I gave a dvar torah

This past Shabbat, I had been asked to deliver a Dvar Torah. Risking my modesty, I would go so far as to say it was perhaps some of my better work as far as Dvarim go, and I have given a fair few in my days. So, here, I am going to attempt to recreate it here.

The Torah portion this week was parshat Noach, the story of Noah. The biggest and most discussed part of this parsha is of course the whole deal with the flood-ark thing. Noah built it, gathered the animals, loaded the family, and waited out the raining and the draining. This story we know, we know what different metaphors and life lessons we get from this, the whole thing has been talked about a lot, in general and also during this Shabbat in specific. So I am not going to talk about Noah, or the ark, or the flood.

In the parsha, lots of things happen after Noah and his family and all of the animals came off of the ark. Noah gets drunk, his sons do and don’t show respect for him, things go a bit off, Cham proves a jerk, etc.
Later on, the descendents go down into the valley and decide to build a city. They decide to build a tower in the center of this city (the tower of Babel) that will reach all the way up into the heavens, solidifying the unity of the people and ensuring their future harmony. However, Gd sees this tower and says, “ Look at what this people are already doing?! This cannot be allowed!” and Gd destroyed the tower, and babbled the language of man, creating the different tongues of the world, and preventing easy communication and cooperation.
Well this seems a bit off. Why would Gd want to divide people, to prohibit cooperation and easy cohabitation? It seems that it would be a more peaceful, harmonious place where people aren’t preemptively misunderstanding each other due to language issues. So what happened?

It has been pretty much accepted (by me, at least) that details that are included in the Torah, especially details that seem unnecessary and unimportant are in fact just the opposite. When it talks about the construction of the tower, the Torah tells us that in the valley there were no stones, and so the leaders instructed the people to make bricks with which to build a tower that would reach the heavens. We are not told any dimensions of the tower, we are not told anything about what the tower will look like, we are not told about what the purposes and functions of the tower will be; this is a great contrast to what happened when the instructions for the building of Noah’s Ark, or the Tabernacle, which were described to the minutest detail. In this case rather, we are told solely that at the location where the tower was to be built, there was no stone, and they would instead make and use bricks.
So, what does this mean? Was it the advancement in human technological advancements that offended Gd so? And if so, then from a Jewish perspective are all of our technological advancements today, from laptops to medical advancements to ipods, equally heretical?
No. Let’s look again at what is said about the tower; we are not told exactly what the purpose of the tower is, but again, that it was made of manmade bricks in absence of natural, organic stone, in the absence of what was there without them—in the absence of Gd. It wasn’t the act that proved so offensive, but rather the godlessness of the foundation and inspiration of it.
In this way, if we, as individuals, choose to include Gd in the actions of our everyday lives, to realize that what we do which may seem so far separate from Gd, really is just as connected as water, trees, and air.

As a conclusion to my Dvar, in tradition with the environment, I gave all the girls a Bracha to be ‘fruitful and multiply.’*

From the previous week’s Parsha, Beresheit, we are commanded to be fruitful and multiply. The problem with this is that, especially as women, there is a very limited amount of time in which this mitzvah is even possible.
In the beginning of Noach, we are told that the toldot-offspring- of Noach are firstly that he was a righteous person and secondly the names of his children. Rashi explains that this is because the most important offspring of a righteous person are not necessarily their children (which are of course important) but their good deeds; based on this, we can all be fruitful and multiply in our deeds for our entire lives, filling the world with our most meaningful offspring, our mitzvoth.