Why did God disperse the men who built the Tower of Babel? The ancient rabbinic texts uncovered several vices that justified their punishment: A tower intended to reach heaven manifests the ambition to challenge God, the desire to “make for ourselves a name” expresses the sin of pride, and so forth. Yet the text of Genesis 11 is not very explicit. In fact, the project is not actually called a sin, and the divine disposition toward it is critical but not outraged. The commentators had good reasons to ponder.
In the 1950s, religious Jews had not yet learned to revile the United Nations. Tennyson spoke of the “parliament of man” in a stanza of “Locksley Hall.” Harry Truman copied it out and kept those lines in his wallet. It was an appealing idea in a world torn apart by a world war, though it proved to be an ineffectual one. In the immediate postwar years the U.N. seemed to foretell a new dawn of peace and cooperation. When rising Israeli religious authorities like Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli wrote papers about Jewish military ethics, they entertained the premise that international cooperation might make possible—and therefore necessary—more demanding ethical standards for the use of military means in resolving disputes between nations.
The 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution that established the double standard for Israel and the secretary-generalship of the old Nazi Kurt Waldheim were all in the future. There was disappointment and mild cynicism but no glee at the Cold War superpower standoff that rendered the U.N. a disharmonious talking club. Nevertheless, in those days we cherished the harmless “fairy tales of utopia,” and valued the quiet advances on less divisive fronts. It seemed fitting for religious Jews to endorse the promise of a “world made new,” as Mary Ann Glendon put it in the title of her book on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.