Thinking religiously today inevitably involves asking how technology, human interaction, and Torah intersect—and how they stand at odds.
I’ve gotten a lot of opportunity to think through these tensions over the last 8 years, sharing poetry on the Parsha each week as I built a career in advertising technology.
It’s that background that led me to decide to embark on a new series exploring the passage in Tanakh that deals with these issues most: the Tower of Babel.
Now, I’ll be sharing a short email regularly that explores the passage in Genesis itself, and the Midrashic, Talmudic, and other Jewish sources surrounding it. This week’s thought on the Tower of Babel below.
If you’d like to sign up for my Tower Babel emails, let me know here.
And if you don’t already receive my weekly Parsha thoughts, I’d be delighted to add you to the list.
Shabbat Shalom, and looking forward to the exchange of ideas.
Abe
Disruption
i
The people in Babel
build a tower to heaven
to make a name for themselves
using bricks liveinim as stone avanim,
tar cheimer as mortar chomer:
engineering from wordplay.
In such a world of innovation,
anything can be whatever we define it to be.
If we like,
we can transform rocks and clay
and take earth to the sky.
ii
Except God separates the nations into languages.
As if to say:
Even in words,
there are always distinctions.
There is always an order.
You can only disrupt so much.
iii
Now consider Shabbat.
On Shabbat, you and your worker and your animal
all must rest as one.
The sharp lines of hierarchy fall away.
The order is broken down.
And this is what God wants.
iv
We can disrupt
for the sake of making a new name for ourselves
as the people of Babel disrupted the world.
We can disrupt
for the sake of something higher
as our Shabbat rest disrupts.
How will you disrupt?
If you’d like to sign up for my Tower Babel emails, let me know here.