It’s so easy to talk to people who agree with us. There is something soothing about hearing things that affirm, rather than challenge, what we feel and believe. It gives us a cosy sense of recognition and comfort. I suppose that is what is meant by an echo chamber: we surround ourselves with people who agree with us and think as we do; we read newspapers that reflect our own views.
Communities can sometimes do the same. They develop a shared and familiar language that can become so ingrained that we struggle to imagine how someone new might enter and be understood.
This week’s Torah portion, Noach, contains the fascinating and brief story of the Tower of Babel. Humanity spoke one language and this led to utter hubris as people decided to build a tower that would reach heaven, as if they could unravel the mysteries of everything they could not know or see. They were making remarkable progress, as we know how efficient people can be when they share a language and a goal. Their mission was interrupted by God. Multiple languages were introduced, and they could no longer work together so seamlessly to achieve their arrogant ambition.
In Genesis 11, we read that humanity spoke devarim ahadim – “the same words” – though the text does not spell out what these words were. One interpretation teaches us that it was not the content of the words themselves that distressed the Holy One of Blessing. God was alarmed not by what people were saying but by the fact that they “all thought the same thing and this came to be the problem of the settlement.”
The Netziv (Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, a nineteenth-century Lithuanian rabbi), commenting on this passage, explained that having one language was not in itself a sin but that it “caused the first sin”. Because people could communicate so easily, “they agreed to stop in one single place.” This, he argued, was contrary to God’s instruction to “fill the earth and replenish it”: humanity was meant to spread out and inhabit its different places, because the earth had been created to be settled.
In other words: branch out. Encounter others. Engage with difference. Open up.
What a brilliantly subtle lesson this offers about the dangers of closed-mindedness. Unity, far from necessarily ensuring openness, can end up closing it down.
We speak a language here at FPS, and I believe – or at least hope – that you and I speak it together. Imagining someone new arriving to lead will, of course, mean learning new languages, at least initially. But that is a good thing. It will bring new opportunities and possibilities.
Having been in Spain this week to visit Dora, I feel particularly alert to the power of language. Whilst we were in Madrid, we also explored Córdoba and learnt about Jewish history with the brilliant Rabbi Haim Casas. We came to understand just how deeply Jewish history is entangled with the Christian and Muslim histories of southern Spain. It was a powerful reminder of the richness and expansiveness that new encounters can bring.
Now that the month of the High Holy Days is over – and what a wonderful month it has been at FPS – I hope we can talk about this period of transition: about anticipating newness, managing uncertainty and remaining open to new ways of communicating and the unfamiliar.
After all, perhaps the task is not to ensure that we all speak the same language but to remain willing to learn one another’s – and perhaps discover what we could never have found on our own.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
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