The contrast is too obvious to be accidental.
At the Tower of Babel, the builders declare: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). One chapter later, in Parashat Lech-Lecha, God calls to Abraham: “Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great” (Genesis 12:1–2).
The juxtaposition is striking. Babel represents humanity’s attempt to make its name through collective self-assertion. Abraham represents the opposite impulse: the courage to leave everything familiar, to scatter himself as God once scattered the builders of Babel, trusting that greatness comes not from human ambition but from moral purpose. One vision seeks fame through construction; the other achieves it through righteousness — through the willingness to challenge injustice, even when that injustice seems to emanate from Heaven itself.
The midrashic tradition makes this opposition explicit. Nimrod, the “mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10:9), is depicted as the driving force behind Babel’s construction. In Bereshit Rabbah and Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer, Abraham smashes his father Terah’s idols, confronts Nimrod’s tyranny and is cast into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow to false gods. The deeper insight of these midrashim is that Nimrod’s idols and the tower were not separate undertakings — they were expressions of the same sin. The tower itself was an idol, a monument to human ego, a physical embodiment of the desire to “make a name for ourselves.”
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Idolatry, the sages suggest, is not just a theological mistake but an ethical one. It is the elevation of buildings over beings. The Midrash crystallizes this with devastating simplicity: When a worker fell from the Tower of Babel and died, no one cared, but when a brick fell, the builders mourned. That is the essence of idolatry. Note that nobody in the story of the Tower of Babel is named.
This is the world Abraham leaves behind. When God commands lech lecha (“go forth”), Abraham’s journey mirrors God’s scattering of Babel, but with a crucial difference. God fractured Babel through the confusion of language; Abraham’s dispersal is born of moral clarity.
The Zohar explains why Abraham, of all people, was chosen: “Abraham sought to draw near to God, and he succeeded … He loved righteousness and hated wickedness.” Abraham’s love of God, the Zohar insists, is identical to his love of righteousness. His hatred of wickedness meant rejecting everything Nimrod’s world represented — the worship of power, the subordination of human dignity to grand designs, the silencing of moral dissent for the sake of unity.
What does it mean to love righteousness (tzedek)? We see it most vividly in Genesis 18, when God reveals God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Abraham protests: “Will You sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” (Genesis 18:23–25). Abraham holds God accountable to the very principle that defines divinity — justice. He loves God enough to confront God. He trusts God enough to argue with God. Faith, in this moment, matures into moral partnership.
Here lies the heart of the contrast. Babel sought unity through submission — the suppression of individuality for the sake of order. Abraham stands for the opposite: the moral independence to question and the courage to dissent. God does not want a servant who obeys without thought, but a partner who argues in the name of righteousness.
The theme of hard labor and brick building also animates Exodus 1 and the whole story of Israelite slavery. If you work 24/7, you won’t have time to think or question. Shabbat offers freedom, which is why we acknowledge the Exodus during Friday night Kiddush. But Shabbat is not just the seventh day, it’s a mindset. It’s the ability to pause, to find one’s voice and use it to ask good questions, rather than just respond to every stimulus. It is in this space of pause that Viktor Frankl — psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and the author of Man’s Search for Meaning — finds freedom.
In this sense, Abraham is the first talmudist: the first to understand that loving God means wrestling with God.
The difference between Babel and Abraham is not simply two divergent paths to greatness but two understandings of what it means to be human. The builders of Babel reach skyward in a zero-sum act of hubris. As Nietzsche says, “If God exists, how could I bear not to be God?” Abraham pleads for Sodom because he sees in every person the image of God. God invites Abraham into a partnership.
God makes Abraham’s name great precisely because Abraham refuses to make it great himself.
