Torah Sparks
Most of this Torah portion concerns the failed attempt by the king of Moav, Balaq, to have a respected prophet, Bil`am, curse the people of Israel. The Israelites are close by and, in his desperation, Balaq sends for Bil’am and brings him all the way from Mesopotamia to issue the curses. The plan fails because God turns Bil`am’s words into blessings. Just as, in this story, God is able to put words into the mouth of a donkey, so is God able to turn Bil`am’s intended pronouncements into blessings.
I would like to return to a question that I asked a few years ago (6/24/10) in Torah Sparks. At the start of the story of the Jewish journey God tells Abraham to go forth. God assures Abram (- that is Abraham’s name in the beginning) that Abram’s mission is to “be blessing. And I shall bless those who bless you and those who curse you I shall curse. But all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through you.” (Gen. 12:2-3) Thus, God warns Abraham from the beginning that some people will curse him. Yet God pledges to combat those enemies by returning their curse. But God does not promise Abram that God will turn those curses aimed at Israel into blessings. So the question is: If Bil`am (and Balaq) wished to curse Israel, why did God not simply allow them to do so and then punish them, as promised?
Perhaps the answer is that this case was different in that Bil`am was seen as a prophet of the same God worshipped by Israel. It was on this special relationship between Bil`am and God that Balaq depended. He thought: How powerful it would be were Bil`am to invoke God’s curses upon the Children of Israel! God could not let that happen. This was not a case of some hateful individual or group hurling curses at us. This was an attempt to label Israel as accursed by God. Thus God’s special intervention was meant to foreclose forever the idea that Israel is cursed by the True God.
Unfortunately, this lesson was not learned easily. It is appropriate that we celebrate this Independence Day Shabbat with a special presentation by our esteemed member, Professor Michael Kogan, whose topic will be: “A New Era in Jewish-Christian Relations: How Did It Come About?” Indeed, the Church has shown great spiritual courage over this last generation in repudiating its long-held teachings that the Jewish people were cursed by God. The lesson of our Torah portion has finally been embraced.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Fourth
Rabbi David Greenstein
Image, “Mankind” by Éole Wind 
used with permission via Creative Commons: Attribution License
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