The Tower of Babel gets a bad rap.  Here's an offensive-ish video illustrating just that fact...
Humanity gangs up, decides to take over heaven, building this massive structure together, which is eventually thwarted by the divine beings who get freaked out about humanity's power.

Blecch.

As Social Media Coalitions Manager at the Jewish Education Project (wow, segue), I've been thinking a lot about collaboration and what it means to build something together.  Whereas a model like, say, building the mishkan is a pleasant reference, the Tower of Babel invokes a sense of caution, even dread.  Don't dream too big! it warns.  

I believe, though, that there is another message we can glean from this text; one that doesn't stop you in your tracks and shout at you that you're not a god.  Quite the contrary.    

In "Reality is Broken" (seriously, just read it), my new hero Jane McGonigal talks about the feeling we get when we're immersed in what she calls "epic environments."  "An epic environment," she writes, "is a space that, by virtue of its extreme scale, provokes a profound sense of awe and wonder."  Built epic environments, those we know have been crafted by human hands, inspire in us a particular sense of awe - "it makes us feel capable of much bigger things, together."  The Grand Canyon is a good example of a natural epic environment, while the Great Wall of China is a built one.

McGonigal talks about the first epic environments, places constructed thousands of years ago for, it seems, the express purpose of inspiring a sense of awe.  The Gobekli Tepe, for instance, which predated Stonehenge by thousands of years, was among humanity's first 'cathedral' on a hill.  One would think that these structures were the products of advanced societies, cultures that had learned to cooperate on a huge scales.  Surprisingly, though, evidence suggests that the opposite may be true.  "The stone cathedrals...actually inspired and enabled human society to become dramatically more cooperative, completely reinventing civilization as it once existed," McGonigal explains.  Whoa.  Some mind-flip, huh?

Now let's return to the infamous Tower of Babel, viewing it with this new information in mind.  

No wait, let's back up a bit.  Let's start with Noah and the Ark.   

Arguably the Ark was an epic environment, yeah?  Massive in scale, housing two of every species on the entire planet, some kind of weird sewage system...  It must have inspired the sense of awe we're talking about.

But the Ark was a one-man kind of deal.  The rabbis often fault Noah (who was "righteous in his time"... but probably wouldn't have cut it were he stacked up next to, say, Abraham) for not involving others.  Unlike Abraham, who argued passionately on behalf of a couple of sinful cities, Noah got the marching orders and set to work.  No questions asked.  No one else involved.

The Tower of Babel, on the other hand, was a grand-scale collaborative effort.  All of humanty gathers to achieve one goal - to build an epic environment.  So epic, in fact, that it would reach to the heavens.  

The divine beings are threatened by this move, and resolve to "confound their speech."  Humanity is then spread over the entirety of the earth, effectively preventing a breech of the upper world.

The text portrays this scene pretty negatively.  Man's hubris, divine intervention, and a punishment that throws us all that much farther out of the Garden of Eden.  But what if we read it another way?  What if we looked at the positive results of this story?

Building the Tower of Babel taught us to be cooperative.  This project forced humanity to test the limits of its power.  It certainly invoked a sense of awe in the builders and onlookers - the kind of awe McGonigal writes about.  The kind that makes bigger things seem doable.  And perhaps the divine punishment is not that at all.  Being scattered, developing new languages...  These are new adventures, wider horizons, opportunities to build complex societies in vastly different territories.  And none of this would have been possible if we hadn't built the Tower in the first place.  

So maybe this biblical tale of the second built epic environment wasn't so bad as it seems.

If you buy into my optimistic reading at all, then, dear readers, we have a new task at hand.  The divine beings thought they were preventing further collaboration by spreading us out and tangling our tongues.  How about we prove them wrong, eh? 
 
(Insert obligatory, half-hearted "sorry I haven't blogged recently" comment here.  Okay, moving on.)

This past Monday and Tuesday I was pleased to be attending the Jewish Outreach Institute's Judaism 2030 conference.  It was mostly a fantastic event, full of great networking and thoughtful, exciting presentations.  I was tweeting madly the whole time.

After getting back, my head buzzing with big ideas and the thrill of new connections, I decided, what the heck, I'll check my Klout score.  Turns out two days of non-stop Twitter chatter had bumped me up six points.

Whoa, seriously?

Klout is a site that measures a person's influence online.  They've developed an impressive array of graphs, charts, and other visual paraphernalia to help you break down and analyze your influence, and compare it with others'.  Once you've seen your score, you also have the option of sharing it through your social networks.

I, apparently, am "effertively using social media to influence my network across a variety of topics."  I am a Networker.  It made me proud to hear that - this ridiculous bit of digital validation was kinda cool.  Being someone who actively tries to connect cool people, it was nice to see the interwebs recognize and reward those efforts with a tidy little score.

Humans love to measure things.  We love to compare.  When we have those numbers, those qualifiers, it helps us make sense of the world.  We can put things in categories and extract them as needed.  But do these measurements really mean anything?  

But networking is not about numbers.  It's about people, about connections, about making meaning and building enduring, mutually beneficial relationships.

So, what's the relationship between the numbers and the people behind them?  Do you tout your Klout?  To what end? 
 

So, in short, New York is amazing, I love my job and my colleagues, Brooklyn is treating us well, and Alan and I are really excited to get back and see our families for what is sure to be a pretty emotional couple of seders.  
But more on that later.
Below is a Passover greeting sent out by my new colleague at the Jewish Education Project, Rabbi Arnie Samlan.  You can see the original post on his blog.  It's clever and thoughtful in that I-have-to-share-this kind of way.

Happy Passover, y'all!

*****
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When Mia, the famous Bronx Zoo Cobra, slithered her way to temporary freedom in a corner of the reptile house, the irony was simply amazing. After all, a cobra adorned the headdress of the ancient Pharaoh’s, including, in all likelihood, the Pharaoh of the exodus story we will tell in a few days.

Snakes show up in yet another way in the story of the exodus: When Moses and Aaron came before Pharaoh, they demonstrated a sign of their Godly mission: Aaron threw his staff to the ground and it became a snake. Not to be outclassed, Pharaoh had his magicians create snakes. But the snake of Aaron and Moses was on top of the game, and swallowed the snakes of the magicians.

So, the snake was first a symbol of slavery, appearing on Pharaoh’s head. But then became a powerful symbol of freedom -- exhibit A in the demonstration of the power that would become fully manifested in the exodus of the Israelites.

Our contemporary Cobra too, became a symbol of freedom. Within hours of the her escape, Mia had a fan base rivaling any rock star. People began using social media to represent her and her (mostly fictional) exploits. The Bronx Zoo Cobra captured our imagination in her dash for freedom. We cheered her on, hoping she would find fulfillment (just not in our home).

The drive towards freedom and fulfillment is powerful. Yet, in our world, there are those who are not fully free. Our world has human slavery, totalitarian rulers, and prejudicial laws and systems that prevent people from living full lives. And Pesach, along with the snakes, both ancient and modern, reminds us that we need to use our power to work for freedom in our world.

 
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Alan and I are beginning to feel a little overwhelmed about our impending move to New York.  On Sunday I sat down with a friend of my mom (a man whom she has described as one of the oddest people on the planet, but brilliant and kind) who gave me, among other things, a mortifying lecture about the horrors or American cockroaches and bedbug infestations in New York apartments.  But we have to get to New York and get an apartment before we can meet whatever six-legged tenants we may be sharing space with...

We have to move our books.  We have to move lots of things, but the books in particular are tough.  They have sentimental value - this one came from Bubbe, this one we found at that cute store in Austin, this is the one the cat peed on, etc.  They add warmth and a sense of home.  They also weigh a shit-ton and are going to kill us on moving expenses if we don't get rid of some.

As it turns out, I am far more willing to brutally ax my library than Alan is.  His philosophy is that a "maybe" should default to "yes."  Mostly I disagree and think that's a pretty good way to become a hoarder and cry on Oprah.  

But it's more complicated when it comes to Jewish books.  The "Jewish bookshelf," as my Scottish friend Martin loves to call it, is the centerpiece of a Jewish life.  It contains the wisdom of our people.  It's the source of questions and answers and more questions.  There's something special about just having them, whether or not they get read.

I think they should be used.  I think it would be better to donate the books to a synagogue, or a friend, make sure they're not lying waste and collecting dust, than to bring them for the sake of having them.  Alan is less amenable to this idea.  Ultimately, he is the one who delves into them, and we agreed he would have final say where Jewish books are concerned.  

But that doesn't make them any lighter.