Why do we Hate Balaam? Musings on Parashat Balak 5772

As I sat on the phone formulating my response, I stewed.  I stewed with desire to unload my anger against a giant corporation that in my mind was willfully, and cruelly blocking my ability to close on my home so that I could live a normal life.  All these emotions welled up within me as finally the other end of the line picked up, and suddenly I had a human being to speak with instead of my image of what that human being would be.  Try as I might, as much as I wanted to spew the curses that had been welling up within me, as much as I desired to make her feel my pain in her very being, blessing spilled forth from my lips. Words of thanks, and appreciation  were all I could say once i was in the presence of this sweet and caring human being. As I told many people later, the woman on the other end of the phone was from the midwest, the odds were that she was going to be pretty nice on the phone.   
Moving to Westchester turned out to be much more of a journey than I had expected. My family and I spent five weeks “in between homes” on our way to our new home in Port Chester. I still do not know how or why it took five weeks to get this done, however, on that journey I had a number of experiences. This experience of interacting with a person I felt like I needed to hate, brought me back to our parashah. For it is throughout our parashah that Balaam consistently tries to curse another group of people, namely the Israelites, yet the words that come out of his mouth are consistently words of praise, as I will sing from our text:

23:5. How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!

ה. מַה טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ יַעֲקֹב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל:

And yet our tradition has hated Balaam even though these beautiful words came from his mouth.   Our biblical text rarely has a kind word to spare for him, and our talmudic text is scathing, where throughout the text his epithet is not simply Balaam but wicked Balaam! He is described as plotting secretly against the Israelites, and some of the allegations against him are simply appalling. 
So I wonder: What is it about Balaam that is so horrendous? How is it that a person who speaks so positively of Israel, is so vilified?  Balaam as a character has a few key traits that create this perfect storm of hatred.  However, the one I wish to focus on is that we never meet him. 
How can I say that you may ask? We read about him in the Torah, we are reading about him this week in our parashah.  Yet, how does Balaam interact with our people the Israelites in the desert? From a distance. From a vantage point where he is looking down at the Israelites, and the beautiful words that he speaks time and again, are described as being put into his mouth by G-d. Other than his death, Balaam is never described as interacting with any Israelite. (Numbers 31:8)
No it is in part for the exact same reason I was so ready to loathe the person on the other line that we as a people have been uncomfortable with Balaam.  He’s an unknown.  He’s never been in our presence, never had a conversation, he’s only talked to G-d, and in the end he barely listened to what G-d had to say.  

So I wonder what that has to say about our own perceptions of other people that we may never meet.   How often do we give ourselves the opportunity to be in someone else’s shoes rather than dissecting them based upon what we perceive? How often do we stop and take a moment to process where they are in the world before we assume certain stereotypes about them?

Susan T. Fiske, a noted social psychologist, has recently done quite a bit of research on this particular question. She argues that our perception of people stems from our preconceived view of their role in society. Her study suggests that we see most groups that we are not a part of as either envied groups, or scorned groups.  Envied groups are often seen as “ ...competent, but we view them as not on our side, so they seem cold...and untrustworthy.”(

http://www.russellsage.org/visiting-scholars/susan-t-fiske-interview)

 On the other hand, we have scorned groups.  In a recent study, Fiske showed images of characteristically scorned groups to participants who were in a Functional MRI machine, and monitored their brain patterns when seeing the scorned groups. The area of the brain that recognizes other people did not light up when the participants viewed members of the scorned groups.   “Fiske suspects that this hesitation to value the lives of those we scorn comes from not fully recognizing members of scorned groups as fellow human beings.”

(http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/compassion.aspx)

It is so easy to ascribe any motive or emotion to a group of unknown people.  To say that any person, based upon their job, political allegiance, or simply their appearance makes them a caricature of everything we imagine they are capable of.   What is infinitely more challenging is to take the deep breath, and step back and try to see the people we are interacting with as far more than merely thoughtless automatons that represent everything we imagine they are.  Rather our challenge is to take a moment, and try to see the person as a human being, created in G-d’s image, and therefore worthy of being recognized as a individual regardless of their opinion, position or group affiliation.

A few years ago a book came out entitled: Why We Hate Us by Dick Meyer.   The premise of the book was deeper than the title, he argued that a deeper social shift was occurring in American society creating this erosion of trust and morality. However, his title and many of his examples throughout the book ring true: we hate us.  A short excerpt from his book provides a multitude of examples: “They loathe snails who drive slowly in the left lane. They don't like people who talk full volume about the heartbreak of their psoriasis on cell phone headsets in restaurants and quiet bookstores....They don't like it when they're talking with someone who starts thumbing their little digital personal device to answer an email from someone five hundred miles away.”
(

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93261726)

Our challenge throughout our lives is to not reduce people to things.   To not look out at that person who is doing something that irritates us, and group them together into this faceless mass that not only irks us but enrages us.   That we don’t look out at a random stranger and see the wicked Balaam, the unknown entity, but a fellow human being created in the divine Image.

Joining this community, it is with great joy that I look forward to seeing that spark within each of you as I come to know you over the years.  I hope that I will not be a faceless Rabbi to you, and that all of you will not be a throng of congregants to me.  Rather as a Kehilah Kedoshah, a holy community we work together to know each other and continue to make WRT, our community, a place to be proud of, and most importantly, our home.   

Shabbat Shalom.

D'var Torah by Rabbi Jan Katzew

Transitions – B’midbar

Westchester Reform Temple

May 14, 2010/2 Sivan 5770

Men’s Club Shabbat

RABBI JAN KATZEW, Union for Reform Judaism

& member, Westchester Reform Temple

I am honored to have been asked to deliver a D’var Torah on Men’s Club Shabbat. D’var Torah means “a word of Torah.” This week’s word of Torah is “B’midbar”. B’midbar means “in the wilderness”. It bears no apparent relationship to the English name of the Book we begin this Shabbat – the Book of Numbers. Appearances are often deceiving, in the Torah as in life.

B’midbar - In a wilderness, in uncharted territory, is where most of us dwell most of the time. The wilderness is not the same as the desert. The wilderness is a place of transition. Tevya almost had it right. Not “tradition” but “transition” may be the essential concept that holds the secret to Jewish life. William Bridges, whose surname is ideal for his authorial subject, composed an article entitled “Getting them through the Wilderness” in which he wrote: “Transition is very different from change. Change is situational… Transition, on the other hand is a three phase psychological reorientation process people go through when they are coming to terms with change. It begins with an ending – with people letting go of their old reality and their old identity. Unless people can make a real ending, they will be unable to make a successful beginning.”

In the words of Torah, unless we can learn to live b’midbar, in the wilderness, we will not be able to live in the b’eretz ha-muvtachat, in the Land of Promise. In the life of the Reform Movement, we are still in transition. The generation of our people that left Egypt spent forty years of meandering in the wilderness before they were ready to experience the responsibility that comes with freedom. It has not yet been forty years since the first woman rabbi was ordained or the first woman cantor was invested, and we are appropriately in the wilderness, still in transition, still holding on to old paradigms and prejudices, still trying to figure out the roles of men and woman in the evolving Jewish community.

B’midbar reminds us to be patient, not to expect that we will be able to take shortcuts, to walk directly from an anthrocentric Jewish culture to a dynamic equilibrium of gender and age balance. Transitions take time and it is as natural for us to have separation anxiety from our prior realities as adults as it is for a child to experience separation anxiety in her first day in school. As Reform Jews we are experiencing multiple transitions. It is now the statistical norm that a student in a congregational school in the Reform Movement is the progeny of at least one parent that was not born as a Jew. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented scenario in Jewish memory. The Reform cantorate has become predominantly female in a single generation. We are a people in transition, bamidbar, and we will do our share of misdirected wandering, just like our forebears. But, with God’s providence and our perseverance, we will learn what it takes not only to survive, but to thrive in our evolving, at times frustrating and almost always fascinating reality.

In the wilderness of Sinai, the Israelites took a census; hence the Book of Numbers is an alternative, appropriate name. Timing is everything, and in 2010, we have, I assume, all participated in the United States census. There were several substantive differences between Sinai and American censuses. Sinai counted only the men 20 years old and older, presumably because they could be counted upon to fight in order to defend the fledgling children of Israel against any enemy forces that would set out to destroy them. The American census seeks to count every person of every age that lives here, as a model of democratic principle. However, there is another distinction that is emblematic of a constructive tension between American and Jewish values. According to the US Census Bureau, “When you fill out the census form, you’re making a statement about what resources your community needs going forward.” According to Sefer B’midbar, the Book of Numbers, “Take a census of the whole Israelite company [of fighters] by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names of every male, head by head.” We count Americans in order to allocate resources. We count the descendants of the Israelites, ourselves, in order to defend the values of a minority, a people that is both ger v’toshav, a stranger and a resident, perpetually in transition, in a wilderness, B’midbar.

Shabbat Shalom!