Noach - The Dangers Of Unity

Hi, this is Evolvski and welcome back to our third year of the parish in five where in five minutes we set out to give you insights into the para just a little short idea that you can say over at the shabas table or hopefully just for yourself to get a little extra insight parasak obviously the last two years we spoke about the marble aspect of paras noak but that's not the only disaster that takes place in paras Noah. Yeah, there are three major stories of destruction in the Torah. Stone Amora, which we haven't gotten to yet, the uh the Mabble. And the second one of this week's par, which is the Dha Floa. What's the Da Floga or as some people pronounce Dha Pala? Yeah. Everybody got together and said let's build a city and a tower and a cobra goes down to see this and he gets very upset and he changes everybody's language B of Bale he mixes up everybody's languages and spreads them all across the earth and that is the which split up and it spread around etc. What what exactly did they do that was so terrible? In other words, the kazal tell us that they were trying to get the entire world to serve a voter. But it doesn't say that in the parish. It didn't say they were all getting together to serve a voter. It says they were getting together to build one city and one tower and everyone spoke one language and they were all united in this purpose. So, so what was the danger here? So, uh, I've mentioned this in the past that the Jewish people, uh, our story is the story of all of, uh, people kind. We did not start with the Jewish people, right? The Christian calendar begins with the birth of Yoshka and the Muslim calendar begins with Muhammad's first vision from Allah that becomes the Quran. Ours starts with the creation of the first human being. And we don't leave out anybody. Everybody's in our story. Non-Jews get roles to play as well. And so the first two parios, which is close to 2,000 years, there's no Jews to be seen. Aan becomes the first Jew. He makes his appearance in next week's parl. But until then, yeah, this is just world history. Abraham Ha. What does mean say the kazal? He was and the entire world was he was on one side and the entire world was on the other side. He was literally the first iconoclast. You've heard the term iconoclast which we use today to mean like an individual, right? Iconoclast means he broke the icons. He broke the salim the statues and he was literally the first iconoclast. He went around and smashed all of the idols. In order to be able to have individuals, you have to to a certain extent sacrifice the sense of absolute unity. And very interesting. So Thomas Moore wrote a book called Utopia which of course a little bit of a joke because in Latin you means nottopia is a place. So utopia means no place. And he writes the perfect society and there is really no room for freedom of expression in this society. Everybody dresses the same. Everybody has to act the same. It's basically a precursor of a communist society. And the picture that they put on top of the book, at least in my particular edition, was a painting of the building of the Tower of Babel because that's what it was. It was total unity and to the point where we could not breach any exception. There would be no individuality. And if that world was allowed to exist, there could never be an Arau. And there held up a prism to mankind. Whereas a prism splits light into seven colors. So this prism split all of the languages into 70 languages and spread people around to give them the opportunity to develop their own personality and cohos something that can't happen when we insist on rigid conformity. And so every society has this uh difficulty. How do you guarantee uh uniformity and at the same time allow room for individual expression? And that's uh ultimately the goal. You can't have everybody where you stifle any sense of individual achievement and you're not going to have a world. You have to be able to have the opportunity for individuals so that Arabus Salanta can pop on the scene and start a Musa movement so that different individuals at history have been able to revolutionize the way we look at the world. And needless to say, the same thing is especially true if we want to have a Jewish people who is a who are living a different life who is an every and that's why uh mdal bevel tells us the story that absolute uniformity is not necessarily the best way. Good job.