“Why can’t we all just agree”?
Great question — and probably a good time to be asking it — as we head into an election week.
But it’s not elections that inspired this question it’s the weekly Torah portion that brings it to the fore.
The fascinating story of “The Tower of Babel”. A time when everyone on the face of the earth spoke one language, pooled their resources and create a united front in a concentrated area (current day Iraq) to rebel against G-d.
G-d’s solution?
The introduction of multiple languages. Such, that one couldn’t naturally understand the other and from one location there was dispersion to different corners of the earth.
Solution?
Yes, a Divine solution. The Divine gift of speech and communication. Uniformity isn’t the modality that G-d intended for Homosapiens. Intelligence, communication and the resulting action is the Divine design of humanity and it’s what makes every day infused with consciousness, excitement, substantial challenge and earned results.
The Divine design is a gift to each of us. It involves hard work, potential for conflict enormous self control, deep satisfaction and the challenge to communicate in a language that the other person understands whilst endeavoring to understand the other language being spoken to us.
G-d’s solution? Well, actually, it’s more like we were each handed the keys for the solution and now it’s in each of our hands to work it out!
With best wishes for a Shabbat Shalom & Chodesh Tov,