The week through a Torah lens
Behind the Headlines is a weekly column on YaakovAstor.com. Each week it takes one story from the news and looks at what may lie behind it, through the eyes of the Torah.
Every politician knows the first rule of public life. You don’t say what you want. You say what you stand for.
Nobody running for office says, “I want power.” He says he is fighting for working families. He wants safer streets, a fairer system, a better future for our children. The higher the ideal, the better it sounds on the lawn sign.
Last week’s parsha tells us how old that trick is.
A Tower and a Name
After the Mabul, all of mankind lived in one valley. They said, “Let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we scatter over the face of the whole earth” (Bereishis 11:4).
Rav Avigdor Miller explained that the pasuk holds two different statements. “Lest we scatter” is what they said out loud. It sounded like a fine goal. Mankind should stay together as one family. Who could argue with that?
“Let us make a name for ourselves” is what they said in their hearts. Someone was pushing this plan because he wanted power. A chapter earlier, the Torah tells us who: Nimrod, and “the beginning of his kingdom was Bavel” (10:10).
The fine-sounding goal was the means. The goal was: Keep all of mankind in one city, around one tower, speaking one language, and whoever runs that city runs the world. Nobody leaves. “Unity” was the fence to give Nimrod power and keep him there. Permanently.
The Same Method Today
The tower fell thousands of years ago — but politicians still use the same method, and election season brings it out in full.
As we can all see for ourselves, the ads and lawn signs promise “affordability” and “lower costs.” Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York on “Freeze the rent.” Each one is today’s “lest we scatter.” Some of the people behind these slogans may even mean them. Still, a slogan is chosen for the voter. What the candidate wants for himself he keeps in his heart, the way the builders of Bavel did, and it shows up in what he keeps doing.
Hatred Dressed Up as an Ideal
Most of this is the ordinary weakness of people who want power. For us as Jews there is a more dangerous kind. It’s when the fine-sounding ideal or self-serving denial is used to cover hatred and in effect spread it.
Almost no one in public office today says, “I don’t like Jews.” It would end a career. So the hatred is dressed up as an ideal: human rights, justice, peace. Or it comes as a false comparison, putting Israel on the same level as the terrorists trying to destroy it. Or it comes as a twisting of the facts, so that a country fighting the people who massacred its citizens is accused of “genocide.”
Mayor Mamdani has made the genocide charge many times. On the anniversary of October 7 he made it again, in a statement that condemned Hamas’s crimes in one breath and accused Israel of genocide in the next, as if the murderers and the people defending themselves from them belong on the same scale. Asked to take it back, he refused.
None of this is news to a Jewish reader. Our grandparents heard it before us, in other languages and other countries. But the Torah called it thousands of years ago. When it told us what the builders said out loud and what they said in their hearts, it was giving us eyes. A Jew who learns the parsha learns to see behind the headlines.
A Name for Hashem
Last week’s parsha ends with the tower abandoned and its builders scattered. This week’s parsha opens with Avraham Avinu, who did the opposite of Nimrod and the politicians who pushed his self-centered cause. Wherever he went, “he called out in the name of Hashem” (12:8). He operated purely l’sheim Shamayim. So Hashem told him, “I will make your name great” (12:2), and “through you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (12:3).
Nimrod tried to make himself the center of the world. Hashem chose Avraham because he wanted to make Hashem the center of the world. As a result, Avraham and his descendants would become Hashem’s true center, the place all peoples will one day come to. The navi Yeshayahu says that at the End of Days “all the nations will stream” to the mountain of Hashem (Yeshayahu 2:2).
Until that day, politicians will go on fooling the weak-minded and those living in the darkness of the times.
True unity won’t be restored until the End of Days, as the navi says in the name of Hashem, “I will turn to the peoples a clear language, so that all of them will call in the name of Hashem, to serve Him with one accord” (Tzefaniah 3:9). Mankind will be united again, with one language, this time around Hashem, and every nation will call out in His name, as Avraham did and as the Jewish people have been doing for millennia.
Do you see something else behind this week’s headlines? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Behind the Headlines is written in the spirit of Yaakov Astor’s Hidden Hand books, which look for Hashem’s guiding hand in history and in nature.
Related reading: All Those Wars; Communism & Coronavirus
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