Balak

Hi,

This week's portion is Balak.

The portion of Balak is a bit of a biblical anomaly – its main story has no Jewish players, and therefore the Jews were not aware of this event, at all, while it was going on. Presumably we are aware of this story only because Gd told Moshe it had happened.

A man named Bilam was known throughout the Sinai/Canaan region as a sorcerer and prophet; his specialty was the area of blessings and curses. Balak, king of the nation of Moav - a nation that lived in the Transjordan area - saw the Jews coming out of the desert, and he saw what the Jews had done to Sichon, the first line of defense for Canaan. Balak realized that military might wasn’t going to stop the Jews. Instead, he hired Bilam to curse the Jews on behalf of the nations of Midian and Moav, figuring that the mystical approach might work.

This was a logical idea, in theory. Unfortunately for both Balak and Bilam, a curse works only because the person invoking the curse asks Gd to punish someone for his sins – if Gd is not interested, or if the person has no sins, then the curse fails. Gd warned Bilam repeatedly, "Don’t bother, it isn’t going to work." Bilam planned to convince Gd to accept the curse.

Bilam began to travel to Balak, and Gd sent an invisible angel to block him. Bilam didn’t see the angel, but Gd made the angel visible to the donkey, who at first tried to go around him in a field. Bilam whipped the donkey for straying. The angel re-appeared in a more narrow area, and the donkey again tried to veer around, crushing Bilam’s leg against a wall, and again Bilam whipped the donkey. On the third occasion there was no room to get around, and Bilam whipped the donkey again, and said, "If I had a sword, I would kill you!" At this point the angel appeared to Bilam and mocked him for his inability to see the angel who the donkey saw. Bilam offered to go home, but the angel said, "Go bless the Jews."

Bilam showed up and, counter to the angel’s advice, tried to curse the Jews on three separate occasions. Each time he only succeeded in blessing them, until Balak angrily dismissed Bilam. Bilam left only after prophesying the ultimate demise of Moav, as well as the other local nations.

The Midrash records that before Bilam left, he offered Balak a piece of advice, triggering the next story to appear in the Torah. Balak arranged for the local women to go seduce the Jewish males into their tents, as part of a plan to get them to worship the Moabite idols. This worked well, to such a point that the leader of the tribe of Shimon, a man named Zimri, began to publicly take part in this activity, despite a plague which was killing thousands of Jews even as he did this. Up stepped a man named Pinchas, and he killed Zimri, thereby ending the immorality, the idolatry and the plague. Next week's portion, Pinchas, will continue with the end of this incident.