Be Here Now

One Moment: What If Everything Was Leading to This?

What if everything in your life — all your struggles, talents, education, and experience — was building toward one single moment?

Bilaam’s story, found in Parshat Balak, offers one of the Torah’s strangest and most revealing glimpses into what it means to have a moment of truth — and miss it. Bilaam is not part of the covenant. He is a hired prophet, called in by Israel’s enemies to curse them. He’s clever, spiritually sensitive, and dangerously self-serving. Yet God grants him something extraordinary: a fleeting glimpse of ultimate clarity.

The Torah doesn’t say, “And God spoke to Bilaam,” as it says with Moses. Instead it says vayikar Elokim el Bilaam — “God encountered Bilaam.” The language is odd, subtle, and loaded. It’s a partial word, vayikar, not the full vayikra used when God calls to Moses. The Sages point out that this word also hints at keri — impurity, chance, or even nocturnal emission. It’s an ambiguous encounter, not an embrace.

But for one shining moment, Bilaam sees. He sees the truth of God’s compassion. He sees the moral elevation of the Jewish people. He even sees something of their destiny. And for a moment, he blesses them with the clarity and power of a true prophet.

It’s a breathtaking moment.

But it wasn’t about him.

God gave Bilaam this brief spiritual elevation not as a reward, but as a statement. It was to show the world: “Even with the greatest prophetic insight, without covenant, without action, nothing changes.” Bilaam goes back to sorcery. He betrays Israel. He dies in disgrace.

Your Bilaam Moment

That’s the story. But here’s the message for us:

We might spend our whole lives gathering tools — talent, insight, discipline, empathy, wisdom — without knowing why. Maybe it’s all preparation for one critical moment. One conversation. One decision. One day where it all lines up — and we must act.

You may not even realize the moment has come until it’s passed.

But the Torah is teaching us: such moments exist. They are real. And you might be standing on the edge of one right now.

God’s Strategy

This story also says something about God’s style. He doesn’t just give Israel Torah. He shapes the world’s understanding of what Torah is.

The nations say, “If we had a prophet like Moses, we’d have done better.” So God sends them one — for a moment. He gives Bilaam the vision, the clarity, the language.

And still… nothing.

It’s not knowledge that changes us. It’s commitment. It’s what we do when the moment comes.

A Moment in the Light

There’s also a difference in when God speaks. To Jewish prophets, it’s during the day — open, revealed, clear. With Bilaam and others like him, it’s at night. In a dream. Shrouded.

Midrash compares it to a king who visits his wife proudly during the day, but only sneaks off to his mistress at night. God’s covenantal relationship is public and enduring. His encounters with outsiders are quiet, partial, fleeting.

But even in the night, even in the shadows, the moment still matters.

So what if right now — this day, this conversation, this choice — is the moment everything in your life has been pointing toward?

Will you recognize it?

Conclusion: It Could Be Now

Maybe the Torah is whispering something simple and terrifying:

You don’t know when your moment will come.
It could be twenty years from now.
It could be today.
It could be this very moment.

What will you do with it?