Fun facts for the table. A year in the teivah: the parashah's dates add up to exactly a solar year (Rashi on 8:14). In later Hebrew, teivah also means "word" — the Baal Shem Tov therefore read "come into the teivah" as: come inside the word of your prayer (a chassidic reading, marked as such). The dove's olive leaf became the peace sign of the whole world — it comes from this parashah. Newton showed with a prism that white light holds all colours; the berachah over the rainbow we have said far longer — science explains the how, the parashah the what-for. There are about seven thousand languages today — and this book itself appears in five of them; after our parashah, that variety is no accident of history but an answer to megalomania. And that "Bavel" sounds like "babble" is linguistic coincidence — but a fine one: the Torah itself plays on the word (balal, "confuse", 11:9).

Games & conversation. Two by two (workbook 1) · Babble-Bavel (workbook 2) · "In my teivah I pack…" — an alphabet game for the Shabbat table: each repeats the list and adds an animal. Five table questions: 1. What did we throw away this week that was still good? 2. Noach was laughed at and built on — when is carrying on hard? 3. Why is a sign in the sky stronger than a promise you only hear? 4. One language — and in the end nobody understood anyone: what does understanding really depend on? 5. Where is "strong together" good — and where does it tip over?

Excursus for parents: when people no longer understand each other. The builders of Bavel spoke one language and in the end did not understand each other: a broken brick weighed more than a fallen person. Understanding is evidently not a matter of vocabulary. At home this means: when a conversation is stuck, the oldest exercise in the world helps — first repeat in your own words what the other said, then answer. Whoever repeats must have listened. Try it at the table for a week; it is the opposite of Bavel.

Every window in this chapter awaits Rav Evers' approval; scholarly and art-historical sources will be verified before printing. The verses will be printed once the rights to the Dasberg translation are settled.