His [Hitler's] dreams of elevating the Austrian city of Linz to a supreme expression of his power and the supreme victory of Nazi Germany haunted and obsessed him. This project, with its monumental buildings, would grant him god-like status and stand forever as a symbol of Nazi racial and political supremacy.
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I will draw a direct line between Hitler’s Linz and this week’s Torah portion that describes humans attempt to build a tower to the heavens, that would reach God and perhaps even challenge Him. The Flood had engulfed and destroyed the world. Noah, his family, and the animals on the ark survived. But humanity, instead of being overawed by God’s immense power, came to the valley in the land of Shinar and planned to make a name for themselves by building a tower and centralizing power in a one-language society. Their uniformity was, they believed, their ultimate power.
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Michigan-based writer M.D. Couturier retells the story of the Tower of Babel in a 2020 fable that takes place in 2074. Global elites in all areas of endeavor want to create a one-world state, a utopia that will end war and conflict. Couturier describes the centerpiece of this global state—an immense tower that would stand as a headquarters, “a monument to the everlasting power and majesty” of the New World Order. The rulers envision this project as a modern Tower of Babel, thinking they would succeed where the ancients could not. But one rebel rises up, as an agent of God, to stop the building of the monument. He gains a mass following—they destroy the tower and return the world to “an imperfect place.”
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The Tower of Babel—in the age of nuclear weapons, the mapping of the human genome, the Internet and AI, the walking of men on the moon and our increasing understanding of the mysteries of cosmology and the ever-expanding universe—endures as a warning to the human lust for God-like power. It remains, after thousands of years, the most cogent and relevant of warnings.