Noah: Selection

This is the parsha of the selection: who will live and who will die.  Among the animals and the birds and the insects, only a remnant will live to repopulate the species.  Gd makes the selection this time.  

Today is Rosh Chodesh ( New Moon)  In the musaf prayer it says " and saves their souls from the hands of the enemy" Gd sometimes saves from the enemy's selection ( like my father)... Sometimes not. 

This parsha also contains the tower of Babel, The stairway to Heaven   The Led Zeppelin  song contains the phrase: " sometimes words have two meanings"   I think that the multiplicity of meanings is the subversion that led to the failure of the tower.   Before the description of the construction of the tower, the text reads: 

א  וַיְהִי כָל-הָאָרֶץ, שָׂפָה אֶחָת, וּדְבָרִים, אֲחָדִים.	1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

Every person understood everyone else.  Every word had one meaning. As the technology evolved, as the hierarchy developed a bureaucracy, the meaning of words became vague.  Thinking became clouded by the ambiguity of meaning.  This is a tremendous current  problem.  In   medicine, words like diagnosis, prognosis, outcome;;; are all ambiguous.  I am sure that the important words in other fields are also less than perfectly clear. 

The multiple meaning of words is applied to the beginning of our parsha:  Noah was a righteous man in his generation.  Had he been in Avraham's generation, perhaps he would not have been selected.  Perhaps vice versa.  Ultimately, we do not know the criteria  for The Selection.