Parashat Balak — Listening to the whole story
United Synagogue of Hoboken, Conservative
“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
When Simon and Garfunkel sang these words more than 50 years ago, it was not in a political context, but now the concept seems so relevant to contemporary politics. Whether with regard to American issues, Israeli issues, internal Jewish communal issues, or any other topic, many of us are so wedded to our preexisting assumptions that we pay deep attention to anything that supports what we already believe, and we dismiss even reputable information if it challenges what we already believe.
I often see this tendency in myself; I try to resist it, and I sometimes succeed.
Balak, the king of the Moabites and the namesake of this week’s Torah portion, may be the Torah’s most outstanding exemplar of this tendency toward selective attention and confirmation bias.
Balak is the only narrative Torah portion in which the action shifts away from the Israelites. The passage focuses on two non-Israelite men with similar-sounding names, Balak and Bil’am (often spelled Balaam). One can be forgiven for getting them confused. (Complicating matters is that whereas we refer to this Torah portion as ‘Parashat Balak,” the Talmud’s name for it is “Parashat Bil’am”; see Bava Batra 14b).
The opening verses set the stage. Balak, the Moabite king, has heard about the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and their military conflict with the Amorites. He decides to hire Bil’am, a sorcerer who has the power to give blessings and curses that genuinely and powerfully take effect, and he offers to pay Bil’am handsomely if Bil’am will curse the Israelites. After some negotiations and false starts, Bil’am agrees to go with Balak, but reminds him that Bil’am can only say what God permits him to say.
To Balak’s great frustration, the words that God places in Bil’am’s mouth, over and over, are words of blessing of the Israelites. The most famous of these words are “Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’akov, mishkenotekha Yisrael” — “How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5), words that a person traditionally would recite on entering a synagogue.
Balak’s tendency toward selective attention begins even in the first verse of the Torah portion, in which he is alarmed by “what the Israelites did to the Amorites” (Numbers 22:2) without apparently being curious about what the Amorites did to the Israelites to instigate the conflict. Soon thereafter, Balak sends messengers to Bil’am, and we learn that Balak knows Bil’am’s reputation: “For I know that whomever you bless is blessed indeed, and whomever you curse is cursed.” (Numbers 22:6) Considering this, it might have been logical for Balak to decide to hire Bil’am to bless his own nation, the Moabites, which would help them prevail not only over the people of Israel but over any other enemies they might face. Whereas some commentators (including Sforno) suggest reasons why he does not do this, the most straightforward way to read the story may be that Balak is blinded by his prior assumptions. It simply doesn’t occur to him that he could hire Bil’am to make his own people stronger.
Several times in our portion, Balak and Bil’am talk past each other in predictable ways. Repeatedly, Bil’am blesses the people of Israel, Balak berates him for doing so, and Bil’am reminds Balak that when he was hired, he had stipulated that he would say only the words that God puts into his mouth. (It can’t be coincidental that this same idea is referenced in the final verses of aliyot 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of Parashat Balak; it appears that our sages who divided the portion into its seven aliyot chose to highlight this repetition.) But Balak appears to disregard Bil’am’s words over and over again, apparently because they are in conflict with Balak’s wishes and initial assumptions.
Balak’s approach can be summed up in the words he says to Bil’am, “You will see only a portion [of the people of Israel] and not their entirety” (Numbers 23:13). Similarly, Balak consistently focuses on the portion of the story with which he is most comfortable, ignoring facts that are inconvenient or challenging.
So much of our public and communal discourse seems so tragically broken this year. One practical step toward its repair may simply be to do what Balak was unable to do — to listen closely to reputable facts and arguments that do not meld neatly with our preexisting assumptions, whatever these may be. This takes honesty and courage, and it may require us to concede that many world situations are somewhat more complicated than we might want to admit.
Sometimes, however, this approach can help us to build bridges with others, and even to bring blessings to our tents and dwelling places.
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