In this week’s double portion Chukat-Balak, a sorcerer named Balaam is hired by Balak, the Moabite king, with one explicit purpose: curse the Children of Israel (Numbers 22-24). Balak doesn't want diplomacy or military victory, he wants Israel destroyed through words, through spiritual sabotage. Balaam climbs the heights overlooking the Israelite camp three times, mouth loaded with malice, fully intending to speak our destruction into being.
And three times, the curse will not come. Instead, what emerges from Balaam's mouth are the words of what eventually become the Mah Tovu prayer, "How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel." (Numbers 24:5) The man who came to curse us produced instead one of the most beloved lines in our liturgy, words we still say walking into synagogue every morning. Hatred opened its mouth, and blessing walked out instead.
It is these blessed words that came to mind this week on our Federation mission through Poland. We stood in Auschwitz, ground built for one purpose: to curse, to erase, to make certain there would be no more tents of Jacob, no more dwelling places of Israel. And although there is no comparison to the suffering of the Holocaust, nor any silver lining to the genocide of six million Jews, standing on those sacred grounds where countless lives were stolen, there was definitely a sense of sanctity and holiness.
But Balak's story isn't only about Balak, it's about what Gd does despite him. And here is what many of us are carrying back from Auschwitz: more than 80 later, 42 of us, Jews, alive and unafraid, stood on that soil with the taste of death, horror, and what many described as hell on earth, and said Kaddish and sung Hatikvah. The curse failed completely. We are still here, still blessing, still reciting the Mah Tovu.
And as I write this message, anti-Semitism in the West has reached its highest documented levels since the Holocaust itself. The Balaks of the world have not finished hiring the Balaams. So, our mission cannot end at simply witnessing these consecrated places. If we can stand on that ground ourselves, then it is incumbent on us all to do it. Our feet must tread through these sites so that the world does not interpret our absence as a sign that we have moved on. And if we are unable to be here firsthand, our obligation doesn't shrink, it changes shape. We must speak up when the curse is repackaged in the media, correct the lie when it's verbalized by elected officials, and we must support the institutions guarding our tents. Passivity is the one posture Mah Tovu does not permit us to take.
The blessing only stands if we keep choosing to be the ones who say it out loud. Because we are Stronger Together.
Shabbat Shalom.
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