashem was “scared” the people would reach his levels so he scattered them (us) before they (we) could do so. It was to keep us away from Him. My takeaway as a kid was that Hashem did not want us to be close to Him. That we should stay at arms length. This was reinforced over the years. But I think it fundamentally misses what is going on.

However, as an adult, and rereading the Torah, I observe that the issue here is the humans at Babel werent living out their purpose. Hashem originally told them to be fruitful and multiply…so although they recognized Hashem’s unity, they were working against their design. They were consolidating. They weren’t spreading and scattering as Hashem wanted.

If they had remained in one place, Hashem likely knew that the strife would end up coming as they could no longer be contained and we would have needed to fight to stay. Hashem had big plans for how many people were going to be on the earth; we learn later when he tells Abram “as many as sand on the shore.” Had the humans in Babel stayed, it would NOT have been good or healthy. So he confused their language and spread them out. This was both loving and compassionate for their (our) future.

However. As Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl in the 18th century points out; “Even after God ‘confused’ all the languages, something of the holy tongue remains in every language. Every language contains at least a few words of Torah. That is the inner reason why the Jewish people have been exiled among all the nations: to elevate, in the course of their discussions in the various languages, the holy letters of the Torah which became mixed in them.” This to me is a beautiful thought in line of theme of Hashem always leaving a remnant. There is always that tinge of hope even when things seem dark.

Part 2: the birth of Abram

It’s a short passage here, but we learn of Abram’s birth and how Terah took his son Abram, Lot (the son of Terah’s deceased son Haran), and Abram’s wife Sarai and began a journey from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan.

We learn that they didn’t make it all the way. When they reached the land of Haran, they settled there. I wonder if that is because of the grief of Terah in losing his son. I don’t know for sure, but other than Abel, I’m not sure we read many children who died before their fathers until this time. There must have been a lot of grief. Enough for Terah to not complete his journey, because Terah died in Haran and never made it to Canaan.

Rabbi Moses Grunwald of Huszt from the 19th century writes; “it is relatively easy to EMBARK on a spiritual journey, the difficulty lies in COMPLETING it. Even ordinary people, of no special religious caliber, will often have an awakening, inspiring them to change radically; but somewhere along the line their spirits become stifled and their plans thwarted.” Rabbi Grunwald goes on to contrast Terah who had good intentions to get to the land of Canaan, but only “reached as far as Haran” and Abram, who persisted and completed his mission to journey to the land.

So this leaves me with some questions (where I don’t yet necessarily have the answers);

1. What spiritual journeys have I embarked on, but got stuck because of my trauma, grief, and junk from the past? Where I made early quick progress, but eventually got bogged down? How do I get “unstuck” in order to persist and complete my mission/journey?

2. Is there a difference between purpose, mission, calling, and journey?

3. Where (like the humans living in Babel) am I comfortable and unwilling to go and be fruitful and multiply?