Parashat HaShavua - Noach
On Monday, my eleventh grade Tanakh students and I studied a verse from the book of Devarim:
כִּ֠י לֹֽא־דָבָ֨ר רֵ֥ק הוּא֙ מִכֶּ֔ם כִּי־ה֖וּא חַיֵּיכֶ֑ם…
For this is not an empty davar for you, it is your life… (Devarim 32:47)
The biblical meaning of the word davar is “word,” rather than the modern Hebrew “thing.” While words are not tangible, as “things”are, they are equally impactful. Words shape our reality; they create our ideas and concepts, make us who we are and the world the way it is. Perhaps this is the meaning of the biblical creation story, in which God speaks the world into existence. Our verse in the book of Devarim (the book of words!) expresses Moshe’s warning to the people- they should not think that the words he has just shared with them, the teachings of the Torah, are empty or trivial, for it is those words that provide them with life. Sifrei Devarim, a rabbinic commentary, understands this verse to mean that if something in the Torah seems empty, that is only because we, the students of Torah, allow it to be so; the words themselves can’t be empty, because they are our life.
The story of the people who build the tower of Babel begins with a statement about devarim/words:
וַֽיְהִ֥י כׇל־הָאָ֖רֶץ שָׂפָ֣ה אֶחָ֑ת וּדְבָרִ֖ים אֲחָדִֽים.
Everyone on earth had the same language and the same devarim/words. (Bereishit 11:1)
This preface to the story can serve as the key to understanding what the people did wrong and why God chose to “confound” their language as a result. A common understanding of the narrative is that the people started off united (everyone had the same language), but trouble arose when they became arrogant and overreaching; so God punished them by making it impossible for them to communicate with each other. According to this reading, the negative consequences of unity outweigh whatever benefits it promotes.
Rabbi Chayim of Volozhin (known as Haamek Hadavar) reads the story differently. The problem, in his view, is not unity, but uniformity. Understanding the phrase “the same language and the same words” literally, he writes:
The text did not explain what those words were…it just tells us that they were the same words, to teach us that it wasn't because of the content of the words themselves that the Holy One of Blessing was distressed…But here what happened is that all thought the same thing, and this came to be the problem of the settlement.
The same words were the expression of the same thoughts. Haamek Hadavar understands the settlement to be one in which diversity of thought is both feared and punished. In order to prevent humanity from building and sustaining this culture of repression, God gave humanity the gift of multiple languages. This increase in devarim/words brings with it the growth of ideas, philosophies and world views.
״For this is not an empty davar for you״ - We empty words of their meaning when we insist on uniformity of understanding. It is multiple readings, multiple perspectives, that bring us life. It is our fervent hope that we will raise our children to know that the words of Torah are never empty, that we will teach them to study with care and curiosity, and that they will embrace multiple readings and perspectives with humility and respect.
Rabbi Miriam Greenblatt
High School Learning Specialist