The Internet Is Our Tower of Babel

Originally published on Gimme Some Torah by Rabbi Eli Garfinkel on October 13, 2026.

Bereishit/Genesis 11:1

וַיְהִ֥י כׇל־הָאָ֖רֶץ שָׂפָ֣ה אֶחָ֑ת וּדְבָרִ֖ים אֲחָדִֽים׃

Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words.

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The Tower of Babel is one of my favorite stories in the Torah. It is a classic origin story that asks and answers this question: “How is it that human beings speak a wide variety of languages and live it cities all over the world?”

The story starts with a puzzling verse: “Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words.” What language did they speak? According to a midrash quoted in Rashi’s commentary, that language was none other than Hebrew.

Is this literally true? Of course not. There are 143 language families comprising over 7,000 languages. It is likely that there was no single first human language. The midrash’s purpose, however, is to teach truth, not facts. Although it is not factually true that Hebrew was the original human language, the teaching presents us with a moral truth nonetheless.

Rabbi Mordechai Leiner (bio), also known as the Ishbitzer Rebbe, wrote an encyclopedic compendium of Torah interpretations known as the Mei Hashiloaḥ. It is beloved, not only for its content but also because it has been completely translated into English. This is what he says about “Everyone…had the same language and the same words.”:

“And it was, that the whole earth was of one language and one speech.” (Bereshit, 11:1) The verse is formulated “one language” (“one lip,” sfat echad) and not “one tongue” (lashon echad). This is because the principal tongue is the holy tongue, the Hebrew of the Bible, emerging from that which is imprinted in the depths of the heart, where all the other languages are called stammering.

Thus is it written (Isaiah 33:19), “of a stammering tongue, of no understanding,” meaning that it has no root of life in its heart, for understanding is in the heart. With the generation of the division of mankind (builders of the tower of Babel), even though they spoke in the holy tongue, their language was not from the root of life, but rather lip service. Their speech was more like the chirping of birds and other animals.

R. Leiner is saying that what makes Hebrew a holy tongue is not the language itself but rather the sacred texts that are written in it. A trashy beach novel written in Hebrew is not sacred. By way of contrast, any book of the Bible is.

He says that the people who built the Tower of Babel spoke Hebrew, but the content of their speech was of such a low grade that it barely rose to the level of human communication. They had a glut of words but a dearth of actual meaning.

This is much the same problem that we have today. Our Tower of Babel is the internet. The amount of data online is currently 181 zettabytes. 1 zettabyte is 1 sextillion bytes, a 1 followed by 21 zeros. It is a mass of data that would take nearly 2 billion years to download at today’s speeds.

But how much quality meaning and truth is there in that data? I imagine that finding true meaning in that vast mountain of ones and zeros would be like finding a diamond in the desert.

The difference between the Tower of Babel and the internet is that the internet is partially good, whereas the Tower of Babel had to be abandoned. The challenge is to keep the good parts of the internet and distance the bad parts from our minds.

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