Cross-posted from the Jewish Book Council Blog and MyJewishLearning.

In her last posts, Ellen Frankel looked at how to make the Bible PG and looked at “What is Jewish Literature?”. She has been guest-blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and JBC.

In this week’s parshah, Noah, we read about the Tower of Babel, constructed at a time when “everyone on earth had the same language and the same words” (Gen. 11:1). But because the Tower’s builders thought that they could storm the gates of heaven, their speech was “confounded…[so that they could] not understand one another’s speech” (Gen 11:7). The Bible puns on the Hebrew words, bavel, referring to ancient Babylonia, and balal, to mix up. And so the people had to stop building the tower and were “scattered over the face of the earth” (Gen 11:9). And so we remain to this day—dispersed, speaking a babble of languages, not understanding one another.

As I prepare to step down at The Jewish Publication Society after eighteen years, I am struck by how much of my work has been devoted to translation, not only from foreign languages, ancient and modern, into English, but also from foreign contexts into an idiom accessible to contemporary Americans. Whether it’s the Mekhilta, a second century rabbinic Midrash on Exodus, or the teachings of the Sefat Emet, a late 19th century Hasidic master, most of today’s Jews need interpreters to guide them through the unfamiliar terrain of Jewish texts, written is so many exotic dialects: philosophy, ethics, halakha, theology, feminist criticism, folklore, history, poetry, and prayer. Without translation, these languages remain opaque.

To read the entire post, visit the Jewish Book Council Blog!