What a time to be alive.
I spent the past week reading – that is my ideal vacation. I don’t need to go anywhere fancy; I just need a stack of books. News alert, your rabbi is a big nerd.
Most of the books I read were about antisemitism. Second news alert, your rabbi has a really warped sense of what a relaxing vacation should look like.
In these books on antisemitism there were a few consistent themes. One, we were hated throughout almost all of history. Two, it wasn’t that hard to act out on antisemitism. If someone did not like us, they would attack us. It was as simple as that.
Nowadays, we spend so much time discussing how to combat antisemitism. Imagine discussing how to fight antisemitism with your great-great-grandparents. You know how they combatted antisemitism a hundred years ago? They ran for their lives.
But now, our enemies cannot just attack us; we have an army that fights back. Jihadists like Ahmed Al-Sharaa, the leader of Syria, are meekly turning to Israel with the hope that Israel will offer them peace. We have come to a point where we are so strong, that one of the roles of the IDF is to restrain Jews from fighting back.
What a time to be alive.
I believe the last time we had such security, security to the point that the nations around us were scared to attack us, probably goes back 3297 years to the year 1272 BCE, the year the Jewish People stood on the banks of the Jordan, after defeating the nations of Sichon and Og, the two mightiest armies in the region.
And here’s where history has a funny way of repeating itself. What do you do when you can’t attack with knives and swords? What do you do when your nuclear capabilities are severely limited and your weaponry can’t match up to the Jewish State?
You start a war of words.
Moav and Midian, two countries who hated the Jewish People, realized they did not stand a chance going to battle against the Jews, and so they employed Bilaam, a master orator, to disparage the Jewish People, to curse them and to highlight their every flaw.
What’s fascinating is that if you review many of the classical commentators, they all ask variations of the same question: Who cares if Bilaam cursed the Jewish People? Why do we have an entire Torah portion dedicated to this lowlife? Why does G-d perform crazy miracles, like a talking donkey and preventing Bilaam from cursing the Jews? What’s the big deal?
I don’t blame these rabbis from the Middle Ages for asking this question. Because they lived in a time when if someone did not like us, they killed us. Our enemies did not have to resort to words to hurt us. But I don’t think you and I have this question. Because we live in a time in which they cannot just attack us physically. And so instead, we have experienced time and time again, the lethal power of words.
- How chants of “From the River to Sea,” on college campuses led to physical violence against Jewish students.
- How groups like In Our Lifetime that chant, “Globalize the Intifada,” then go ahead and list addresses of major Jewish organizations and leaders, all but telling their followers to take “justice” into their own hands.
- How on May 20th, the under-secretary-general of the UN issued a dire warning on a BBC interview how “there were 18,000 Gazan babies who would die in 48 hours.” And although the absurd claim was immediately debunked, the next day, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead in Washington, DC.
- How just a few days later, a man who yelled, “How many children [have] you killed?” firebombed a group of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people, and ultimately, killing Karen Diamon.
One commentator understood this. The Abarbanel argues that Bilaam’s curses had no power at all. But had he been successful in cursing the Jewish People it would have galvanized the enemies of the Jews to attack them physically. In 2025, we know all too well what that looks like.
And so instead of just ignoring the “meaningless” words of Bilaam, the Torah records this entire episode, as if to say, there will be a time, thousands of years from now, when the Jewish People will once again be in a position of power, the Jewish People will once again be in a position in which our enemies will be scared to attack, but there will be Bilaams who will attack you with words – Bilaams like Mahmoud Khalil in Columbia chanting death to the Jews, or Bilaams like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens who platform antisemitic conspiracy theories, or Bilaams like Kanye West and the rapper, Vylan, who lace their music with hatred. The story of Bilaam is a warning – do not ignore those hateful words; they have power.
To further illustrate how powerful words can be, G-d does something rather intriguing. G-d does not just prevent Bilaam from speaking, Bilaam is not kicked off of Twitter and forced to stop sharing his hate. Instead, G-d turns Bilaam’s curses into blessings. Rashi explains that G-d took each of Bilaam’s attempted curses and showed how that curse can actually be a blessing.
If Bilaam were alive in 2025, it does not take much of an imagination to know what he would want to say. I imagine that if Bilaam were around today, he would probably try to claim the Jewish People have outsized influence and control world politics. He would probably claim that we are racist. And he would probably claim that the IDF kills Arabs indiscriminately.
If Bilaam were alive in 2025, if G-d were to take his curses and turn them into blessings, this is probably how Bilaam’s curses-turned-blessings would sound:
“Hen am l’vadad yishkon, it is a nation that lives alone.” The Jewish People are not looking for world dominion; they are looking to be left alone, to live in peace. There are no Elders of Zion plotting world dominion. The wealthiest people on earth are not Jews. But the Jews do indeed have an outsized influence. We have made outsized contributions to the field of life-saving medicine. We have an outsized representation in the realm of social justice. We give more dollars per capita to charity than any other faith group. Our stated mission is to support and elevate the nations around us. Bilaam of 2025 would affirm the outsized positive influence of our nation.
He would then be forced to continue:
“Mah tovu oholecha, how beautiful are your tents!” Like the tents of Avraham, opened on four sides to every passerby regardless of their faith, regardless of their race. Judaism is not racist. On the contrary, it is the only faith that believes that it does not have a monopoly on heaven. Ours is a tradition that does not call others dhimmis or sinners; instead it coins terms like tzadikei umos ha’olam, righteous gentiles. Spend a moment in Israel and you will meet millions Jews of all colors.
And then finally, Bilaam of 2025 would concede:
“Kara shachav ka’ari, the Jewish People crouch like a lion.” That yes, we attack, yes, we fight, yes, we bomb. But our preferred state is that of a crouching lion, of not attacking at all. As Paul Johnson once noted, it was the Jews who taught the world that peace is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of strength. In our tradition, the word we use for peace, Shalom, is also a name of G-d. We cannot finish a single prayer without beseeching G-d for peace. We are obsessed with peace.
Sometimes we have to kill. And sometimes our army makes mistakes, let’s be honest with ourselves. But warfare as a value?! Killing children as something to glorify?! There is nothing further than the truth. As Golda Meir so beautifully put it, “We will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”
What a time to be alive.
Like the times of the Bilaam of old, we live in a time of unprecedented Jewish strength.
Like the times of the Bilaam of old, we live in a time when our enemies must resort to words – dangerous, hateful, lethal words.
Like the times of the Bilaam of old, we have internalized the message of our parsha; we know how dangerous those words can be, and we must fight them at every turn.
May we merit to live in a time in which all of Bilaam’s blessings come true, a time in which dorach kochav mi’Yaakov, a Messianic star will shoot forth from Yaakov, and the Jewish value of peace will reign supreme.