Noach: the new world

Noach is so accessible that it is taught to second graders. It is so deep that it can never  be understood completely.  It is the story that introduces the mystery of gendered  reproduction, the Jewish day school equivalent of "the birds and the bees." It has the great reassurance: that Gd  will never again flood the world;  and it has the rainbow, the resolution of visible light into its component colors, as the  sign of that covenant. (GD did not promise that there would never be a holocaust.) It contains the curse of slavery and the  skyscraper of Babel: the consequences of these stories are still evolving . 

Noah contains stories that relate to survival. Every  story  is told by the survivors. 

Every audience is an audience of survivors, the descendants of survivors.  Noach (and his kin) are the sole survivors of the deluge. They will restart humanity, They will generate some combination of the old tradition and the new order.

My parents were such survivors. Their world was destroyed, all of their kindred were murdered, the culture was killed, the land of Poland evicted them. They were replanted in America and spawned children to synthesize a new way of life. Their old ways were important to them. They are important to me. I hope that my ways are important to my children.

Am I preserving the most precious parts? Are the innovations constructive? The evolution of our culture is ongoing, always confronting a changing set of challenges. The Judaism that I have is an evolved thing. What I leave behind will be a distortion of what I received, what I rejected, what I accepted. 

The  the antediluvian world destroyed itself. The text uses  a passive (Nifal)voice: נִשְׁחָתָה : it had become destroyed. The destruction had happened  because of a lack controlling action.. The absence of divine intervention, the laissez-faire approach, had led to terminal degradation. The  solution was a hard reset, control-alt-delete.

Recent warnings about artificial intelligence generate debate about the need to control this juggernaut. Artificial intelligence has the potential to heal sickness, feed the hungry, enhance justice. As it is currently constituted, AI has cliche values, the edited aggregate what what people have said. The disconnect between what people think, feel and say makes the basis of these values a half truth. Multiply this by the limitations of human knowledge and you have a mess. Add the greed vector and the more powerful AI becomes,  the greater the danger of another נִשְׁחָתָה (nishchatha), a corruption brought on by passivity.  But these words are already cliche.

The people (and animals) rescued in the ark build a new world. 

וּמֵאֵ֖לֶּה נָֽפְצָ֥ה כׇל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

and from these the whole world branched out. 

The next verse is 

וַיָּ֥חֶל נֹ֖חַ אִ֣ישׁ הָֽאֲדָמָ֑ה וַיִּטַּ֖ע כָּֽרֶם׃ 

Noah, the tiller of the soil,  first planted a vineyard.

The introductory word: Vayichal seems superfluous and it is ambiguous. It could mean that Noah "was the first" ( ibn Ezra) but Rashi says

ויחל. עָשָׂה עַצְמוֹ חֻלִּין, (ב"ר):

He made himself profane, ordinary.

Rashi's interpretation makes the verse read: 

Noah, the man of the earth, profaned himself and planted a vineyard

A fundamental meaning of the root chal means something that just happens by itself. That is the nature of fermentation, the process that adds alcohol, the intoxicant to fruit of the vine. It is a change, an improvement(?), that happens if you merely wait. This is the origin of the technology that gives us bread and wine. Another mixed blessing.

Noah and the vineyard is a partial re-enactment of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The wine distorted Noah's perception, just as the knowledge fruit had done to Adam and Eve. Eating from the tree of knowledge led to an awareness of nakedness and the need to clothe. Noah's wine  led to his nakedness.  When he sobered he was embarrassed. Noah's analysis of the behavior of his sons led to enslaving one to the others, an approval of aristocracy and hierarchy. 

The Tower of Babel is a synthesis of technology and hierarchy. There may have been an element of mistrust in GD's promise not to bring another flood in the motivation for the Tower. Rashi quotes Bereshith Rabba  

וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים – אָמְרוּ אַחַת לְאֶלֶף ותרנ"ו שָׁנִים הָרָקִיעַ מִתְמוֹטֵט כְּשֵׁם שֶׁעָשָׂה בִּימֵי הַמַּבּוּל, בֹּאוּ וְנַעֲשֶׂה לוֹ סְמִיכוֹת (ב"ר):

they spoke דברים חדים “sharp” words; they said, “Once in every one thousand six hundred and fifty six years (the period that elapsed from the Creation to the Flood) there is a heaven-shaking, just as there was in the days of the Flood. Come. then, and let us make supports for it” (Genesis Rabbah 38:6).  

This  casts the Tower as the product of "science" overcoming faith. The simplest (agnostic/atheistic) explanation for the flood was as a periodic event over a long interval, like Haley's comet. 

The tower of Babel was  an attempt to guide history. It was built to keep the people together, to discourage the dispersion , to keep the current power structure in place. It was built so that all would continue to speak the same language. I find it tempting to read the theme of domination into this chapter. The tower of Babel could be seen as a watchtower, a way to make sure that no one strays from the official gaze of the government. 

The story of the Tower of Babel begins with the first mention of bricks. Bricks are the first interchangeable part, the first industrial product. In the Mandelkern  concordance, the only other use of the word is connected to the slavery in Egypt.

The production of bricks implies a division of labor. Some people produce bricks, others place them and build, perhaps others assure the proper placement. My sense is that the brick-maker was the least prestigious group. In the society of the times, making bricks might be the work of slaves. Bricks reappear when the Hebrews are enslaved by the Egyptians. There, the production of bricks is clearly the work of the subjugated. It was certainly not the work of winners.

When Gd sees the assembly line, Gd exclaims:

 הֵ֣ן עַ֤ם אֶחָד֙ וְשָׂפָ֤ה אַחַת֙ לְכֻלָּ֔ם וְזֶ֖ה הַחִלָּ֣ם לַעֲשׂ֑וֹת

 If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act. 

We have seen this in our time as the internet has deteriorated into a tool of enslavement. The internet started as a universal language without apparent hierarchy. Now, it is an instrument for the subjugation of the people by the powerful few.

It is interesting to note that large language models (a large part of what we call AI) are language agnostic. They break words into tokens, strings of symbols and calculates the next string of symbols. It is a return to "one language"

Are the early errors recursive? Is there a force that makes every generation repeat the hubris of the past? AI does not lead to path path out of the cliche. Think out of the box, but be careful.