Parashat  Balak

Essays and Articles:

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   The Other; the Stranger.

 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

(Excerpted from “The Other, the Stranger, and He.”)

Bilam stalks the people of Israel, attempting to penetrate their cycle of existence, though it is as remote from his own as if it were another planet.

Yet the remote planet makes no response to Bilam.  It reacts neither to his enticements, nor to his attempts to sic his dogs on them; both good and evil have no effect.

         Their constant ignoring of his existence, their imperturbable composure, raise his fury and lower his arrogant posture.  At moments, it seems to him he would even join them, if they would only deign to look on him, to give him the slightest glance, and relate to him, and take an interest in his opinion, which would be all flattery, all unctuous praise, only the deepest admiration for their Godly quality – so unique, so – ah – strange, so inexplicable.

         And so the remote and distant stranger sends his concealed venom by way of blatant compliments.  “Whoever disqualifies another is really disqualifying his own shortcomings.”  He who is so remote from the world of ideas, values and qualities, that there is no hope of ever bridging the gap, accuses Israel of cherishing values, admittedly, yet values remote and strange.

         His venom does not cling to them, to his great regret.  This is because they do not belong to this world.  They do not belong to “the world of Doing”, the world of mechanical achievement.  They belong to the world of Godly values.

         Therefore, they deserve to be cursed.  Yet – “What can I curse that God has not cursed?  How can I be wrathful when God has not been wrathful?”  They belong to heaven.  Earthly affairs do not interest them.  “They are a nation that dwells alone.  They are not counted among the nations.”

         Thus is his blessing bound up with loathing and incitement: Israel is the eternal stranger.  It must forever be excluded from the nations of the world.  It may never merit their recognition. 

They are mysterious: “Who can count the dust of Yaakov, or number the reproduction of Israel.”  A great compliment: No one can control them.

         Yet Bilam too has a mysterious side to him: The future.  He is concealed within the mists of an inaccessible future.  The future arouses fear and anxiety in the wicked Bilam, whose world is limited to the ephemeral, to the here and now that contains no breadth and no depth.  Therefore Bilam must grasp onto physical matter, as a compensation for the threat of oblivion that looms in the future, the lot of all ephemeral, temporary, weightless people.

         Bilam has discovered the pre-eminence that Israel enjoys in the higher spheres.  Yet this great advantage can be used to their disadvantage by Bilam’s cunning presentation:

What is the great achievement here, Bilam is asking the Lord.  That they are unjustly granted a protected status, by a Creator of the universe Who treats them with favoritism?  The confrontation is unfair.

         Let us see how they succeed in preserving their quality when exposed to the temptation-strewn, mine-ridden world of physical matter.  After all, had it not been for the Lord who took them out of Egypt, the people of Israel would be now mired to their necks.   Already then, they had been on the edge of “the fiftieth gate of impurity”, from which there is no return to purity.

         See how they luxuriate now in sanctity, and are never forced, like him, to resort to witchcraft and the other forces of impurity.

         Here again, Bilam masks his prosecution by a veil of praise: God favors them and reveals His secrets to them.  By way of the Urim VeTumim.  He lavishes prophets on them and encircles them with Torah and mitsvot.

         “If you cannot curse them, surely don’t bless them!”  Balak does not quite follow the wicked Bilam’s shrewd intention.  He does not detect the strains of condemnation and prosecution that emanate from Bilam’s lips.

         Now Bilam has found the secret, the key to penetrating the stranger: Noble character.  Refined midot, character traits that evolve toward perfection thanks to the values they cherish: “How goodly are your tents, Yaakov,” a Garden of Eden of sacred people, in which tents that God has pitched among heavenly cedars, rise high above the superficialities of secular existence.

         What good is the attempt to attack them directly?  A mere exercise in futility.  Instead, they must be infiltrated, by a Trojan horse.  We must address (attack) their avodat hamidot, their efforts of character perfection – that charmed shield that seems to provide them with a magical protection.,

         However, an avodat hamidot that restrains emotion from only one direction, will not succeed in withstanding temptation – if it draws its values only from the dimension of height, and never feels the need to immunize itself against the world of physical matter – because it never even relates to the needs of physical matter in any way.

         When kedusha ignores the yetser hara, when sanctity ignores the urge to evil – it fails to immunize itself against it.  It is an approach fraught with danger. On the contrary, rather than ignore physical matter, emotion must be always supported by both sides.  It must be supported, on the one hand, by “the world of Creation”, source of values and sanctity, and it must be supported on the other hand by “the world of Doing”, which serves as its creative channel. 

         “To learn in order to do.”  Without “in order to do”, the “to learn” is never transferred into action.  It then becomes inadequate, and incapable of restraining the raging Sambatyon River of human emotion, that roaring turbulent entity that is like a knight’s mighty stallion: It requires the reins of the knight who rides him, who controls the direction of his gallop.

         “And now flee you to your place.”  “The term “fleeing” does not always necessarily refer to a flight from a pursuer.  Rather, it means specifically, turn away from this place, for fear of a future harm.”  (Sforno) 

Exactly what harm would occur in the future is not specified.  Apparently Balak realizes that the stranger’s ignoring of Bilam’s sinister efforts cannot continue indefinitely. When Israel becomes aware of Bilam’s plot and of its disastrous ramifications, they will respond with vengeance, and it would be wise for Bilam to flee them.

         The Attitude to the Other

         At this point we must investigate a certain fundamental feature of human behavior – specifically, our selective attitude toward reality.  A person’s attitude is determined by the way he organizes reality into different circles surrounding himself.

         The axis that turns the human attitude is determined by the stances that he takes toward, and the values that he attributes to the particular situations of his existence. 

A person with a subjective attitude ignores any values that do not originate in himself.  Values drawn from the higher dimension, from the values of “the world of creation”, the world of ideas, abode of spirituality and Godly values, do not exist for him.

Man’s creative spiritual capacity enables him – by virtue of his being created in God’s image – to view reality from a higher lookout point.  He  the high view, of judging reality with objectivity.

The subjective attitude erupts from the nethermost depths of ego, with all its physical-material components, built upon the animal survival instinct controlled by the self-preservation mechanism, by “envy, lust, and pride”.  These three are constantly trading places and alternating with one another, according to stimulants that come and go: “Every morning, there are new ones.”

In the war for survival, the ego is involved and not the self.  All things uniquely original, qualitative, and creative, are disgusted by the stimulants of physical matter, and view them as a block to the innermost creative self.

The self chooses carefully.  It is exceedingly meticulous about the raw materials from external reality that it will accept, that it will make use of in order to express its own uniquely original quality.

All else, it rejects in revulsion – as being “other,” strange, alien, outside of the circles it must relate to.

This is not only as a means of defense against infiltration of the self by the stranger, by the “other” – for such infiltration blurs the uniqueness of the self – but it is also for lack of interest: What is “other” and strange, has nothing to offer in the way of creativity based on the values of the self.

However,  a selective attitude toward reality that protects the self from the “other” – can be limited by the narrow horizons of the person holding the attitude.  He may exclude an inocent stranger, and push him outside of his circle of relating for being “other,” just because of some unfamiliar externality.  Strange speech, strange clothing, a strange culture – can disqualify a person who may have many blessed qualities that would be beneficial and enriching to anyone willing to encounter them.

In such a case, the attitude to the stranger creates a protective wall, a ghetto out of choice, such as the Diasporas initiated, for fear of religious-spiritual-cultural harm.

If the protective wall is too sweeping and inclusive, it will also keep out cultural wealth, and arrest the personal development of the more spiritual, who require the stimulants and confrontations with a rich environment in order to cultivate their own spiritual and emotional inspiration.

A blocked self creates a mechanical attitude – from the outside to the outside, rather than from inside, from the inner personal self, to outside.  This is the way that vague and sweeping values are created, which preen themselves with feathers not their own.

Wantonness preens itself in the mantle of liberalism, symbol of humanness, ostentatiously scattering great fistfuls of counterfeit coins of justice, social honesty, and an attitude of equality and even-handedness to every living creature.  It never senses how its highly publicized attitude is missing the main ingredient: Personal relatedness.

Only by relating personally is one capable of discerning essential from superfluous, and beneficial from harmful, in the context of constantly changing realities and situations, and people who have constantly differing personal needs.  Sweeping attitudes and sweeping values simply ignore these people, as though they were the stranger, the “other”.  There is no sensitivity to and no consideration for specific cases.  Different becomes “other” – excommunicated and cast out of the camp.

This teaches us about the need to relate personally, the need to relate to others by way of one’s own self, rather than by way of slogans born of demagoguery, which empties values of their human element:  Liberalism masks wantonness.  Loving everyone empties love of its potential personal power and becomes a mere mask for animal lust fed by external stimulants.

Here we see how preaching love for all – as opposed to love for another human being, the one standing before you at this moment – can become a threat to the private individual’s space, and deny him the recognition and appreciation he deserves. 

The public domain threatens the private domain when both fail to address the man-God axis that connects the private individual to the values he has absorbed from the dimension of height. 

We find here a need for a personal attitude, a need to relate personally to values, for only personal relating can give values genuineness, and their human value.

Values become double-edged and dangerous slogans when they appear outside of the private domain, serving as a political weapon against the adversary – who very soon becomes the “other” who does not deserve to be related to, at the first stage, and at a later stage he becomes the enemy against whom all vengeance is justified.  He is cast out as mother of all sin, father of all impurity.  He is related to in contexts saturated with hatred for the stranger, for the “other,” no matter how innocent of wrongdoing he may be.

It is enough for a certain behavior to be perceived as illogical, due to lack of conventional stereotypes that cover this perticular expression or thought process in a particular society, in order to create a hatred for the stranger and to cast him off as “other”.

Another sad case is the mentally disturbed person.  He is rejected as “other,” out of a fear of anything different, for he does not broadcast on the conventional wavelength.

More common within our regions and no less distressing is the attitude toward those who belong to religious movements with different customs: Mitnagdim versus Hasidim, Ashkenazim versus Eastern and Sephardic cultures.  Different political movements.

The attitude to the “other” who is different, develops all too quickly into hatred among brothers, becoming a divisiveness that destroys every good achievement.

The tendency to classify people as “other” is embedded in the animalistic survival mechanism, as we have mentioned, and it is inevitable, despite all preachings and teachings about pluralism and liberal tolerance.  At a moment of distress, all politely smiling masks disappear, all velvet gloves are removed, the claws are drawn and the fangs are exposed. 

There is no escape from the need to address the man-God axis, if we wish to create objective, productive, and constructive ways of categorizing our fellow human beings.

As an example, we should perhaps address that highly suspect topic, Judaism’s attitude toward women.  Woman as the symbol of the one who is different from man, does not merit a particularly generous attitude in our sources: “I find the woman more bitter than death.”  “Blessed art Thou…that Thou hast not made me a woman.”  The man recites this blessing with rather suspicious fervor. 

These and many other expressions that are not complimentary to women are scattered thoughout our Talmudic sources.  Needless to mention Lilith, the demoness, who rules the kingdom of the kabalah, in whom so many women find refuge in their flight from halacha, those practical/legal applications of Judaism that seem to them too strict and too dry.

I maintain here that the Torah draws a clear line and makes an absolute distinction between woman as sexual symbol and woman as human being.  In addressing the human being in her, the Torah finds no flaw whatsoever in woman.  The attitude toward this human being is the same as toward any fellow human being, and follows the rule of “love your comrade as yourself.”  Loving the woman in her is condemned like every “love that is dependent on a thing”, whereas loving the human being in her merits the status of “love that is not dependent on a thing”. 

This has the status of a love that sofah lihitkayaim, that will ultimately endure forever, that merits every descriptive term of enchantment and infinite power to apply to all those who love at the level of reciprocity and dvaikut, who are two complementary halves creating unity and perfection.

This relationship runs along an axis.  The human expression of the self is one end of the axis, and the Godly value of hesed, love, and dvaikut towards the Godly element in another human being – forms the other end of this axis. 

Such is the man-God axis.  Along this axis, relating to another human being serves to replace that illegitimate relating that emphasizes what is different about man and woman.

Both man and woman have a Godly element that is absolutely equal.  Viewing the woman as a female creature and the man as a male creature distorts the supreme and profound value that is common to both.  For both are called Ahdahm, both are human creatures, both are created in God’s image.

Such a view sanctifies man and woman.  It eliminates the attitude to the “other” that blocks the relationship that express the bond between the self that is me and the self that is another.