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Despite Aristotle’s pronouncement that human beings are social animals, and therefore need each other to live and flourish, it is rarely the case that our relationships to others is uncomplicated. We need each other, but get too close and we find out just how difficult life can be together. If anything, this realization makes the Tower of Babel an achievement worth nothing. Projects of that scope and scale require a unity of consensus and collective effort that seems nearly impossible in today’s world. How exactly were they able to come together to build the Torah and what can we learn from it?
According to the midrash, what differentiated the generation who built the Tower of Babel from the generation who perished in the flood is that those who built the tower “acted towards each other with love and fellowship, as it says ‘they were of the same language and the same words’ (Bereshit 11:1) from this you learn that disagreement is hated and peace is great.” (Bereshit Rabbah 38:6) Despite their sin, God refrains from wiping them out as he did to the generation of the flood, because those who built the tower demonstrated love for one another.
At first glance, this explanation seems strange. How could an effort rooted in love end in such calamity? In the end God thwarts their efforts. He “confuses their speech” and “spreads them out across the face of the earth.” To better understand how love could bring about these unfortunate circumstances, it is instructive to turn to the works of Sigmund Freud. Though better known for his insight into the individual psyche, his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego sheds light on the dynamics of groups and the pathologies that they can exhibit. He first notes that group form through the process of identification. Individual members of the group become bonded through their mutual identification in some ideal object, a mission or leader one looks up to and feels drawn towards. This process of identification, Frued explains, is at the heart of how we experience love throughout our lives and first manifests when we are young. We love our parents, look up to them, seek to imitate them, and internalize the fantasy image that we construct of them.
However, love as Freud explains, can easily become narcissistic and this is especially the case in groups. Members idealize the love object, a mission or leader, and see it as the embodiment of all that they themselves lack.
We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism.
By showering love on the love object, one in fact is able to experience love for oneself. To love the group’s cause or leader allows one a closeness and intimacy with all that one dreams about. But how then can a narcissistic experience as described by Freud lead to such profound attachments to others in the group? By sharing an ideal object which they mutually idolize, they identify not only with that object but with each other as well. Each one sees the other as a part of oneself and it is this feeling that propels group members to work together towards a common purpose.
To the outsider looking in, the magnificence of the group’s mission or leader may be lost upon them. Campaign slogans used to unite people together are often intentionally vague in a way that leaves them open to interpretation. This is certainly the case regarding the Tower of Babel. All the Torah records is that the tower is built so that the people can “make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.” Biblical commentators are left struggling to understand what exactly may be the Tower’s purpose. Why do the people need a name? What was so problematic about being scattered? In actuality, the vague purpose of the tower may have served to its advantage. It ultimately could function as a blank slate upon which members of the group could project all of their hopes, dreams, and love.
On the one hand, everything Freud lays out may appear relatively harmless. So what if groups are constituted at least in part in this fashion?. If they provide meaning and community to those who participate them, then why should God or anyone else have a problem with them? Nevertheless, the midrash senses the dark undercurrents at play and Freud helps elucidate them. He notes that the more group members idealize the mission or leader and treat it as their ego ideal, their sense of self becomes replaced with that of the object their admiration. In Freud’s words:
the ego [of the lover] becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence.
To identify fully and absolutely with a cause is to ultimately see oneself as worthless when measured against the greatness of what is being aspired to. If necessary, one must be willing to sacrifice themselves and perhaps even others in order to achieve the necessary goals. This results in a complete inability to articulate or sustain critique of any kind against the object of one’s love. Instead:
everything that the object does and asks for is right and blameless. Conscience has no application to anything that is done for the sake of the object in blindness of love remorselessness is carried to the pitch of crime.
Nothing captures this better than the midrash’s description of the building of the tower.
“Seven large levels led up to the Tower from the east and seven from the west. Bricks would be carried up from one side and lowered from the other. If a person fell and died, no one would pay attention to it. If a brick fell, they would sit and cry, wailing “Woe is us. When will another brick be raised up in its place”
Pirkei D’Rebbe Eliezer, Chapter 34.
The people are so in love with their tower and what it represents to them that it is the only thing that matters. Despite God’s clear affirmation after the flood that the human beings is created in the divine image, those engaged in the building of the tower seemed to have forgotten this basic moral truth. When faced once again with humanity’s corruption, this time inspired by love, God has no choice but to destroy the tower and disperse them across the earth.
The Jewish people know a thing or two about the destruction of buildings that served to unify people together for the Temple befell a similar fate to that of the Tower of Babel. What then can we learn from this story? Rav Kook famously states that the Temple will only be rebuilt through ahavat chinam, love freely given. While one can debate the exact meaning of this, one thing is clear. It cannot be rebuilt through the kind of love that built the Tower of Babel. That love leads only to destruction.