Individual or community? – No’ach
What a wonderful social structure the generation of Babel seem to have set up.
Tower of Babel, by Pieter Brueghel, 1563
Property was shared, decisions were made jointly, selfishness was suppressed, and everything appears perfect.
Idealism in action! Commonality established! How could God do anything other than applaud?
Yet the Almighty decided otherwise. He saw that there was something so wrong on earth that the Babel scheme was dangerous.
Where was the problem? From the extreme of selfishness that characterised the generation of Noah they had gone to the other extreme. The community was everything, the individual was squashed.
We see how neither extreme was deserving of survival. The best pattern is always a balance between individual and community.
