We must put Babel in reverse to save the planet
The New Year for Trees has become a focal point for environmental awareness, writes
In the face of climate emergency, the minor festival of Tu Bishvat, the New Year for Trees, which falls on Monday, has taken on added significance. The custom of planting a tree to mark it was once associated with the Zionist’s movement reclamation of the Land of Israel. Now it can be viewed as part of a worldwide call for action to help protect the environment. Trees are today recognised as “the lungs of the earth”, absorbing carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to global warming. The eco-conscious Prince Charles has urged us to plant trees to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee this year.
The Torah recounts that Abraham himself planted a tree — a tamarisk near Beersheba. It might appear one of the patriarch’s less remarkable deeds. But our nomadic forebears are depicted as living close to nature, diggers of wells that yield life-giving water. They may build altars, but what they don’t build is cities.
Cities may be synonymous with the advance of civilisation but in the early books of the Bible they are viewed with suspicion. The first city is constructed by Cain, the first killer. Sodom and Gomorrah are dens of iniquity, not beacons of progress. And Pithon and Raamses in Egypt are the products of slavery.
There is no better illustration of the distrust of cities than in the episode of the Tower of the Bible, a tale of hubris punished, a biblical just-so story to explain the multiplicity of languages.
According to the Torah, migrants from the east settle in a plain in Mesopotamia and plan to erect a city with a tower whose top reaches to the heavens. They fire their bricks to make them hard, the repetition in the Hebrew venisrafah lisrefah emphasising their ardour.
But God intervenes, sowing confusion by causing the builders to start speaking in different languages whereas the world previously had a common tongue. Unable to understand each other, they abandon the project.
Whereas the Flood is brought about as an act of divine retribution to cleanse the earth of human violence, the offence of the Babel-builders is not so obvious. The Torah records that they aspired to “make a name” for themselves, fearing that they would be “scattered across the face of the earth”.
Considering that the memory of the Flood would be fresh in their minds, their desire to herd together for protection might seem understandable. But in the eyes of rabbis, their heavenly skyscraper is seen as an assault on heaven. One vivid interpretation in the Talmud depicts them trying to smash open the clouds with axes and release the rain, as though they could take command of the weather.
Another has the hunter Nimrod leading an attempted rebellion that seeks to enthrone an idol as a rival deity.
For the 19th-century commentator the Netziv (Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin), the sin of Babel lies in wanting to remain in one place, resisting the directive in Genesis to the first humans “to fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28).
The Torah, however, doesn’t spell this out. What God says there is: “If, as one people with one language, they have begun to do this, nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” (11:6). It seems to echo the kind of anxiety that leads God to expel Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden: “Now that man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever” (3:22).
In other words, human beings are creatures endowed with great possibility but who threaten to run out of control.
There is in the Creation story a tension between the exhortation to “fill the earth and subdue it” and the direction a few verses later for Adam and Eve to “work and safeguard” their habitat (2:16), a tension between domination and responsible stewardship.
Equilibrium can be maintained by observing the Sabbath, a rest from creative work and a memorial of Creation, which acknowledges that we are part of something larger than ourselves: later in the Torah the very idea of the Sabbath is applied to the land, which must be allowed its rest in the sabbatical year.
Whatever moral gloss we might put on the story of Babel, it expresses something of our predicament. From one perspective, the tower represents human ambition, ever striving for new heights. But taken too far, our creative instincts can also carry us towards disaster and so we have to know when to stop, step back and put limits on our exploitation of the natural world.
The commentator Ibn Ezra, reflecting on the Babel episode, observed that different religions and language create “jealousy and hatred among people”.
Now, perhaps uniquely aware of a global challenge, the different nations of the world are going to have to lay aside some of their rivalry and work together in the common interest. To save the planet, we are going to have to put Babel in reverse.