The story of Balak and Bilaam, the ass and the angel and God – and the non-speaking role of the Children of Israel – is a familiar one to us. Balak King of Moab hires the renowned seer Bilaam to curse Israel.
What is a curse? How does it work? And where is it? Does it hover out there like a dark angel, shifting events against the victim? Does it sow seeds in his unconscious so that he unwittingly brings about his own downfall? Or does it have no effect at all, except to serve as something to blame when things go wrong?
I wonder if today many of us believe in the power of blessings and curses. In the world of opera, of course, curses are powerful and efficacious. As we watch the story of Rigoletto unfold, we know, despite wanting to forget it, that the curse laid on the hunchback must inevitable take its toll, and Rigoletto’s final cry, Ah, La maledizione! as he holds his dead daughter in is arms, tells us chillingly that he too never forgot the curse, as much as he wanted to make light of it.
The story in today’s Parsha is punctuated by half a dozen variations of double phrases about blessings and curses. The first comes early on, when Balak seems to be trying to seduce Bilaam by flattery:
For I know that he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed. In other words, Balaam is credited with being a hundred percent efficacious in the business of blessing and cursing.
The next punctuation point is God speaking to Bilaam. First He tells him not to go with Balak’s emissaries, and then adds:
You shall not curse the people for they are blessed.
For some reason, God is concerned at the idea of Bilaam delivering the curses that Balak is demanding of him.
The third point comes when Bilaam starts his first oracle and says to Balak (in the words that God has put in his mouth):
How can I damn whom God has not damned, how doom when Hashem has not doomed?
When this first oracle ends, we have the fourth such point, with a furious Balak saying to Bilaam:
I brought you here to curse my enemies and behold you have surely blessed them
Fifthly, Bilaam says in his second oracle:
Lo it is a blessing I have taken (i.e. from God); He has blessed; I will not (or cannot) change it.
And finally at the end of the third oracle (for which, by the way, Balaam has taken a big step forward, as God is no longer dictating to him word for word, but רוח אלקים has come upon him)... at the end of this third oracle, Bilaam says to Israel:
Whoever blesses you is blessed, whoever curses you is cursed.
Here then we learn about the effects of blessings and curses, not on the recipient, but on the giver. This echoes God’s promise to Abraham in Lech Lecha. The message seems to be that God will not treat lightly those who curse, or attempt to drag down, others who seek to do God’s work.
So let me address what I think is a central question on this parsha: given that the People of Israel were already blessed, why would it matter if Balaam uttered words of curse? I would suggest that a basic premise needs to be that our words, the words of each and every one of us, and not least the words of someone of such repute and supposed power as Bilaam, do have an effect.
After all, we know what our tradition says about dancing before the bride. Beit Shammai says you tell the bride the truth of what you see (!) Beit Hillel says you tell her she’s beautiful. It does not take great powers of insight to imagine what difference those two approaches would make to a plain and uncertain young woman on her wedding day. If the truth can do such damage, kal v’chomer, all the more so, a curse.
To the modern mind, curses and blessings may not have any direct effect on future events, but the indirect effect – through the subjective experience of the listeners – may be far-reaching. Had Bilaam given the curses that would have earned him his reward, the Moabites would have been encouraged to attack, and Israel would have been downhearted. But he didn’t, he blessed us. Abravanel points to the powerful effect of the words of blessing, as we saw just a few weeks ago in Haftarat Shelach Lecha, when the Jericho harlot Rachav tells Joshua’s spies that the dread of Israel is in the local people.
There is another interesting layer, suggested by Nechama Leibowitz. If Israel heard itself cursed, it would in future times have superstitiously attributed all its sufferings to Bilaam’s curse, rather than to Israel’s incurring divine displeasure through its disobedience, and taking responsibility for its actions.
I think there is a fine line between taking responsibility for our actions, and a sense of being cursed, blemished, and doomed to failure. If we carry such a sense of blemish, we cannot escape the cycle of wrongdoing, nor take responsibility for our own part in the trials and tribulations of our lives. It’s the blemish! The curse! La maledizione! And since curses are immutable, I might as well carry on behaving as I do.
What then does it mean to be blessed? Bilaam himself in his second oracle gives one kind of answer. God sees no evil in Israel, Hashem is with them. Does this really mean that God takes a constantly rosy view of Israel? We have only to look at the end of this parsha when the Israelite males are seduced to worship at the shrine of Baal Pe’or; then God is ready to come down on them like a ton of bricks. As the Etz Hayim commentary notes, Ibn Ezra reads this verse as "Only when God sees no evil in Israel is Hashem with them." When we do God’s will, God is our protection.
Let’s look at this in relation to our history – our national history and your and my personal histories. Our people have had a rough last two thousand years, often marked by suffering and degradation. But I think it can be argued that the belief that God is with us, can transcend such suffering. A people which experiences itself as blessed, as having God with it, may still suffer grievously, but that suffering can be borne. This is true of individuals too. A feeling of being blessed, of having God with us, can sustain us through the pain and difficulties that life throws at us. That feeling is all-important. There is a sense, I believe, in which our subjective feeling of being blessed is to be blessed; and our subjective feeling of being cursed is to be cursed.
Perhaps God does not act in the world. Perhaps it is not God who brings illness into our bodies, or death into our families. But a relationship with God, a covenant, a personal brit, means that we can experience God’s blessing whatever happens. Sometimes of course it is a struggle. Sometimes we may experience hester panim, God’s face being hidden from us, as inevitably we go into dark places. But as soon as a sense of God’s proximity and blessing can be recovered, then we can face life again with a light step. With more than a light step, with joy.
I love the words of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev: "Your pure, firm thoughts can change God’s attribute of judgment to the attribute of mercy, when you believe that all that God does is for the good, and thus express your great and mighty love of God."
If we can believe that God is with us, that the path we walk is right, and that what we have to face on that path is right, then we are blessed.
God bless you!