Three Vantage Points
The enemy king Balak, seeking to curse the Children of Israel, summons the prophet Balaam. Balaam tells Balak that he will try his best to curse Israel, but he can only say what God tells him to say.
Balak prompts Balaam to stand above Israel at three different vantage points; Balaam asks for seven altars to sacrifice seven bulls, with the end goal of God appearing to him and telling him what to say. At each vantage point, Baamot-Baal, Pisgah and Peor, the section of the people that Balaam sees are still worthy of blessing in God’s view, and God “feeds” Balaam with copious blessings for Israel that he pronounces.
At the end, Balak is enraged. “I called you,” Balak said to Balaam, “to damn my enemies, and instead you have blessed them these three times! (Numbers 24:13)
The commenter Sforno says that Balak’s suggestion to try different vantage points is purposeful. “Do not try and look at all of them simultaneously, because if you do, you will not even achieve part of your objective,” Sforno suggests Balak tells Balaam. The Jewish people as a whole cannot be annihilated, but perhaps a section can be.
And if a section is annihilated, perhaps the whole people will become weak enough to attack.
The question of Jewish unity as a theological subject runs deeply. In rabbinic sources, the question of Jewish unity revolves around the idea that no matter the relative elevation of one’s Jewish values and deeds, they are still essentially connected.
On Sukkot, we learn that each part of the lulav and etrog represent a part of the Jewish people. And each part is characterized by moral success and failure — the etrog, which is both fragrant and edible, represents Jews who study Torah and do good deeds. They are bound with even the Jews of the willow, which is neither fragrant or tasteful, who do not study Torah nor do good deeds. (And the myrtle and palm in the middle.) When we bless over the lulav and etrog, all these sections are bound together, unbreakable.
On Passover, we think of the four sons (The Wise, Wicked, Simple and Not Asking), each of whom vary in terms of their moral quality in the form of their interest in the seder. Even though the wicked son is warned that he will not be bound to the unity of Israel, he is not excluded from the outset.
Rabbi Meir, a great rabbi of the Talmud, constantly tells Akher, Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, who strays from belief in God’s providence in the world and breaks away from the rabbis, that despite what he thinks, God accepts teshuvah — repentance, from anybody in any situation. There is no lost cause among the Jewish people. And therefore, there is no (fundamental) disunity among the people.
Though sections of the Jewish people have been destroyed over the centuries, it is critical to note that in our view, only the hand of God punishes specific Jews for deeds or misdeeds, a thing God does only in the special circumstances of the Torah. When the Jews disobey God by building the Golden Calf, God punishes the non-Levites with a plague. But in the destructions of history, the “punished” are truly at random.
The Maharal of Prague was very concerned about Jewish unity. He writes in Ner Mitzvah v’Torah Or that if Jews are to truly be united, then all the foreign oppressive powers would finally fall, and the Messianic times will come.
But the question is, what does it actually mean for Jews to be united? As Balak and Balaam discover, the Jewish people cannot be broken into pieces by sorting them into “good” and “bad.” The key in our holiday rituals is to recognize that they indivisible in this sense. This is what we must recognize: embracing each other, despite our failures, is the ultimate weapon against those who seek to tear us apart.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Golden
