Weekly Unscrolled Torah Portion: Noah
Aimee Bender guides us through thirty seven statements about Babel focusing on the power of language. Bender writes about when the people were building the tower of Babel they had a shared language and “There the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth” in order to create many languages. Bender gives analogies to her writing class where individuals often use the same words to mean different things to an argument in a deli where a misunderstanding occurred because of language differences, showing how so often when we try to communicate we have misunderstandings.
Aimee Bender is a fiction writer and teaches at USC. Her latest book is The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. She also wrote The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures and An Invisible Sign of My Own. Her fiction has been published in Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review and McSweeney’s, and heard on This American Life.