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Topics in this digest: Balak 5764
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Note: Rabbi Leff is on vacation, traveling to his new pulpit in Toledo,
Ohio. This will be the last parsha commentary for several weeks…so don’t
worry that you’ve been dropped from the email list if you don’t get
another mailing for a month or so!
In every form of struggle, whether it’s war, business, or sports, we look
to have some kind of special advantage over our opponents. Some athletes
take steroids, despite the risks, because they hope it will give them a
little edge over their opponents. When I worked in high-tech, the
question the venture capitalists always wanted you to be able to answer is
“what is your sustainable, unfair, competitive advantage”—something that
really stacks the deck in your favor. Israel’s ultimate edge that helps
hold radical Islamic countries at bay is, of course, the atom bomb.
In this week’s Torah portion, Balak, we are told the story of Balak’s
struggle with Israel. Balak, son of Tzipor, was the king of Moabites. He
too was looking for a way to get an edge in his struggle against Israel.
He was afraid that he was no match for the Israelites. He thought he had
found his edge in Balaam, son of Beor. Balaam was a prophet. He was not
Jewish—but God spoke to and through him nonetheless. Balak wanted to hire
Balaam to curse the Israelites. Balak told Balaam “ki yadati et asher
t’varach m’vorach, va’asher taor yoar,” for I know that what you bless, is
blessed, and that which you curse is cursed.
Balak’s brilliant plan to use Balaam as a secret weapon backfires and
blows up in his face. Instead of curses, when Balaam turns his attention
to Israel, out of his mouth come blessings. In fact, one of the blessings
to come out of Balaam’s mouth is the blessing that we have inscribed over
the front doors of our synagogue: “mah tovu ohelecha Yakov, how goodly are
thy tents, O Jacob!” Balak is furious when Balaam starts praising Israel.
He says “meh asita li!” “What have you done to me?!” I hired you to
curse my enemies, and here you are blessing them! In his first blessing
Balaam praised how numerous Israel was; so Balak figured if he took Balaam
somewhere he couldn’t see the whole group, maybe he could then drum up a
curse instead of a blessing. But that brilliant scheme doesn’t work
either. After two failures, Balak has second thoughts, and tells Balaam,
well, keep your mouth shut, if you can’t curse them, at least don’t bless
them. But Balak is so intent on cursing Israel, that he decides to try a
third time. Balak appears to have in mind the old saying, “m’shaneh
makom, m’shaneh mazal,” change your place, change your luck. He tells
Balaam we’re going somewhere else, maybe God will let you curse these
people from another spot. But that strategy also fails. Yet a third
time, instead of curses, out come more blessings. Balak sends Balaam
away, disgusted.
When cursing Israel didn’t work, Balak could have tried a different tack.
Instead of worrying about cursing Israel, he could have asked Balaam for a
blessing—after all, the verse reads, “asher t’varach m’vorach,” what you
bless is blessed. But he doesn’t. Why not? The Beit Ramah says it’s
because Balak was so consumed by hatred that he forgot about his own
people’s needs and could only think about hurting his enemy.
One look at the Middle East, and we see that this attitude of being
consumed by hatred for your enemy is, sadly, still alive and well. The
Palestinians are so intent on cursing Israel, that they have no time to
seek blessings for themselves. If they were to put a fraction of the
effort they expend on trying to destroy Israel into building up Palestine,
they could be living in a Garden of Eden.
The Palestinians are not stupid—there are universities in Gaza and the
West Bank. Palestinians who emigrate to other countries often manage to
become successful professionals. But instead of spending energy and
effort on creating their own infrastructure and economy, they prefer to
try and destroy Israel’s. They protest a fence that keeps them out from
working minimum wage jobs in Israel; why don’t they build businesses and
establish an economy on their side of the fence? The Europeans who are so
pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli would likely be a ready market.
What so inflames Balak in our Torah portion, and the Palestinians today,
is envy. Balak envies (and fears) the accomplishments of the Israelites,
and wants to slow them down. The Palestinians envy the accomplishments of
Israel, the land that Israel is sitting on. They want it all for
themselves.
Envy is one of the most common of emotions. We are all subject to it,
some to a greater degree, some lesser.
In Madregat HaAdam, R. Yosef Horowitz teaches that people are unhappy
because everyone is busy thinking about what the other guy has; and that
guy is busy thinking about what someone else has. No one actually reaches
their desires, because they are always so busy comparing themselves to
someone else who has a little more. This trait of being busy thinking
about what the other guy has is what we might call the tendency to want to
“keep up with the Jones’s.” The stress of a life of keeping up with the
Jones’s is something that we often thinks dates to the 1950s or 60s—yet R.
Horowitz wrote his words 150 years ago, and it was nothing new then.
Being focused on what the other guy has is one of the most ancient of
problems—hence “do not covet” is one of the ten commandments.
I have to admit, that in general, Canadians do not seem to be as consumed
by envy as Americans—especially Americans living in Los Angeles. Our
parking lot is not as filled with SUVs on steroids as the synagogue we
used to attend in LA. But the truth is, as pointed out in Orchot
haTzaddikim, the Ways of the Righteous, that no one escapes it. According
to Orchot haTzaddikim, “For we see all men being pulled one after the
other.” I may not be consumed by envy, but I’m not immune from feeling a
touch of it—maybe when a colleague gets a “dream pulpit” that pays a very
big salary right on the beach in Miami, or maybe wishing I could afford to
fly myself around in a fancier airplane. And it is exactly that sentiment
which can lead to unhappiness—losing sight of all the blessings in your
own life, and instead comparing yourself to someone else who seems to have
more. Just as R. Horowitz points out, the other guy—whether the rabbi
with the dream pulpit, or the fellow flying around in a fancy plane—has
his eye on someone with yet a better job, or a better plane.
But that kind of envy—the mild envy we all feel on occasion—is bush league
compared to the kind of envy that we see in Balak, and in the
Palestinians. It’s one thing to have the sort of envy which inspires you
to work a little harder, or extend yourself a little more to get a little
more. But envy can go to a much deeper level: it can lead to the most
un-generous of all forms of envy, the form where you don’t care about
getting more for yourself, as long as the other guy doesn’t have more than
you do. When people get wrapped up in this kind of pathological envy,
they become like Balak, so focused on cursing the other party they forget
about their own self-interest. That is why we have a saying, “don’t cut
off your nose to spite your face.”
The Palestinians are stuck in this kind of pathological envy. They are
literally cutting off their noses—and blowing themselves up—to spite the
Israelis. They are more concerned with damaging Israel than with building
up Palestine.
The Palestinians are an extreme case, but what they are doing is very much
in keeping with human nature.
The historians Will and Ariel Durant are best known for their 11-volume
magnum opus “The Story of Civilization.” Towards the end of their
careers, after a lifetime of studying history, they wrote a gem of a
little book called “The Lessons of History.” In the Lessons of History,
the Durants looked back on history to see what kind of trends and
universals they could discern. They affirmed that envy is something that
is always with us, and in fact the very virulent form of envy—the kind
that will lead to people becoming so obsessed with cursing others that
they will do it overlooking possible blessings to themselves—inevitably
recurs.
The Durants point out that there is unequal division of ability in a
population, and that this inevitably leads to an unequal distribution of
wealth. Over time the unequal distribution of wealth becomes more and
more severe, as the rich give more education and capital to their
children. Eventually, say the Durants, one of two things happen. You
either get a redistribution of wealth through legislation, or a
redistribution of poverty through revolution. Either the wealthy share
the wealth, as is the case here in Canada, and in most of the Western
world, at least today—or you get a revolution, as happened in France in
1789 and Russia in 1917. Revolts generally do not share the wealth—they
destroy wealth, and leave everyone equally poor.
What’s happening today in Israel is the Palestinians are revolting, and
trying to destroy Israel—and make the Israelis just as poor as the
Palestinians. It would serve both sides in the Israel-Palestinian
conflict to remember that the better outcome will result from
legislation—and negotiation—than from revolution and war.
Shabbat Shalom
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