Dvar Torah on Parshat Balak

We all live in a new reality, very different from the way the world was only a few years ago. The ubiquitous nature and tremendous variety of online communication, through facebook, twitter, text messaging, etc., has changed the way we “talk”; reconfiguring our schedules and our focus, with most of us now spending a very large amount of our time and energy communicating online with people we know, sort of know, or don’t know at all.

It has been pointed out that the instant, impersonal (yet very direct), and often anonymous ways in which these communications occur have created new styles and forms of interaction; online bullying and shaming, rants (or maybe that should be spelled RANTS), sexting, trolling, and other kinds of anti-social behavior, all of which occur while sitting alone at home, in one’s car, or at work.

There are also many apparently positive aspects to this brave new world. I have been the recipient, via facebook and my WhatsApp groups, of some wonderful things; great articles, moving and enlightening videos, interesting conversations, and pictures of my grandchildren, in various stages of cuteness.

What are we to make of this unprecedented disconnected connectedness? Beyond the simple question of whether it is good or bad, what is it doing to us? How is it changing us? What does it mean?

This week we read about Bil’am, the evil non-Jewish prophet who tried, and failed, to curse the people of Israel. Against his will, he blesses them, in a series of beautiful poems which praise the Jewish people’s morality, glory, and future success. Although all this happened way before the internet, he communicated his messages to and about the Jewish people in a way which shares some features with our online communications: he did not really know them and they did not know him, and he spoke from a distance, standing on various high places at some remove from the Israelite camp. I imagine that he also would have liked the opportunity to take back what he said right after he said it. I’d like to think a bit about what light his activity might shed on our current online reality. 

The question of how there could even be a Bil’am, an evil prophet, is an exceedingly difficult one. In Jewish tradition, a prophet is meant to have a close relationship with God, something which certainly demands a sterling character, wisdom, and sensitivity. How could someone like Bil’am, who hates and tries to destroy the Jewish people, and, according to the Rabbis’ reading of the story, was arrogant and greedy as well, ever become a prophet?

I have no intention of actually answering this question, it’s too difficult. However, I think we can learn something from Bil’am’s modus operandi. Each time he seeks to curse the Jewish people, he goes to a place from which he can see their camp, or at least part of it. Late in the parsha, when he prophesizes pertaining to other nations, he is also described as seeing them, although this would seem to be allegorical, and not an actual going and looking at those particular people.

The way it worked with Bil’am was this: he was hired to curse the Israelites. To do so, he goes and looks at them, and then, perhaps moved and influenced by what he sees, he speaks the truth, and praises and blesses them. It would seem that looking at them creates his prophecy; an expression of the truth he actually sees before him when contemplating the nation. His agenda – to serve the Moabites and Midianites who, fearing the oncoming Israelites, have contracted him to curse, and thereby hopefully stop, them – is no match for the actual truth which reveals itself to his eyes. This is why Bil’am’s eyes, and his act of "seeing", are mentioned again and again in the parsha; when he actually views the Jewish people, he is forced to speak truthfully, even beautifully and profoundly, about what he sees.

This may be a way to explain, to some degree, what his being a prophet actually means. As corrupt as Bil'am was, he did have the ability to see, and beautifully express what he saw, to recognize and articulate a reality when he beheld it. That is why he needs to view the nation, going to different locations so he can get different perspectives on them, and this does, in fact, yield new prophecies. Bil’am is, literally, a seer. He views the people of Israel from different vantage points, and describes, poetically and beautifully, what he sees. Although, from his ideological perspective, from his prejudices, he would prefer to curse them, his eyes do not deceive him, and he communicates faithfully what they see.

The way we communicate today all too often robs us of this ability. We speak - rant, actually - about people and things we have never even seen, much less interacted with, investigated, or really listened to. We don’t, as Bil’am did, try to see from new perspectives. We don’t, as Bil’am did, search out a better vantage point from which to see that which we would like to pass judgment on – even to curse – and are therefore, unlike Bil’am, stuck in our preconceptions, unable to describe what is really in front of us, because we can’t see it.

Obviously, people were guilty of this before the advent of the internet. We have been speaking forcefully about things we know very little about forever. Online communication, however, gives us undreamed of opportunities to not see, or know, what we are talking about, and spread that uniformed opinion all over the world. It asks us to, offering us endless opportunities to comment, respond, like or dislike everything that flashes across our screens. Bil’am, though locked in a negative ideology and world view, was at least forced to say honestly what it was his eyes saw. We, all too often, staring at our screens and keyboards, don’t even have that advantage. We are becoming used to making snap, uninformed judgments almost as a matter of course; as the information flows in, we are asked to judge it, respond to it, shame it, sometimes buy it, and we do so joyfully. The recent online lynch of Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, who may or may not have made a dumb remark/joke (who knows? We didn’t see it) about women in the lab and was subsequently destroyed professionally, online; the recent case here in Israel of a man who worked in the Ministry of the Interior, was accused online of behaving in a racist way to a client, then attacked vociferously as a racist pig online and so committed suicide (sorry, but that was a dumb decision), when it is absolutely unclear what really happened, are only two of many, many recent examples of how we all let the keyboard do our thinking for us.

Bil’am was not a good guy. But the least we can do, before cursing someone, is, as he did, go take a good look at them. It might, as it did in his case, make a difference.