The story of the Tower of Babel, which appears toward the end of this week’s Torah portion, is one of the most obscure sin narratives in the Bible. In just nine verses, the Torah describes how initially, everyone on earth spoke a single language. But then there was a decision to erect a city and a tower to the heavens “to make a name for ourselves.” This greatly displeased God, who decided that if humanity would act in such a way when they all spoke the same language, God must “confound their speech” and scatter the people across the earth.
From the plain meaning of the text, it is not at all clear whether building the tower even constitutes a sin at all — and if so, what it is. This ambiguity is reflected in the various explanations that have been offered for this episode, all of which are vastly different from one another.
In the Zohar’s view, the sin of the Tower of Babel constitutes the single greatest danger in the kabbalistic worship of God, a sin referred to by the mystics as kitzutz bi-neti’ot — “cutting the shoots.” Let us turn then to the Zohar’s treatment of the Tower of Babel to understand the nature of this sin and its religious significance:
Come, let us build ourselves a city and tower with its top in the heavens. All of them came with evil counsel to rebel against the Holy One, blessed be He, in their foolishness, with the folly of their hearts. Rabbi Abba said: They took folly in their hearts, but they came with the wisdom of wickedness, in order to depart from the supreme authority to another authority, and to exchange His glory for a foreign glory, and in everything there is a secret of supernal wisdom.
Come, let us build ourselves a city and tower — Come and see: When they arrived at this valley, which is a foreign dominion, and the place of this dominion was revealed to them as being embedded in the fish of the sea, they said: Here is a place to settle and to strengthen the heart, to enjoy it below. Immediately they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city.’ We shall establish in this place a city and tower, and make ourselves a name. This place shall be for us to fear, and not another, and we shall build for this place a city and tower. Why should we ascend above, where we cannot enjoy it? Here is an established place. ‘And make ourselves a name’ — fear to worship there…
A valley is a low place, first and foremost topographically. But in the Zohar, it also represents a low place spiritually. In the Zohar’s view, the building of the tower in a valley reflects the focus of the tower’s builders on a lower entity instead of the supreme entity — namely, God. This deviation is, in the Zohar’s eyes, the arch-sin. In order to understand this matter, several additional points must be made.
In the literalist conception, the sin of idolatry could be understood to consist of the fetishistic worship of wood and stone or of fictitious invented entities. The Zohar’s understanding is different. Idolaters are in fact worshipping authentic metaphysical or divine entities, things like stars and constellations (which in ancient times were seen as having power over people) and angels. The problem is that these entities are secondary (or even tertiary) to God, but they are not God himself.
One of Kabbalah’s central innovations in the understanding of God is the system of divine powers known as the sefirot, each of which represents a different aspect of divinity. But once we understand God’s power as channeling through the sefirot, the danger of sin in divine worship no longer lies solely outside the divine entity, but also within divinity itself. One can now err by worshipping one of the lower sefirot, or the Sitra Achra (the “Other Side” of divinity), in place of worshipping God. The Zohar is thus careful to close a potential breach opened up by kabbalistic doctrine itself by rejecting the worship of divine entities that are low in the kabbalistic hierarchy.
This is how the Zohar understood what the people in the valley were up to with their project of building a tower to heaven. It is not entirely clear what the Zohar has in mind when it mentions “another authority” or “foreign glory,” but it is clearly referring to one of the lower entities. The sin of the Tower of Babel therefore was in preferring religious attachment to a low divine entity instead of worshiping the supreme God represented by the totality of the sefirot.
Why did they prefer the low over the sublime and exalted? The Zohar’s answer is that the choice of the lower entity is a product of utilitarian consideration. The lower entity is convenient and accessible, closer to the human spirit. Interacting with a proximate divinity that is within reach is, in the eyes of the sinners, preferable to the sublime and hidden one that is inconceivable and cannot be institutionalized. Moreover, by describing the valley as a place to “strengthen the heart, to enjoy it below,” the Zohar hints that the lower entity is more subject to manipulation (probably magic manipulation), meaning one can derive benefit from it, while the supreme divine entity stands above man and is not subject to his control.
The danger inherent in religious worship of low theosophical entities that are not identified with the supreme divine totality troubled the Zohar greatly. And it found this danger reflected in some of the best-known transgressions recorded in the Bible. So for example, the sin of the first man was not that he ate from the Tree of Knowledge, but that he did not eat from the more sublime Tree of Life and thereby chose to live an inferior religious life. In the Zohar’s view, the preference for the Tree of Knowledge (like the preference for the valley) comes from the human tendency to settle for the near and the familiar instead of striving for the exalted and the supreme — what we might call bourgeois mysticism. The deep significance of misconstruing the ultimate object of worship is the danger of trivializing religion itself, reducing it to human needs and whims while turning away from its sublime and hidden dimensions.
This piece was originally published as part of an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria called A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone. Sign up for the entire series here.
