In Loraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (1959), Walter famously declaims his understanding of how things work:  “It’s all divided up.  Life is.  Between the takers and the ‘tooken.’” (p. 117)  There is a power imbalance in the world.  Some of us are powerful and can do and take whatever we want; and some of us are powerless to avoid being exploited by the powerful.  And so, Walter concludes, categories like right and wrong are not relevant; only power matters.  Raisin in the Sun was a huge hit in the 1960s; but Walter’s words feel even more relevant today, as we look around and see how people who have amassed huge amounts of money are able to do whatever they want, buying media and elections and so bending democracies to their will and often overwhelming the gates and their keepers designed to prevent just such imbalances.  But money isn’t everything: there is also the more complicated power imbalance of majoritarian rule.  For example: the voters elected Donald Trump; therefore, he can do whatever he wants; the voters elected the Knesset’s members; therefore, the majority of them can do whatever they want.  In either case, the minority has no standing, because the majority has absolute power.  And if that’s not what the US constitution imagined – or Israel’s founders – they were naïve.  For example, the drama surrounding Israel’s recent budget vote left a very large minority (maybe even a majority) feeling tooken indeed.

The Torah repeatedly describes the ideal society in terms of the protection of the powerless from the heavy hand of the powerful; for example: the prohibition of wronging the stranger, the widow, or the orphan. (Ex. 22:20-3); the exhortation “not to follow the majority (or “the mighty”) to do wrong.” (Ex. 23:2); preventing the wealthy from exerting undue influence in court. (Ex. 23:2, 6; Lev. 19:15-16); the prohibition of cursing the deaf or tripping the blind (Lev. 19:14); and the law of the jubilee year, requiring that all sales of farmland be voided every 50 years, to prevent the creation of a landed/landless class system. (Lev. 25:6-17).

We are commanded not only to avoid being takers, but also to make sure there are no tooken in our community.

Perhaps the first text to address this topic was the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11.  While the Torah does not make clear the sin of the builders, most commentators assumed it had to do with asserting human power over against God’s power.  Some connected the project with Nimrod, mentioned in the preceding chapter as “the first powerful man on earth,” (Gen. 10:8) king of Shinar, where the tower was built.  Here is Josephus’ account:

Now it was Nimrod who … persuaded them not to ascribe [their happiness] to God, …but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power.  He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! …Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod. (Antiquities I, 4, 2-3)

Josephus seems to suggest that this is a universal danger: the human challenge to Divine power implies an abuse of power within the human sphere as well; that is, rejecting the fear of God leads to loss of respect for those created in God’s image – and so to tyranny and cruelty.  A late rabbinic midrash expresses this principle colorfully: during the construction of the tower, “If a man fell and died, no one paid any attention, but if a brick fell they sat and wept, saying, ‘When will we find another to take its place?’” (Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer 24).

Almost two millennia later, in late nineteenth century Germany, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on the Babel story seems to channel Josephus against a background of the rise of romantic nationalism in his time:

The desire of a nation “to make a name for themselves” (Gen. 11:4) and to increase their national honor – means the abandonment of any moral purpose.  In an individual, the trait of seeking honor is seen as a moral defect; whereas in a public it is seen as a virtue.  And it undermines the foundations of morality of both the individual and the group.  For every appetite can ultimately be satisfied – except the desire for honor.  Moreover, here, the quest for honor built a tower and burned, uncaringly, everything necessary in order to gain the stones comprising its victories.  And these things return and repeat themselves throughout human experience.

Thus, throughout the generations, the story of the tower of Babel was seen as a repudiation of Nimrod’s heritage of “It’s all divided up.  Life is.  Between the takers and the ‘tooken.’” It was interpreted to teach that the amassing of physical – and political – power represents the rejection of God’s power and of the moral order that it implies and enforces.

It seems that some people deal with their feeling of being tooken by seeking to become takers;  some by seeking to be associated with takers – surrendering their power of agency to the powerful; some by lashing out violently against perceived takers; and some by recognizing that Walter’s understanding was flawed, for both power and powerlessness are illusory – we all have power of agency and thus bear responsibility for our actions, even if we’d rather not admit it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)