CHUKAT AND BALAK
Chukat, law, (19-22:1) and Balak (Numbers 22:2-25:9) are a combined parsha in some years including 5783. These are two rich parshiot, and I had trouble narrowing my themes down to 4 each when I did the two parshiot separately, so all the more so here when I will present only four themes for the combined parsha.
Death is the overriding theme of Chukat. Chapter 19 begins with the ritual of the red cow (often mistranslated as red heifer) who is sacrificed and then whose ashes are used in purifying people who have come into contact with a corpse, a highly polluting event in Biblical imagination. Chapter 20 begins with Miriam’s death (given a measly part of one verse) in Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin. Kadesh has the same root as the word “holy” suggesting that either she died in a sacred place, or the place was made sacred because of her death. Her death triggers a lack of water for the people because Miriam is associated with water, as we’ve discussed before. This leads us to the famous story of Moses and the rock. We’ll discuss this below.
The people then start doing some real travelling. They wind up at Mt. Hor where Aaron dies, which we will discuss below. It’s been a bad parsha for the family. The people continue to wander and in Chapter 21, they get frustrated and complain again. This time YHVH sets forth fiery snakes against the people, killing some of them. Scared witless, the people beg Moses to intervene on their behalf and he does by following YHVH’s instructions to make a fiery snake and mount it on a pole so that people can look at it and live. This bronze snake later dwelled in the first Temple until it was destroyed by one of the Yahwist kings, Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4) The snake as symbol of transformation with its deep connection to the Goddess and the story of Eden are themes I will discuss when we have a separate parsha.
Balak is also a rich parsha. The core is the story of Balak and Balaam that runs from the start of the parsha through Chapter 24. Balak, the king of the Moabites, wants 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.” There is a famous and quite funny story about Balaam’s ass (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 asses 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.
The parsha culminates with 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 kills both of the couple by running them through with a spear (yuck). This stops the plague unleashed by YHVH in his anger towards the Israelites for chasing after foreign women and foreign Gods.
I want to discuss four themes, two from each parsha.
How understand Moses’ punishment?
Aaron’s death
The idea of prophets for hire who can bless or curse
How to navigate the mixing of societies and spiritualities
How should we understand the punishment of Moses? Here’s the story. Following Miriam’s death, there’s no water and the people whine, of course, saying “If only we had expired when our brothers expired in front of YHVH! (20:3). Just a bit over the top. Aaron and Moses pray to YHVH who instructs Moses to take his staff and speak to the rock and water will come forth. Moses, thoroughly frustrated the people, says “Listen rebels, shall we bring water out of this rock for you?” (20:10). As we know, he strikes the rock, water flows but YHVH is offended and says to Moses (and Aaron), “because you did not trust in me, to make me holy before the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this community to the land that I have given them.” (20:12)
The punishment certainly seems disproportionate and it greatly bothered the Rabbis who debated why it happened. There is no man as patient as Moses in his tolerance for the incredibly whiny people of Israel whose leadership is a task he did not even want. Rashi says the punishment is because Moses was commanded to speak to the rock, not strike it. Rambam says it was the fact that Moses spoke angrily. Ramban and others say that the punishment is based on the fact that Moses claimed some agency in bringing forth water, rather than having all ability to work miracles belonging to YHVH. We certainly know, as the ten utterances tell us, that YHVH is a jealous God. “Listen rebels, shall we bring water out of this rock for you?” (20:10)
Yet just as I argued that Adam and Eve’s eating of the tree of knowledge and being expelled from the garden of Eden is a statement of what it means to be human and not some kind of intentional sin of disobedience as is routinely argued, I wonder here if there is a deeper meaning than don’t usurp the place of YHVH. To be human is to mean that there are projects that we never complete, things we hold dear to us that do not work out as we would wish, things we would have done differently. We are finite, limited beings who cannot be human and remain in the garden of Eden. We are finite human beings who cannot always control if we enter the promised land or when we might die.
Moses’ failure to enter the promised land is a problem for any view that holds that there is justice in the world and people get what they deserve. Certainly, with an all powerful deity in YHVH, this has long been the thrust of Jewish thought—and how could it not be? But what if there is no omnipotent deity ensuring cosmic justice and crap happening is just the human condition? Then this story becomes not one of overreach on Moses’ part or a puzzling punishment by YHVH, but a statement of the random implications of finitude in our human lives. Sometimes things don’t work and life isn’t fair.
How do you think about Moses not reaching the promised land? Does it seem justified to you, and do any of the traditional interpretations work for you? Do you believe there is justice in the world? How much of what happens is random, with both good luck and bad luck?
Aaron, in the lovely Biblical phrase is “gathered to his people” on Mt. Hor. Aaron, his son Elazar and Moses all climb Mt. Hor. Moses takes off Aaron’s priestly clothes, places them upon Elazar to signify that he is now the high priest, then Aaron dies (20:24-28)
This is a good death, to my way of thinking. YHVH says Aaron dies before he can enter the promised land because he participated in rebelling against YHVH by claiming agency for the water from the rock. (20:24). But I would argue that Aaron’s death is a question of when, not if and there’s no particular association of Aaron and the promised land.
This is a good death. Aaron is in good enough shape that he can actually climb a mountain, not a bed ridden elder. Then he gets to see his son step into the leadership role for which he has been preparing. This should be a sweet thing for an elder.
There’s an exercise that I’ve done a number of times called a death lodge, which is based on the idea that in indigenous societies when it is time for an elder to die, he or she goes out of the village with the intent to die in a few days. Everyone gets a chance to say whatever they need to say to the elder, and then the elder dies up on the mountain—just like Aaron. This is a good death.
How would you define a good death? How do you hope you will die?
The idea of holy people who can be hired to bless or curse is common in face to face societies. I discuss this theme here because it is important to understand our ancestors’ approach to spirituality. If we want to reclaim the indigenous spirituality of our ancestors in some sense we need to delve into the logic of their relationship to the sacred. I think the logic here 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 in 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 covering up for 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, how to slaughter the animals offered to the divine. 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 well 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?
Two aspects of Balak the 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. “and the people began prostituting themselves to the daughters of Moab. And they attracted the people to the sacrifices of their Gods and the people ate and bowed to their Gods.” (25:1-2) The text tells us they were particularly connected to a deity Baal Peor (25:3). 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 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 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 take it are too often not grounded in anything at all and 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
How do you think about Moses not reaching the promised land? Does it seem justified to you, and do any of the traditional interpretations work for you? Do you believe there is justice in the world? How much of what happens is random, with both good luck and bad luck?
How would you define a good death? How do you hope you will die?
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 are you, as a religious seeker, addressing living in a pluralistic context? How deep is your root system?
