Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class.
My name is Gedalia Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel.
As far as we know, we humans are the only creatures on this planet that possess the
ability to change our fate.
For all we know, we may be the only creatures in the universe to possess this elusive power.
How do we accomplish this remarkable feat?
With our minds, of course.
That utterly unencompassable entity that is somehow linked to the brain, is somehow able
to withstand and to alter the all-encompassing power of fate.
That is a pretty grand claim.
Not everybody would agree with it.
The world of science, for instance, denies that the mind has any such power.
In fact, it denies that there really is any such thing as the mind to begin with.
There is only the brain, with its molecules, its chemicals, and its electrical signals.
For that matter, there really is no such thing as fate either, according to the purists among
them.
There is only the physical reality and the forces that guide it.
This is not fate as much as nature.
It just happens the way that it does for no reason other than that was the way these forces
worked out in the course of time.
This does sound a bit like fate, but that is a matter of semantics.
For those who aren t absolutely sold on this rather materialistic view of the world, the
mind is still staring them right in the face, waiting patiently to be recognized for what
it is.
It is a good bet that most people really don t believe that they are nothing but molecules
steered around by some forces.
They have no problem believing that those things exist, but a good deal of problems
accepting that this is the whole story.
The mind, they know through countless experiences, can perform the miracle of altering the present,
and thus altering the future.
This means that it can change fate.
It is usually restricted to affecting the fate of itself only, but it does have the
limited ability to affect that of others, as we all know.
This power lies at the root of capability to be good or evil.
These Biblical sounding terms still resound with us as the moral underpinnings of our
sense of purpose in life.
We can change fate with our actions, with our words, and even with our thoughts.
We make choices that visibly and palpably alter things internal or external to ourselves.
We act on those choices and change our lives, and possibly the lives of others.
We influence others with our words and expressions.
We may even be able to do this with thought alone, but of this nobody is altogether sure
of this.
There has always been a strong feeling that this is indeed the case, and it really hasn
t been abandoned in the face of science.
This is a powerful belief.
It is one that resonates with human consciousness.
It connects our inner self to the outside world in a manner that defies and ignores
any scientific evidence.
This sort of thing is all over the Bible.
Every blessing that one person conveys upon another works precisely through this means.
Every curse would work in the same way but with the opposite result.
It is not only God who can accomplish these miracles of intent.
People are doing this to each other throughout the stories.
We, who may read such stories, either in the Bible or elsewhere, are free to disregard
them as superstitious nonsense or accept them as an integral part of reality.
It is a good bet that our own outlook on this question goes a good way in determining whether
or not we employ such means of attempting to influence things in our own lives.
If we buy into it, we probably do it ourselves.
If we don t, we likely avoid this kind of thing.
Or at least we don t talk about it.
This week s Parsha is called Balak.
That word is a name.
It is the name of a king of ancient Moab, a nation that lived on the eastern border
of the Land of Israel.
He was the king of Moab at the time the Israelites were traveling north along that eastern border
as they made their way towards an entry point into the land.
There is no indication that Moab was in any danger of being attacked by the Israelites.
It wasn t part of the more ancient land of Canaan and Moshe was given explicit instructions
to not attack them.
But this didn t stop Balak, the king of Moab, from worrying about this very possibility.
For this, he elected to play all of his options.
He went to the trouble of hiring the services of a regional soothsayer named Balaam, who
was reputed to have the power of curse or bless with remarkable success.
Balak wanted Balaam to curse the Israelites, and thus keep them from attacking and defeating
his nation.
Again, none of this was really necessary, but Balak didn t know that and he wasn t taking
any chances.
It turns out that almost the entire Parsha revolves around the personality of Balaam.
It is just a quirk of language that the Parsha isn t named Balaam instead of Balak, since
it is really all about Balaam.
It happens that this Balaam is one of the handful of people in the Bible whose existence
is attested to by a contemporary source outside of the Bible.
We have the remains of an inscription that was put on the walls of an ancient shrine
in what is now Jordan that tells this same story but from the point of view of the Moabites
as opposed to the Isrealites.
It is a fascinating bit of ancient poetry and storytelling, written in some ancient
middle eastern dialect and employing all the classic Biblical means of weaving the divine
and the human into one narrative.
The essential theme of the Parsha is that Balaam is told by God, who is the clear source
of his mysterious power, that he should not go along with this plan for cursing the Isreaelites
since they are inherently blessed.
Balaam seems to accept this divine verdict and tells Balak s messengers that he won t
be part of the plan.
Balak ups the ante and Balaam keeps asking God if it is ok to agree.
For some reason that is unclear in the text, God relents and tells Balaam that he can go
with Balak as long as he only utters the words that God puts in his mouth.
After a very strange incident that seems to have a dreamlike supernatural quality, Balaam
arrives at Balak s camp and they set out to curse the Israelites.
The Torah makes no secret about the fact that Balaam was not opposed to Balak s goal at
all.
On the contrary, he seems to support it.
But he keeps reminding Balak that he is powerless to do anything other than what God instructs
him to do.
The bulk of the Parsha tells of three separate instances in which Balak sets Balaam up to
curse the Israelites and each time God places a blessing in his mouth instead of a curse.
Balak gets increasingly furious as this goes on and finally gives up on Balaam altogether.
The final scene is Balaam proclaiming a long prophecy about the destiny of the Isrealites
and the surrounding nations which sets the destiny of these competing forces in motion.
This prophecy, and the three blessings that preceded it, have gained a tremendous importance
in the eyes of Jews and all those who see the Bible as a source of revealing God s role
in the world.
This Parsha has earned a unique place in the Torah as the single instance of an outsider
establishing and confirming the destiny of the Israelites.
In this regard there is nothing quite like it in the Bible, and it may be appropriate
that its fate was to be discovered among the ruins of some obscure shrine in the desert
of ancient Moab.
One of the truly amazing things about this story is that it is very easy to read the
Parsha and overlook the remarkable assumption that Balaam did indeed have this power to
curse or to bless.
This is so obvious and so assumed in the story that it really is never stated outright.
This was simply an accepted fact of the time.
We might look at this as pure nonsense, but when we read this story it simply has to be
accepted as an essential element.
It is like reading a fantasy story in which the existence of magic or elves or fairies
is assumed and accepted without question, because otherwise the story would make no
sense.
But in this case, we are expected to truly believe what we are reading.
There is one difference between Balaam s cursing and blessing in this Parsha and the way countless
other people have attempted this very thing in their own lives.
We might bless or curse some person or goal or whatever concerning which we really need
things to go a certain way.
We may do this with genuine feeling and conviction that what we are doing will have some effect
on the outcome.
We may wonder why we are doing something so ridiculous from a rational point of view,
but we do it anyway.
However, we only rarely truly follow the formula established by Balaam in the Parsha.
We insist that the outcome be the way we want it to be.
Balaam went into his mission with the idea that he could only say the words God placed
in his mouth.
This makes all the difference in the world.
A blessing or a curse that does not take God s influence in mind is nothing more than a
wish upon a star.
It may happen or it may not, but it likely has almost nothing to do with that blessing
or curse.
WIth Balaam, however, God played the central role in determining what Balaam would say.
It could only result in a curse if God approved.
If God wished to bless, there was nothing Balaam could do to prevent it.
This fact of spiritual reality is summed up in one of Balaam s messages to Balak upon
entering into his prophetic trance.
How can I curse that which God has not cursed?
What divine wrath can I conjure if God is not angry?
If anything is the hidden theme of this Parsha it is this.
We can bless and curse to our hearts desire but the effects of those blessings and curses
will probably go no further than the extent of our own minds if we do not include God
in the process.
This was precisely what Balaam repeatedly told to Balak and it was precisely what Balak
could not accept.
He thought that Balaam had the power to change fate regardless of what the source of fate
had in mind.
But in this he was wrong.
Balaam, for all his faults, had this one crucial element of spiritual power firmly in hand.
He knew that he was helpless to change fate unless he was working with God.
We can change fate.
We do this all the time.
But we are limited to specific methods and spheres of influence.
To curse or to bless may be a natural desire at times, but it is nothing more than wishful
thinking unless we gain some sense of what God has in store for us.
If there is one thing that we can glean from this unusual Parsha it is this - if we truly
want to see our wishes fulfilled, we have to make sure that they are in line with what
God has planned.
Shabbat Shalom!