Conformity was the seemingly idyllic world after the flood.  Chapter 11 opens:

“The whole world was of one language and of one common purpose…“Let US make bricks. Let US build a city and a tower with its tops in heaven, and let US make a name for ourselves”  (11:3 – emphasis added).

At first glance, the Torah seems to be  describing a utopian community where everyone is united around a common purpose. Emphasizing the plurality  of “US” is an image of a society that seamlessly moves together, in one large mass, with one voice.

And yet, God severely punishes the people for building the Tower of Babel.  Why is sameness so bad? The problem with Babel, is that the people didn’t actually care about unity, oneness, and togetherness. They used their unity to build walls, not relationships.

The midrash (The Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer, 24) describes how the people loved their tower more than people.  “It had seven steps from the east and seven steps from the west. Bricks were hauled up from one side, and the descent would be from the other. If one man fell down and died, no attention was paid to him, but if one brick fell down, they would sit and weep…”  This was not a society that cared about one another. A united society that is built on prioritizing material wealth- bricks and mortar– is not a sustainable community.

Perhaps then, God’s so called punishment, the demand for diversity was not meant to reprimand the people, but it was meant to teach them to rebuild their world placing harmony, not conformity, at the center of their world.   Now that the world was made up of people with diverse languages and cultures, everyone needed to work that much harder to bring down their personal walls, and learn to live with and love one another.

God models how to exist in such a world. When God goes down to mete out their punishment, God says: “Come let US go down” (11:7). Rashi, addressing the question of who God is talking to, suggests that God “took counsel with the Angels, with his judicial court.” Surely God knows how to mete out judgment and punishment, but by addressing the Angels, God models how to collaborate.

Let us too, strive for harmony, not conformity.

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