Balak: persecution Judaism

I am currently in Tel Aviv, Israel. My daughter, Shoshana, had a baby. The baby's name is Alma (in Aramaic, not Hebrew), meaning universal. The name has many additional meanings in other languages (soul, caring, etc). She will need to find a place in the world. The state of Israel is a confrontation of that problem. She is born a Jew and that has so many meanings

Judaism  has many axes. The religion axis has preserved important elements of identity through millennia of diaspora. There is a wide spectrum  of belief and practices  within the religious dimension that can vary from a worldview  that denies human reason in favor of a strict  adherence to a particular  interpretation  of the Holy texts - to a perspective  that the religion is a set of cruel, sexist, manipulative and misguided customs. 

The historical dimension is colored  by the religious.  Stories of the Exodus  and Jewish kings are treated as fact by the believer

The doubter has a range of views.  More recent history is somewhat less subject to interpretation  although miracles attributed to Israeli military  actions are the subject  of debate  among the poorly informed. 

Jewish views of the cultural dimension vary with the individual definition of that culture and its importance

The Judaism of association is dominated by great world achievers: Einstein, Salk, Krebs, etc,etc. There is something of a hope for shared genes.

The Judaism that no one can escape from is persecution Judaism. The common bond that follows from shared threat.  Opinions about how to deal with this  issue range from Zionism - to trust in assimilation - to isolation in the hope that Gd will deal with the problem. 

This weeks' parsha explores antisemitism. Balak ( the title character) is the king of Moab " at that time" Rashi quotes the Midrash: 

 at that time: he was not really entitled to the kingdom; he was actually one of the Midianite princes, but when Sihon died they (the Moabites) appointed him as king over them to meet the needs of the time (Midrash Tanchuma, Balak 4).

The Israelites had recently conquered the realm of Sichon. The Haftara to last week's parsha explains that  Sichon's previous conquest of this Ammonite land was  the justification for the subsequent Israelite conquest. The lands of Ammon were not part of the Promised Land, they were off limits, but the change of hands, the replacement by the people of Sichon, made it fair game.

 

When we visited  the homes of my parents in Poland I heard a variation of this argument. The current occupants of my father's ancestral land justified their possession by invoking the Communists nationalizing the land, making it fair game for new owners. 

Balak seems to have been invited to rule, but he was not a Moabite. Thus, conquest might have been defended by the argument that a pretender was on the throne.  The situation if not entirely clear; but there was a lot of fear. The best way to handle it was to weaken the enemy... or the perception of the potential enemy . The Moabite army behind Balak would melt if they saw the Israelites as invincible. Balak needed a propagandist to show their weakness and vulnerability. 

Does this make Balak an antisemite? The Torah presents his concerns as justified. But every antisemite feels that fear of the Jews is justified. I don not know if Balak had a better alternative, but his solution was to deprecate the Israelites.  

Gd tells Bilham not to go. When he is approached again, he asks again. He tries to get permission a second time from Gd, an entity that generally does not reconsider a decision. Gd will carry out Gd's plan, but Bilham, through his insistence, will be part of it. 

Bilham is a very determined person. When his world becomes strange, his most trusted, simple animal turns against him, he does not recognize the error of this mission. The obstructing angel implies that these acts will kill him. Bilham proceeds. 

Bilham fails in his mission. He praises the Israelites on Gd's instructions. He then volunteers prophecies for the distant future. Prophecies of an ascendant Israel and the destruction of Israel's enemies. Prophecies that will perpetuate the fear that excuses antisemitism... forever.