Parshah Commentary

The narrative of Parshat Balak, the second reading in this week’s double portion, is unique: It’s the only parshah in the last four books of the Torah that doesn’t feature the Israelites as the main characters. Most of this week’s portion instead follows two non-Israelites: a local king, Balak, and prophet, Bilaam, whom Balak has hired to curse the Israelites. Following a string of Israelite military successes—defeating Sichon, the Amorite king, and Og, the king of Bashan, as well as conquering their territory—the neighboring kingdoms of Moab and Midian are frightened of the Israelites camped on their borders, and so Balak, the king of Moab, proposes hindering their might through prophetic curse.

But this plan backfires spectacularly. Although Bilaam is hired to curse the Israelites, God instructs him not to, “for they are blessed.” Bilaam repeatedly reminds his benefactor that he cannot do anything but what God wills—which Balak ignores, instead bringing him to gaze upon the Israelite encampments and utter a curse. Yet when Bilaam opens his mouth, the words that come forth are indeed ones of support: “How can I damn whom God has not damned; how can I doom when God has not doomed? . . . May my fate be like theirs!” 

Balak, however, remains undeterred. He brings Bilaam to another site from which to view and curse the Israelites—but once again,  the prophet is able to speak only blessings. “No wickedness is seen in Jacob, no woe in view for Israel,” Bilaam declares. “The Eternal their God is with them, and their Sovereign’s acclaim in their midst.” (Some commentators understand this first line as a declaration of the Israelites’ innocence, while others read it as God choosing not to “see” the people’s evil even when they err; regardless, whether through guiltlessness or favor, Bilaam here presents the Israelites as special in the eyes of God.)

Balak insists on moving to different vantage points, hoping that a new perspective on the Israelites might allow Bilaam to damn them. But, each time, praise issues from his lips. In one instance, he lauds the Israelites’ military prowess, while, in his final blessing, he commends the beauty of their dwellings—a benediction that has made its way into our daily liturgy in a prayer named after the first lines of Bilaam’s ode: “Mah Tovu,” or “How good [are your tents],” a compliment the Rabbis read as referring to the Israelites’ exemplary modesty. Bilaam concludes his praises by prophesying the future defeat of Moab and its neighboring nations’ at the hands of the Israelites.

Viewed far from far above, as Bilaam sees them, the Israelites are powerful and glorious. Their enemies are transformed into powerless, bumbling fools, while they are vast, pious, mighty, and favored by God. From this vantage point, the story lends itself to a triumphalist vision of Jewish exceptionalism—one that many in the Jewish world embrace when reading this parshah.

But the final section of Parshat Balak, only nine verses in length, zooms back in on the Israelite camp. The chapter opens by declaring that, while the Israelites camped in Shitim, they “profaned themselves by whoring with the Moabite women . . . and worshiping their god, Ba’al Peor.” The moment we return to the Israelites, just praised for their modesty and religious devotion, we find them engaging in sexual impropriety and idolatry. Incensed, God inflicts the Israelites with a plague, which is stopped only when the zealous Pinchas—the son of Elazar, who has just replaced his father Aaron as high priest—stabs an Israelite man and Moabite woman having sex. Twenty-four thousand Israelites have perished by the plague’s end.

The dominant Rabbinic position reads these stories as causally linked: The Rabbis, interpreting a later verse, suggest that after failing to curse the Israelites, Bilaam advised the Moabite women to seduce the people into idolatry, knowing the Israelites would be vulnerable to misfortune once they had sinned. However, the 19th-century Italian commentator Shadal contests this reading; if entrapping the Israelites had always been Bilaam’s scheme, he suggests, it shouldn’t have taken three failed attempts at cursing them before he offered this suggestion. Rabbi David Kasher, noting that one of Balak’s chosen vantage points for the attempted curse is “the summit of Peor,” suggests that the stories of the attempted cursing and the plague are not necessarily sequential but rather may have occurred simultaneously. Balak, in this reading, leads Bilaam to a place where the Israelites are embroiled in sin—worshiping the god of Peor—hoping that this perspective might sway God to assent to Balak’s plan. In this telling, the protection the Israelites receive from Balak’s attempted curse becomes a demonstration “not of God’s faithfulness, but of God’s mercy,” as Kasher puts it. In other words, God simultaneously spares the Israelites from the total destruction of Balak’s curse out of a divine kindness they did not earn, and metes out punishment commensurate with their sin.

While we may have begun our parshah primed to fear for the Israelites’ safety, with multiple nations allying against them, the Israelites’ position has changed drastically over the course of this double portion. Whereas earlier in Chukat, the first of this week’s double parshiyot, they are exhausted, hungry, begging for safe passage through neighboring lands only to be violently denied, by the end of that parshah, they’ve defeated two mighty kings and conquered their land. In this sense, at least some of Bilaam’s praise is accurate: The Israelites have become an imposing military force. And so the great irony of Parshat Balak’s final twist is that the only real threat to the Israelites is themselves—leaving the triumphalist reading of our portion deflated at best.

In Talmudic literature, the term “sonei yisrael” (haters or enemies of Israel) is used almost exclusively as a euphemism for Jews themselves, specifically Jewish sinners. Though this is in part an example of “lashon nekiyah”—literally, “clean language,” or the use of euphemism to speak delicately about an uncomfortable reality—it also gets to the heart of this parshah’s dissonance. We begin the parshah with Israel surrounded by external foes but quickly vindicated as its foes are proven impotent and God’s favor confirmed. Yet what we learn, by the end of the parshah, is that Israel is perfectly capable of destroying itself. The Torah proves to us how easily we can be led astray. The Book of Bamidbar, of which this is one of the later parshiyot, has regaled us for many chapters with the Israelites’ travails and repeated failings, but the moment our focus shifts to the external “enemy,” Israel is portrayed as a paragon of virtue. It’s only when we return to taking a hard look at ourselves that we discover the catastrophe we face is brought on not by the actions of our external enemies, but rather by our own misdeeds.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.