Judaism is anything but monolithic. Our text, scripture, is hardly the final word in any conversation. Rather it serves as a jumping off point. The text merely gives us an outline and then asks us, the reader, to fill in the details. This dynamic of reader and text working together to uncover truths is the cornerstone of textual study.
The Torah, Judaism, and the universe are all expansive in nature, not reductive. The truth that one discovers as they begin to wade into the sea of Jewish tradition is that there is no answer, but rather answers. Our tradition asks us to treat life like a coloring book. The outline is present, but it is up to us to color it in.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Midrash. Midrash in its most basic form is sermons or teachings that are drawn out of the text. For instance, the Torah merely tells us that God told Noah to build an ark and Noah did it. What the Torah fails to tell us, or intentionally leaves out, is any real detail of Noah’s internal conflict. His feelings, thoughts or struggles are left to the imagination. The Torah merely reports on actions. It tells us that Noah was told to build an ark, he built it, filled it with animals and there was a flood.
The thing that is truly beautiful about this form of story telling is that it demands a reader to become whole. A covenantal relationship between reader and text is required. For the text to truly come alive it depends on the reader coloring in the missing pieces. Judaism in particular - and religion by expansion - becomes an active process of thinking, as opposed to a passive process of ingesting. The text not only allows, but wants us to fill in the backstory of what is going on. By its very nature our Torah opens the way for Midrash and then models the very core of Jewish existence, covenant.
Jewish tradition imagines a world that is predicated on relationship. The sacred pillar of all existence is the very act of working together not for a common goal but for reciprocal needs. God needs the people of Israel as much as they need God. Similarly, we do not need to work towards a common goal but rather help each other achieve personal goals, needs and wants.
It is like the zen parable of the chopsticks:
Once upon a time, in a temple nestled in the misty end of south hill, lived a pair of monks. One old and one young.
“What are the differences between Heaven and Hell?” the young monk asked the learned master one day.
“There are no material differences,” replied the old monk peacefully.
“None at all?” asked the confused young monk.
“Yes. Both Heaven and Hell look the same. They all have a dining hall with a big hot pot in the centre in which some delicious noodles are boiled, giving off an appetising scent,” said our old priest. “The size of the pan and the number of people sitting around the pot are the same in these two places.”
“But oddly, each diner is given a pair of meter-long chopsticks and must use them to eat the noodles. And to eat the noodles, one must hold the chopsticks properly at their ends, no cheating is allowed,” the Zen master went on to describe to our young monk.
“In the case of Hell, people are always starved because no matter how hard they try, they fail to get the noodles into their mouths,” said the old priest.
“But isn't it the same happens to the people in Heaven?” the junior questioned.
“No. They can eat because they each feed the person sitting opposite them at the table. You see, that is the difference between Heaven and Hell,” explained the old monk.
(Parable source: chaxiubao.typepad.com)
Similarly, the story of the Tower of Babel tells us about humanity coming together for a common purpose, to build a tower up to heaven. God sees this and causes all the people to speak different languages. What if God’s making the people speak different languages is not a punishment for the crime of hubris, but for the crime of monolithic behavior. One reading of this story might suggest that we go against our nature when we all work for the same thing, building a tower, feeding only ourselves. Rather, the story leaves open the possibility that our nature and purpose needs to be to help each other achieve individual dreams, not merely a collective goal. The tower was not built as an expression of each individual’s sacred spark, but as an act of subsuming ones spark for the greater wants and needs of society.
I want to be clear, there is a time and place for subsuming ones own nature for the greater good, but this is not the message this week, or of this particular Midrash. This story might be teaching us that being united is not a static state, but rather a dynamic one. A truly whole universe is a universe at peace, not everyone building one tower, but us all helping each other build individual towers based on the uniqueness of the individual. Creating buildings that are small but express the uniqueness of the individual becomes the trajectory of life, not trying to build one large tower that loses the individual in the greater structure. Small towers that are built on a foundation of individual expression and of helping each other is perhaps what God really wanted to see the people do.
The story of the Tower of Babel shows us the way we should be is that no one builds their little tower alone, rather, we take help from others to build and express our uniqueness. When the land is scattered with small towers, each envisioned by an individual and built with a community of different languages, then, and only then do we become whole, do we become one. Only when we embrace a dynamic model of existence do we actually achieve shalom, peace.
And this is the beauty of Midrash. A mere outline of a story that asks us together to color it in.
