WOAH Talmud, woah.
So my Hebrew book, Bet is for Bereishit, is based on Bible and prayer passages and offers little commentary discussions. This chapter's portion is the Tower of Babel story. Man gets a little crazy and decides that if they don't build a giant tower to the heavens, then they will get dispersed. G-d gets a little crazy and decides that if G-d doesn't disperse them (very Fate/Greek Fortune kind of crap that goes completely unmentioned), they will take over the Divine Realm.
The third of the selected commentaries compares this humanly fuck-up to Noah and it's nice because Noah's generation were douches and so G-d killed them, but the Babel kids worked together and were really nice to eachother (they just threatened a not-so-powerful Heavenly Hosts by being awesome) so they just get a little linguistically farkakt and booted out to hotzeplotz: much better than drowning.
The other two compare this foible to getting kicked out o' the Garden. This is where I would like to brake a little. That sounds way too much like Original Sin. That's not who we are. We're habitual sinners, oh yes, but we should not be DOOMED to sin. They are drawing this correlation because the wording in the story refers to them as Children of Adam. Aside from the fact that Children and Adam have other meanings in Hebrew. It also talks about their “first act” or how they “began to act”--the action being the tower of self-importance.
Why does the connection to Adam have to be sin? I know the Jewish instinct is to the sin and doom and gloom but maybe it should be to linguistics. It's been several generations between Adam and this tower business, and we still only have one language. Maybe the connection is that they are still speaking and living closely to how and where Adam was speaking and living. Except he stayed ground side. From there they started a different, not-Adam generation: the generation of where they were relocated to and how they spoke there. That's when people became different peoples and would to be a better identifier, be different children of_________. The nomenclature of the time was _____ son/maybedaughter of _____. From there people became ______, son of _____ from ______. Or just ______from ______.
And that's why cherry-picking and pessimism are bad.
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