Dvar Torah Parsha Balak 5783

Bamidbar 22:2 – 25:9

“Behold It Is a People That Dwell Alone” Our Torah portion is Balak. It begins with Balak, king of Moab who is concerned about the Israelites. He sends for Balaam, a fortune teller for hire to prophesy against them. Balaam is an interesting character, obliged to no one, but he will prophesy for anyone who is willing to pay the price. From Pethor in Northern Syria, Balaam, son of Beor is one of the characters according to the Torah, Women’s Commentary who is mentioned outside of the Torah, in an inscription on a wall from the eighth century BCE east of the Jordan River describing the night visions of Balaam son of Beor. In our Parsha we also see the talking ass, a she-donkey who can see the angel of Hashem even when Balaam does not.

While he has been hired to curse the Israelites, instead Hashem speaks through him blessing Israel, not once, but three separate times. In battle Israel prevails, but the people at the instigation of Balaam sleep with the Moabite women and they worship foreign idols. Phineas catches one couple and impales them. A plague kills 24,000 more. In a battle with the Midianites, five kings are killed along with Balaam. We learn in Sanhedrin 90A that Balaam is one of four non-royals denied a place in the World to Come.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes the nature of a prophesy coming from an outsider. There is a principle in Proverbs 27:2: “Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips.” Tanach demonstrates this principle, choosing to record for history our faults, not our virtues.

I want to focus on this prophecy by Balaam in Bamidbar 23:9:
“As I see them from the mountain tops,
Gaze on them from the heights,
Behold it is a people that dwell alone,
Not reckoned among the nations.”

The Sages addressed this concept of being alone among the nations. Ibn Ezra saw us as a nation who would stand alone and not intermingle with other nations who would try to overpower us and try to get us to give up G_d’s Torah. Rashi saw it as a prerogative to dwell alone for we alone are destined to inherit the world. Ramban says our culture and creed will remain pure, not a cosmopolitan mix of traditions and nationalities. Some have argued it is our destiny that Israel be isolated as if antisemitism were a given. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks disagrees, and I concur. Rather the prophets suggested the day would come when others would eventually recognize Israel’s G_d and come to worship that G_d.

While I’m not certain of that, I do know that others are drawn to us, not by lofty words of the hereafter, but rather by our real concrete actions here on Earth. We are called to repair the world. We see this in our actions as a caring committee, looking out for each other. We demonstrate it through acts of loving kindness, our Gemilut Chasidim. I remember many years ago, long before my own conversion to my Jewish family, I was in my senior year of high school when I had a serious motorcycle accident which left me in the hospital for three months. A Jewish friend and his mother came to visit me several times, and it meant the world for me. As Jews, our journey may be singular, but our interaction with the world outside is very real and ongoing.

I hasten to add that we are not, nor should we be an evangelical faith. Rather the intent is along the lines of Tikkun Olam, changing the world as we go not through words or evangelism, but rather in loving acts of chesed, teshuvah, those things we Jews are called to do in our daily life. Antisemitism is born of actions in response to our failure to assimilate, first with the religion of multiple gods from Greece or Rome, later from early Christianity in a move to separate themselves from their Jewish roots.

So it has been that we are a people, united as a nation even as we have dwelled in nations around the world. I am an American, but there are brothers and sisters around the world, united as a people. We do not share a common everyday language, but we do share Hebrew and have had other vernaculars such as Yiddish, Ladino, etc. What then, makes us a nation? Rabbi Saadia Gaon in the tenth century CE offers we are a nation by virtue of our laws, aka the Torah. Rabbi Sacks points out that only with Judaism do we have a one-to-one correlation between nation and religion. We are many ethnicities, a nation united by our belief. There are a host of practices by Jews around the world, Sephardic, Ashkenazi (including Haredi, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist), Beta Israel from India, Ethiopian Jewry, Mizrahi, and others. But among all of these, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew.

Perhaps because we are a distinct nation and will not assimilate, we have been a target wherever we reside in the world. Even in America, where we fared rather well following WWII, we are now seeing a disproportionate rise in antisemitic acts and hate crimes here along with the renewal of dog whistles and tropes, some centuries old. It seems to align with an increased reliance upon a host of conspiracy theories overall.

One thought, however. We as a people have been around ever since the 12th century BCE. Great civilizations, nations have risen and fallen. Here we are, following a centuries old Torah, we remain. Certainly, that Torah is interpreted in ways radically different from when the words were first committed to writing. But they are the same words, and our peoplehood is very much intact. We continue to interact with others of all walks of life and do not isolate. But as Balaam states in his prophetic words, as a nation we stand alone. Baruch Hashem!