NOJDS weekly school newsletter #10

This week's Torah portion - Noach - includes many famous stories. Given our recent weather and location on the globe, the flood story is perhaps the easiest link to New Orleans. But one other part of the parsha is of equal importance - the Tower of Babel narrative. In this story, the people - all of whom share one common language - build a city and a tower in order to make a name for themselves. When G-d sees what the people have done, he worries about their actions and states, "If as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech..." In this case, G-d worries about the negative aspect of the ease of having everybody work together through the ease of one common language. Today, we have the opposite problem. Our many languages and cultures make it difficult to work together as one cohesive community, but diversity in our world has led to such richness. This is true both inside and outside of the Jewish community. Your children may benefit from a discussion about how different the world would be if we didn't have so many languages and cultures. What would your children miss if we were one homogenous culture with one shared language? Older children may wish to discuss the importance of how we can actively work to overcome the barrier of working together that G-d created when he scattered everybody over the face of the earth.