BALAK 5784
BALAK 5782
Balak (Numbers 22:2-25:9) is the back half of the often combined parsha with Chukat. It is a rich parsha on its own. Chapters 22-24 are the stories of Balaam, a prophet of YHVH but not an Israelite. Balak, the king of the Moabites, greatly fears the numerous Israelites. So he seeks to hire Balaam to curse the Hebrews. Balak is really persistent, making two different offers, taking Balaam to three different places, trying to get him to curse Israel. Instead, as Balaam has repeatedly told Balak, Balaam repeats only what YHVH instructs him to say, since Balaam’s power comes from his connection with YHVH.
Balaam’s comments about Israel are so praiseworthy that we repeat a snippet of them every morning when we recite the prayer “Mah Tovu” (24:5). “How good are your tents, Jacob, your tabernacles O Israel.” The story about Balaam’s ass is 23:21 to 23:31. God has commanded Balaam to go with Balak if that’s what Balak’s people want (23:20) and he saddles his ass in the morning to do just that. But an Angel of God stands in the way. The ass can see the angel, but Balaam, the prophet, cannot, so Balaam beats the donkey three times to try to get him to move. Finally, YHVH opens the ass’s mouth and the ass says, why are you beating me, haven’t I been your faithful servant? Have I ever beaten you? Balaam acknowledges that the ass is correct and then YHVH uncovers Balaam’s eyes and he sees the angel.
Lastly, we start the story of Pinchas, Aaron’s grandson. (Chapter 25) The Israelites have settled in Shittim and, naturally enough, start to integrate themselves with the local population, including intermarrying and offering sacrifices to their gods (lest we think this is only a modern problem). YHVH is in a rage, as he so often is, and a non Levite brought a Moabite woman to the entrance of the tent of meeting, thus violating sacred space because this space was reserved for the Levites. Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron, kills both of the couple by running them through with a spear (yuck). This stops the plague unleased by YHVH in his anger towards the Israelites for chasing after foreign women and foreign Gods.
I will explore four themes.
The idea of prophets for hire who can bless or curse
The high places
The blessing of the community of Israel and how that might be expanded
How to navigate the mixing of societies and spiritualities
The idea of holy people who can be hired to bless or curse is common in face to face societies. I think the logic is that holy people engage with spirits that ordinary people generally avoid being too close to, and ordinary folk see no reason that the uncanny abilities of holy people can’t be used for good or ill. Indeed, it is a commonplace to believe that many illnesses can be attributed to someone cursing the ill person. The intuition here is that the sacred is a power and trained people can engage with it for good or for ill. Indeed, organized religion can be manifest as soup kitchens, a path to discover your true purpose in life or witch burnings or pedophilia.
Balak hires Balaam the same way I would hire a plumber. I have a problem I can’t solve, and this trained technical person can solve it for me. Sure, it’s a different kind of problem and the methodologies are different, but I think for our ancestors, there’s much to say that prophets such as Balaam were regarded as a certain kind of technician of the sacred. Except, instead of fixing the toilet, Balaam floods the house, to stretch the metaphor.
The sacred, to my way of approaching it, is both this overwhelmingly mysterious thing that can never be grasped in its unfathomable depth, and something that has a highly prosaic, technical side like how to go into trance, what stories to tell young initiates, how to execute the slight of hand to extract poison from someone, how to make a certain kind of sand painting. Human practitioners of the sacred are exactly that—humans with the usual range of human abilities and weaknesses. So I am not surprised when a guru has sex with his followers, even if I am appalled by it. Hiring Balaam is no different for Balak than hiring mercenaries to fight the Israelites—a course of action he might have considered.
Does the ability to hire a prophet to curse or bless impact your understanding of the sacred? In what ways? How do you work with the deep mysteriousness of the sacred and the human aspect of our work with it?
The high places where Balak takes Balaam to prepare him to curse the Israelites are clearly sacred places of power. Indigenous folk believe that the sacred is more available in certain places than others. These high places were places of sacrifice both for the Moabites in this instance, and also for the Israelites until sacrifices outside of Jerusalem are outlawed because of their association with paganism. It is really important to note that the sacrifices prepared by Balaam are the exact same practice as our ancestors did in the high places.
Even though these high places are routinely condemned and are associated with paganism, they survive in at least one of our most important prayers. If you know 5 Jewish prayers, chances are that the Kaddish is one of them. This is the prayer we say to commemorate our dead (among other things). The last line of the prayer might be translated as follows (this is the Reform Movement translation) “May the one who creates harmony on high, bring peace to us and to all Israel, to which we say Amen.” But that’s not what the text says. The text actually says, “Make peace from his high places, he who makes peace on us and on all Israel and let us say Amen.” The Reform translation (this is just as true of other translations, I’m not picking on the Reform movement) blithely obliterates the sacred place in which we connect with YHVH, the “high places”
I’ve talked about sacred places before, particularly in the commentary on Vayeitzei. The high places were important as an institutionalization of particular sacred spots. They were bitterly opposed by the Jerusalem priesthood which wanted to centralize worship at the Temple. They also tended to be associated with the sacred groves of the Goddess on top of hills.
We’ve lost this connection to high places and sacred space. Today we have a decentralized worship structure in our synagogues, but there’s just no connection to outdoor sacred spots as a place to perform communal rituals. I can think of lots of sacred places but none of them are anywhere near where I live. Nor can I think of any place where outdoor sacred rituals are performed anywhere near me. The last outdoor sacred ritual I attended was not in any kind of particularly sacred space. I think this is a huge loss because it encourages us to view the sacred as something between the divine and the human without any reference to the more than human world.
How can we ensure that the more than human world is incorporated in our sense of sacrality? Can we create outdoor sacred places the way we build synagogues, or must the power inhere in the place independent of human action?
Balaam offers many blessings on our ancestors in this parsha, but one is something we repeat every morning. “How good are your tents, Jacob, your tabernacles, Israel” (24:5). This is the prayer “Mah Tovu” that is part of the morning blessings. The sexism is obvious. The Kohenet Institute has created a sweet version of this that centers women “How abundant are your tents, O Leah, your shrines, O Rachel.” (Kohenet Institute Siddur, p.43). I think of the morning blessings as being about gratitude for our bodies (Modeh Ani and Asher Yatzar), for our community, (Mah Tovu) and our souls (Elohai).
But just as the male version of Mah Tovu is inadequate because it excludes women, I think any version that excludes the entire community including the more than human world is inadequate. We do not live as humans apart from the more than human world, but rather nestled in this world, embraced by it—or we live as the alienated beings most of us are in our alienated culture. So I would like to create a Mah Tovu that has we humans in our proper place amongst the community of the more than human world.
This is such a radically different vision of the place of humans compared to our mainstream culture. Reflecting on Mah Tovu, a beautiful prayer, gives us a clue about how pervasive the mainstream perspective is. Of course, changing the prayer, or how we at least think about the prayer is a small step, but it is a step.
Do you agree with this vision of the proper place of humans amongst the community of the more than human world? What are some different ways you can integrate this different perspective in your own life and in your communities?
Two aspects of this parsha highlight some of the issues with navigating our relationship with other spiritualities. First, we have Balaam whose powers of prophecy are directly connected to YHVH, even though he isn’t an Israelite and seemingly lives 400 miles away from Balak and the East Bank of the Jordan river, close to Canaan. We are given nothing about how Balaam comes to be connected with YHVH, but connected he is. And look at the practices Balaam engages with Balak. He takes Balak up to the high places, which Israelites also had before they were destroyed, and they build altars and offer sacrifices of rams and bulls. The word used for “burnt offering” is the same as the word used in Israelite sacrifices/offerings (23:3). Balaam is explicit that he is doing this so that YHVH will communicate with him (23:3-5) and YHVH absolutely communicates with him as expressed in the four prophecies of the parsha (23:7-10), (23:18-24), (24:3-9), and (24:15-24). All this even though the high places used are high places associated with Baal and not YHVH!
The second aspect is the set up for Pinchas murdering the Israelite and his Midianite lover (25:6-8). The Israelites have settled in Shittim on the east bank of the Jordan River, and, naturally enough, start to integrate themselves with the local population, including intermarrying and offering sacrifices to their gods. The text tells us they were particularly connected to a deity named Baal Peor (25:1-3). Assimilation isn’t just a modern situation, it would seem.
How to respond in a pluralistic universe? One approach, as exemplified in our text and in the fundamentalist response to modernity across the globe is to demand fidelity to one particular tradition and demonize all the others. The rise of Islamism is exactly parallel to the rise of White Christian nationalism that we are suffering from in the United States, exactly parallel to the rise of Haredi (ultra Orthodox) Judaism and to the YHVH only of our text where Moses has Israel’s judges literally kill the Israelites associated with Baal Peor (25:5) and Pinchas’s unjustifiable actions are justified.
Another possible approach is to pick and choose amongst the different possibilities and embrace a mish mash. I think there are (at least) two significant problems with this approach. The first is that people who adopt this perspective are too often not grounded in anything at all. Being grounded is the only antidote to our alienation. The second is that the picking and choosing is often done from a privileged perspective resulting in cultural appropriation. Feel like doing a sweat lodge, even though you don’t have permission from anyone? No problem. Feel like using sacred Hebrew names of the divine with a pentagram? No problem, I was recently told, because it’s all heading towards the light. Only as an Ashkenazi Jew I felt like the Cossacks were raiding my village.
A third approach is to embrace a tolerant universal religion/teaching, such as Buddhism. At least there’s the virtue of being tolerant. But Buddhism as it was practiced in Asia was always grounded in local traditions; that’s why Buddhism in Japan is so different than Buddhism in Tibet for instance. So again, there’s the question of being grounded.
My approach is to ground myself in my tradition and consciously and carefully see what I can learn from other traditions and how it ties into mine. After all, traditions aren’t monoliths and it is perfectly plausible to create, for instance, an authentic Judaism that looks radically different from other Judaisms. That’s my project. But I would be remiss to not recognize that this approach is only possible because of how connected I am to my heritage. I know plenty of people whose roots are much more shallow. To them, I want to say that shallow root systems make it easy to be uprooted and blown over in a storm, and our world is in for some seriously stormy weather.
How are you, as a religious seeker, addressing living in a pluralistic context? How deep is your root system?
QUESTIONS
Does the ability to hire a prophet to curse or bless impact your understanding of the sacred? In what ways? How do you work with the deep mysteriousness of the sacred and the human aspect of our work with it?
How can we ensure that the more than human world is incorporated in our sense of sacrality? Can we create outdoor sacred places the way we build synagogues, or must the power inhere in the place independent of human action?
Do you agree with this vision of the proper place of humans amongst the community of the more than human world? What are some different ways you can integrate this different perspective in your own life and in your communities?
How are you, as a religious seeker, addressing living in a pluralistic context? How deep is your root system?
