Dvar Torah on Parshat Balak

This week's parsha, Balak, tells us the story of how the nation  of Moav, located to the east of Israel, in modern-day Jordan, seeing the military success of the people of Israel as they approached the land of Cannan, were afraid that they would be the next nation to be conquered.  To try and prevent this, Balak, their king, hired a pagan prophet, Bil'aam, to curse the Jewish people, in the hope that this will be their undoing. This doesn't work out so well - again and again, God puts words of blessing, rather than curses, into Bil'aam's mouth - and the next thing we are told is this: וישב ישראל בשטים ויחל העם לזנות אל בנות מואב, "And Israel dwelled in Shittim, and the nation began to whore after the daughters of Moav." The Torah goes on to tell us that these women seduced the Israelite men into worshipping their God, Pe'or.

Naturally, this behavior, at this very late stage in their journey to the Land of Israel, angers God. He sends a plague to kill the sinners - ultimately we are told that  24,000 people die - and orders Moshe to deputize the tribal leaders and hang the idol-worshippers. One particularly flagrant sinner, identified at the start of next week's parsha, Pinchas, as Zimri ben Salu, a head of the tribe of Shimon, publically and defiantly has intercourse with a Midianite princess in public, and for this he is killed by the zealous Pinchas, of the tribe of Levi.

The Talmud, in Tractate Sanhedrin, page 106a, takes a look at the seemingly innocuous opening words of this story: וישב ישראל בשטים -"And Israel dwelled in Shittim" and tells us the following: "Rabbi Yochanan said, everywhere that is says 'and they dwelled (וישב)' it can only be an expression of sadness." Rabbi Yochanan then brings our story as his first example - the Israelites dwelled in Shittim and then began lusting after the daughters of Midian, leading to tragedy -  and then brings a few more: Yaakov dwelled in the land of Canaan, having returned there after having run away from his brother Esav, and immediately the trouble with his son Yosef and his brothers began. The Israelites dwelled in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen, and immediately we are told that Yaakov's days were about to come to an end.  The people of Judea and of Northen Israel dwelled securely, each man under his grapevine and under his fig tree, and soon after God sent the Edomites against King Shlomo (interestingly, this also follows our being told that Shlomo "loved many foreign women, and the daughter of Pharoah, Mobaites, Ammonites, Edomites...").

What is this connection between the notion of dwelling, settling, and trouble? Why does the act of settling down, coming to rest, seem to invite disaster? Well, if we focus on the example in our parsha, and, because of the parallel "love of foreign women" in the King Shlomo story, on that one as well, we can come up with at least one idea: The Jewish people's grip on their particular identity loses some of its strength when they feel at home, unthreatened, settled. The Jews in our parsha, although they still have not reached the promised land, have successfully fought a number of battles and defeated a few enemies. They are at the end of their forty-year journey, in their last encampment, where they will stay until, after Moshe's death, Yehoshua will lead them, finally, over the Jordan and into Israel. Perhaps it is this (false?) sense of security that allows them to feel they can let their guards down, and interact freely with other nations. Perhaps they feel that, after the victories they have won, with the Land of Canaan in their sights, they can "settle", relax their guard, normalize themselves, and interact normally with the other nations around them. This certainly seems to be the case with Shlomo Hamelech, King Solomon. A great ruler, secure in his kingdom, everyone happily under his grapevine, he feels no compunction about "loving" foreign princesses. After all, is he not, like them, a royal? Able to act as an equal with others of other nations? How could such dalliances in any way threaten his position, his kingdom, as strong and "settled" as it is?

In the case of Yaakov settling in Canaan, secure in the knowledge that he has weathered the storms of his trickster father-in-law Lavan and his murderous brother Esav, perhaps we can say that he also let his guard down, and neglected to be as vigilant as he needed to be with Yoseph and his other children, assuming that he had reached the end of his personal history and could now relax, inviting the trouble that, in fact, followed.

It would seem that it is precisely this sense of security, arrived at once the nation, or an individual, has settled down, and has apparently achieved a position of safety and calm, that this midrash is warning us against. The Jewish people as a nation, and all of us as individuals, are never "done". We can never simply relax into a hard-won identity, secure in the knowledge that we are who we are and we have reached a place of stasis, secure in our identity, position, and character. We must remain viigilant. Things are always in a state of flux, nothing is over until it is over, and history, both personal and national, never is.

Let me share with you two stories from here in Israel, to further illustrate this idea. Today, on the 8 AM news, we were told that in Abu Gosh, a Christian-Muslim Arab village near Jerusalem that has been extraordinarily peaceful since it sided with Israel in its 1948 War of Independance, 28 cars had their tires punctured, and graffiti aginst "Arab assimilation" was written on walls in the town. Similar activities (all awful, in my opinion) have taken place in Zfat, a town in the north with many Arab villages around it. The fear on the part of the perpetrators is that here in Israel there are too many Jews interacting socially with, and ultimately  marrying Arabs. The worry is that this could ultimately undermine Jewish identity and security, even here,  in the Jewish State. 

At the same time, one of our most popular musicians (I am not going to name him, as it feels too gossipy) who has a non-Jewish, Austrian girlfriend, has just announced, in the middle of a sold-out concert in Caeseria,  that his girl-friend is pregnant with their daughter. When asked by an interviewer what his child, born of an Austrian woman, will be like, he answered "very Israeli". I think he is expressing a feeling prevalent among secular Israelis. We are here, confident and settled in our identities, and able, therefore, to assimilate into our culture any "foreign women", and their offspring, with whom we might choose to interact. This comfort with relationships with "foreign women" seems to derive from a confidence - an overconfidence? - in Israel's strong national identity, ethos, and culture. We are settled here, and a child born of a relationship with a foreigner will settle in here as well, and be "very Israeli".

These two extremes, the tire-puncturers in Abu Gosh and the fans and press tickled pink at our popular musician's pregnant Austrian girl-friend, represent two schools of thought about the security and permanence of our situation here in Israel. The first group fully understands the fears expressed in our midrash, and see Jewish identity as always demanding vigilance and safeguarding. The other group feels that there is a time when we can relax, secure in the knowledge that our culture is strong enough, robust enough, and pervasive enough to assimilate others into iself; we need not worry about assimilating out.   

This is not only an Israeli debate. America is also the home of an extremely "settled" Jewish community, one of the most at-home Jewish communities in all of our history. Might it be our very self-confidence about our American-Jewish identities, our sense that our social position is so strong, that allows us to so comfortably and naturally interact with a no-longer-threatening other in the U.S. as well? The Clinton/Mezvinsky wedding of a few years ago is an excellent example. While many decried the very notion of an intermarriage officiated over by a Rabbi, with a chuppa, a talit, sheva brachot, etc., as another nail in the coffin of Jewish continuity, others felt that this was a case of a non-Jew assimilating in, rather than of  a Jew marrying out, and, as such, was a victory for our culture and position in America.

Our tradition clearly, and wisely, warns us against the dangers of feeling too "settled", of feeling we are done, we have reached the end of our journey and can finally let down our guard, relax, and be normal, just be ourselves. This seems to be true on the national level - the case in our parsha of the Israelite men being seduced into idol worship by the Midianite women just as they are feeling that they are pretty much done with the difficulties of their trek through the desert  - as well as the personal - Yaakov thinking he could rest when he still had a lot of parenting to do. In both of our major Jewish communites, Israel and America, many are calling out this very warning. Others feel that our current reality is different, and perhaps the unique situations in the U.S and Israel today make it possible for us  to just relax and be confident that our culture will win in the battle that takes place every time one of our young people interacts with someone from another culture. I do feel that, here in Israel, there is room for some optimism. Non-Jews living here among us really are enveloped by a very vibrant Jewish reality: the language, calendar, mind-set, all are extraordinarily Jewish, and need to be, as there is no way we can hermetically seal ourselves off from non-Jews and their cultures (nor would our role as home of ALL the Jewish people make it desirable, as the aliyah from Russia and other pleces makes abundantly clear). Though it remains a very challenging and problematic process, I would like to believe that we have a greater ability here to successfully accept and absorb within us individuals from other nations. I am much less sanguine about the situation outside of the Jewish State.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix