This week we continue our exploration of the messages from the Torah derived from our rebellion and hardship in the wilderness, and how these apply to our present circumstances. In Parshat Balak, we learn of the machinations of our enemies in their efforts to cause us harm, how they achieve success, and what are the limitations of the power they wield over us.
From the simple reading of the text, we know that Balak, the king of Moab, feared the impending conquest of the Holy Land by the Children of Israel and how this would affect him and his nation. He saw that Israel wielded supernatural power over our enemies, such as the giants Og and Sichon. Thus, he sought to use supernatural means to halt our advance, or at least to repel us from his own lands and sphere of influence. To this end he engaged the Midianite soothsayer Bilaam, renowned for the power of his curses and for his nefarious wisdom in occult matters.
We see that Bilaam is skeptical of a frontal assault on G-d and His powers of protection, but that he is tempted by Balak’s promises of wealth and fame. So Bilaam, somewhat disingenuously, indulges Balak in the latter’s insistence that Israel be cursed, even though Bilaam knows very well that Israel will not be cursed. (The rationalization and justification for his duplicity, and his attempts to play both his patrons – G-d and Balak – against each other, are also worthy of our attention, but outside the scope of this discussion.) It’s important to understand that Bilaam is fully cognizant of the limits of his own power (willing as he is to obscure them from Balak) and also of the true weakness of Israel. In this regard he is a truly dangerous enemy who causes profound and enduring injury.
It is instructive to examine by what means Bilaam achieves success, and why in the end he is not victorious. In fact, he finds his end almost in a postscript, in a later parsha, violent and ignoble – destroyed in an Israeli precision strike.
The Ben Ish Chai relates that, as noted above, Bilaam cannot curse Israel as Balak instructs him to do. He understands that to defeat Israel, it will be necessary to employ subterfuge and to undermine our moral standing. If Israel can’t be cursed and can’t be defeated militarily, then he must induce us to destroy ourselves. To do so, he plots to seduce the men of Israel into moral depravity and even idolatry. By eroding our ethical foundations and our faithful service of Hashem, he hopes to lead us into dissolution as a people set apart. If we don’t uphold the Torah and maintain our personal integrity, then we cannot exist as a distinct nation, let alone conquer and despoil other nations such as Moab.
He recognizes that as the “son” of the Almighty, Israel is entitled to inherit the Land and to conquer its surrounding territories. Indeed, the whole world is Hashem’s and Hashem can give of it to His son as He sees fit. But if Israel can be made out to be instead the daughter of Hashem, then she would only be entitled to at most one tenth of the intended inheritance. By Bilaam’s estimation, one tenth of the world inhabited by seventy nations is the Land of Israel, at that time the home of seven nations. If Israel is the daughter, then she will not inherit anything beyond those borders. Moab should be safe. To this end, in seducing them to fornication, idolatry, and intoxication, Bilaam will make of them a ben sorer u’moreh, a dissolute and rebellious son. According to halacha, such a son is disinherited and put to death – but there is no such judgment rendered against daughters. Thus, once implicated as a rebellious son, Israel will have no choice but to protest that we are only the daughter of Hashem, and thus forsake any claim on the land of Moab.
Finally, Bilaam understood that any Jewish person who falls under a judgment of purgation in the next world can be atoned for and redeemed by the merit of Avraham. The exception to this principle is when Jewish men wantonly consort with gentile women, thus desecrating the sign of the covenant that Avraham entered into. Bilaam’s hope is to reduce the power of Israel by carving away at our fighting men through spiritual means, so that they will be removed from the army as they are condemned to perdition for their transgressions. As the number of “true” or worthy Jews is thus reduced, the land that we can reasonably claim to need to occupy should be reduced accordingly.
In his sermon on this week’s parsha delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto in 5700 (1940), the Aish Kodesh indirectly addressed these weaknesses as he spoke of our unique strength. He derived this principle from one of the blessings that Balak was compelled to deliver when he undertook to curse us. Bilaam’s description of Israel as being of enduring moral quality, rising proudly as a lion in pursuit of its prey (Bamidbar 23:21-24), is juxtaposed by the Gemara (Berachot 7a) with the description in Tehillim (7:12) of Hashem raging in every moment. Aish Kodesh explains, following Rashi on Bereishit, that it is a testament to the mercy of Hashem that His rages only last a moment because otherwise He would have surely destroyed the world.
Rashi further explained that when Hashem created the human being, He built Him with His hands, but all other beings were brought into existence by the Divine Voice alone. In other words, elsewhere we see that Hashem decrees “Let there be” and something is, but the human is shaped into a form until the breath of life is breathed into him. Aish Kodesh explains that as creations of Hashem, all living things are able to behold the Divine Majesty that animates the universe in fleeting moments of revelation. This corresponds to the creative power of the Divine Voice. But when Israel serves Hashem and performs His mitzvot, we embody the true substance of Creation that Hashem lovingly formed into the shape of us. For this reason, even the righteous of the nations can only be said to exist for a fleeting moment in the cosmic framework. They and all their works are here for a moment and then they have passed. But when Israel does mitzvot and lives according to the Torah, then they become part of the framework of the Torah itself, which is eternal and never dies.
Thus, as Bilaam was forced to testify even as he undertook to destroy us, the worst our enemies can ever do is to destroy our bodies, but these are anyway of only fleeting value to ourselves and to the universe. In contrast, the work we do in learning and upholding Hashem’s Torah is beyond their reach and also will endure for all eternity.
