From the Chassidic Masters

How a year plus eleven days makes a year

A water-droplet catches a ray of light, unleashing the spectrum of colors it contains and displaying them in an arc across the sky. But for the first 1,656 years of history, this natural occurrence did not occur

One can well understand then that Noah was worried about bringing new life into the world. Why give birth, toil and work the program that living entails if all that is built could at a point in the future also be destroyed!?

The Tower of Babel marked the end of humanity as a single community and gave rise to four millennia of xenophobia and bloodletting. What terrible mistake motivated these seemingly well-intentioned builders?