Parshas Noach: The Best Tower in the World
On Sunday morning, I opened WhatsApp and saw a picture on a friend’s status: three of his kids, playing with Magna-Tiles.
The caption read: “working together to build “The Best Tower In The World”!”.
It struck me as perfect for Parshas Noach.
It struck me as perfect for Parshas Noach.
After all, this is the week we read about towers too.
After the Flood, when the world was washed clean and silent, Noach sent out a dove. It came back with a small olive leaf in its beak. That leaf didn’t save humanity. It didn’t feed his family. But it was the sign: it’s safe again, you can walk the world soon. A single, fragile branch spoke more than a looming tower ever could.
Noach had so many lessons he could have learned from: the dove carrying hope, the rainbow painting the sky, the chance to plant something nourishing and start fresh.
But he was carrying so much unrecognized pain inside.
That’s why my friend’s kids were so right. Three different ages, each with their own spark, their own contribution, building together what, for them, was the best tower in the world. That’s the tower worth building.
That’s our work too. Look for the good hidden in life’s lessons. Learn from people that have walked similar steps to yours. Find your unique voice. Use it together with others, to keep building towers that are beautiful. Not against God, but toward Him. So when the floodwaters of life inevitably come, you can choose habits that sustain you instead of ones that numb you.
Wishing you all a calm and peaceful Shabbos.
🩵 Berke
After the Flood, when the world was washed clean and silent, Noach sent out a dove. It came back with a small olive leaf in its beak. That leaf didn’t save humanity. It didn’t feed his family. But it was the sign: it’s safe again, you can walk the world soon. A single, fragile branch spoke more than a looming tower ever could.
Noach had so many lessons he could have learned from: the dove carrying hope, the rainbow painting the sky, the chance to plant something nourishing and start fresh.
But he was carrying so much unrecognized pain inside.
Dude was 600 years old. Just spent a hundred or so years building an ark while people laughed at him. A year sealed inside with the animals. A flood that devoured his entire world aside from his immediate family.
If that’s not trauma, I don’t know what is.
He didn’t have role models to show him what healthy choices looked like either. Humanity was still new, there wasn’t anyone who had walked this path before. He did what people often do when they’re hurting inside: he left the safety of the ark to “settle down,” told himself he was planting for the future, but instead went to self-medicate the ache instead of transmuting it. He could’ve planted wheat for bread or olives for oil. But no, he planted grapes. He got blacked-out drunk. He numbed. He missed the deeper meaning of the gifts Hashem was handing him. For that, he was punished.
That choice echoes in every generation: after the floodwaters of life, do we plant what sustains us, or what helps us forget?
Generations later, humanity gathered on the plains of Shinar, ready to “protect” themselves and wage war against God.
With no stones to be found, they said: “Come, let us make bricks and build a tower to the sky.”
Stones are natural. Each with its own God-given shape. Bricks are artificial — pressed into molds, identical, replaceable.
On one level, it was genius: invention, innovation, human creativity. But they turned that gift toward ego.
The Midrash even says that if a man fell from the tower, they mourned the lost brick more than the lost life. That’s what happens when the project becomes more important than the people inside it.
Hashem scattered them. It wasn’t to destroy them, but to protect them from themselves. Not with water or fire this time, but with languages. Earlier He had given Noach a rainbow: many colors, each distinct, joined together in one arc, a promise of safety. Now He gave humanity the same lesson in another form: many voices instead of one, spread across the earth so their strength would not become their downfall, but their salvation.
It reminds me of color television. Before 1953, the world wasn’t actually black and white. It only appeared that way on screen. People still wore colorful clothes, sunsets still glowed, rainbows still arched across the sky — but TV flattened it to shades of gray. Then new technology came, and suddenly, boom: the same world, but revealed in color. Nothing had changed, and yet everything looked different.
That’s the rainbow. That’s the world of Bavel.
If that’s not trauma, I don’t know what is.
He didn’t have role models to show him what healthy choices looked like either. Humanity was still new, there wasn’t anyone who had walked this path before. He did what people often do when they’re hurting inside: he left the safety of the ark to “settle down,” told himself he was planting for the future, but instead went to self-medicate the ache instead of transmuting it. He could’ve planted wheat for bread or olives for oil. But no, he planted grapes. He got blacked-out drunk. He numbed. He missed the deeper meaning of the gifts Hashem was handing him. For that, he was punished.
That choice echoes in every generation: after the floodwaters of life, do we plant what sustains us, or what helps us forget?
Generations later, humanity gathered on the plains of Shinar, ready to “protect” themselves and wage war against God.
With no stones to be found, they said: “Come, let us make bricks and build a tower to the sky.”
Stones are natural. Each with its own God-given shape. Bricks are artificial — pressed into molds, identical, replaceable.
On one level, it was genius: invention, innovation, human creativity. But they turned that gift toward ego.
The Midrash even says that if a man fell from the tower, they mourned the lost brick more than the lost life. That’s what happens when the project becomes more important than the people inside it.
Hashem scattered them. It wasn’t to destroy them, but to protect them from themselves. Not with water or fire this time, but with languages. Earlier He had given Noach a rainbow: many colors, each distinct, joined together in one arc, a promise of safety. Now He gave humanity the same lesson in another form: many voices instead of one, spread across the earth so their strength would not become their downfall, but their salvation.
It reminds me of color television. Before 1953, the world wasn’t actually black and white. It only appeared that way on screen. People still wore colorful clothes, sunsets still glowed, rainbows still arched across the sky — but TV flattened it to shades of gray. Then new technology came, and suddenly, boom: the same world, but revealed in color. Nothing had changed, and yet everything looked different.
That’s the rainbow. That’s the world of Bavel.
Diversity was always there; in voices, in souls, in gifts. Nobody recognized it. They thought they were all the same. When a “singular” giant ego takes over, it flattens everything into the same brick mold.
If we’re honest, sometimes it’s not just a brick mold — it’s a moldy brick. What could’ve been alive and colorful ends up heavy, gray, and dead.
God’s answer was to give everyone their own voice. As long as we recognize that voice, we are good. Humanity can thrive. When we try to hide it, or think we’re the same as everyone else, the world stays bricked over.
I once heard Eli Nash, on his podcast, quoting his friend Mike DeSanti: “We often think our problems are unique and our gifts are common. But really, our problems are common, and our gifts are unique.”
If we’re honest, sometimes it’s not just a brick mold — it’s a moldy brick. What could’ve been alive and colorful ends up heavy, gray, and dead.
God’s answer was to give everyone their own voice. As long as we recognize that voice, we are good. Humanity can thrive. When we try to hide it, or think we’re the same as everyone else, the world stays bricked over.
I once heard Eli Nash, on his podcast, quoting his friend Mike DeSanti: “We often think our problems are unique and our gifts are common. But really, our problems are common, and our gifts are unique.”
That line really stuck with me, and fits here perfectly.
Floods, fears, bad habits, shame — those are shared. What makes us irreplaceable isn’t our problems, it’s our gifts. Our voices. Our hands. Our imaginations.
That’s why my friend’s kids were so right. Three different ages, each with their own spark, their own contribution, building together what, for them, was the best tower in the world. That’s the tower worth building.
That’s our work too. Look for the good hidden in life’s lessons. Learn from people that have walked similar steps to yours. Find your unique voice. Use it together with others, to keep building towers that are beautiful. Not against God, but toward Him. So when the floodwaters of life inevitably come, you can choose habits that sustain you instead of ones that numb you.
Wishing you all a calm and peaceful Shabbos.
🩵 Berke