Perhaps all peoples are meant to dwell alone

This week’s Torah reading is parshat Balak which contains the infamous prophecies of the wicked non-Jewish prophet, Bilaam. Forced by Hashem against his will, Bilaam bestows many beautiful blessings on the Children of Israel.

Among these prophecies, but perhaps more double-edged than any other, Bilaam prophesies that the Children of Israel are ‘a people that will dwell alone’ (Numbers 23:9).

This particular prophecy always seems to prompt novel reflections and meditations according to the particular context in which the parsha is read. This year of course is no different.

Here’s mine.

Democratic societies worldwide are seeing ever-widening political polarisation. This polarisation basically reflects the schism between universalism and particularity.

Curiously, after a decade fighting the universalism of globalisation, the left have flipped and are now increasingly embracing universality. The right meanwhile, having spent a decade driving globalization, have flipped in the other direction and are now increasingly embracing particularity (think ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again’).

The Jewish people, as always, are caught in the middle.

Just as Jews faced the charge of being both arch-capitalists by communists, and arch-communists by capitalists, now the extreme (and unfortunately sometimes not so extreme) left see the Jews as the face of particularist ‘white privilege’ while the extreme (and unfortunately sometimes not so extreme) right see Jews as universalizing ‘arch-globalists’.

Meanwhile in Israel, the interplay of the Jewish secular universalist left and traditional particularist right is taking place at protests that are blocking up public thoroughfares, highways and road junctions across the country.

I believe it is no accident that Jews have been seen as both communist and capitalist, and now as both particularist and universalist. If you look carefully within Torah, you will see a whole range of opposites across which Judaism stands like a bridge. 

This, I believe, is an underlying reason for the chosen-ness of the Land of Israel – the meeting point of the three continents known to the ancient world: where east encounters west; where cultivated land meets the wilderness; where the very much alive Kinneret stands adjacent to the Dead Sea.

Look closer still and see how many opposites are fused within the Jewish religious totality: holy with mundane, heaven with earth, finite with infinite, transcendence with immanence, physicality with spirituality, hidden with revealed, rationalism with mysticism, sun with moon, body with soul, male with female, infertility with fruitfulness, free will with determinism, chessed with gevurah, Rachel with Leah, Yaakov with Yisrael, Yosef with Yehuda, Issachar with Zevulun, Aaron with Moshe, kindness with truth, righteousness with peace, priest with prophet, king with court, justice with mercy, brit avot with brit sinai, first tablets with second tablets, left tablet with right tablet, duties to Hashem with duties to mankind, written with oral, halakhah with aggadah, Hillel with Shammai, remembering the Exodus with not despising the Egyptian, the angels ascending the ladder with the angels descending the ladder, the goat to Hashem with the goat to Azazel, filling and subduing with serving and guarding, the pauper with the princes, the barren women of the house with the happy mother of children, emunah with hishtadlut, punishment with teshuvah, redistribution with wealth, individual with collective, word with deed, war with peace, slavery with freedom, rights with obligations, work with rest, blessing with curse, prayer with sacrifice, observe with remember, greatness with humility, acceptance with rebuke, deference with defiance.

This is how I think this all crystallizes into reality. 

There is a well-known teaching that the holiness of Purim is equated with Yom Kippur. The Torah calls Yom Kippur, ‘Yom HaKippurim’, literally, a day that is like Purim.

What links the two?

On Yom Kippur, Jews take on and subsume spirituality – 25 hours of fasting, four other afflictions, and a full day of intense prayer and repentance – on this holy day when G-d’s presence was fully revealed as he forgave the Jewish people for the sin of the Golden Calf and gave Moses the second set of tablets.

On Purim, Jews take on and subsume physicality – a day full of feasting, partying and gift-giving on the day the sages teach that the Jewish people finally consented freely to accept the Torah when G-d’s presence was completely hidden (the name Esther itself means ‘hidden’, and hence why we dress in mask and costumes on Purim).

Yom Kippur and Purim are days of extremes – respectively of spirituality and physicality. However it is clear that both become subsumed within Judaism and are carried forward in fusion into the rest of our year.

Thus, on the night after Yom Kippur goes out, its intense spirituality is immediately fused with the physicality of building and decorating our sukkahs.

And soon after Purim finishes, its intense physicality is fused with the spirituality of purging chametz (leavened goods) – representing materialism – from our property in the build up to Pesach.

I believe the Yom Kippur-Purim linkage is an archetype.

It represents a four-stage process by which the Jewish people come to unify the opposites identified above: first to take on those opposites (Yom Kippur-style spirituality, Purim-style physicality), second to subsume them, third to fuse them, and fourthly to project this holy fusion out to the world bringing the unification of apparent opposites toward a final revelation of underlying unity: ‘Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem echad’ (Deuteronomy 6:4), ‘ein od milvado’ (Deuteronomy 4:35), ‘on that day Hashem will be One, and His Name will be One’ (Zechariah 14:9).

So what’s going on with a ‘people that shall dwell alone’?

The world today may have swung too far towards universality. Hashem set up the world with boundaries, and Jews have been given commandments that require preservation of these boundaries (meat and milk, modesty, shatnez and kilayim, among others.)

The particularity of Judaism – the Torah obligations that only fall on Jews, the rules on inter-marriage, and the discouragement of conversion – stands in stark contrast to the other two abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, which are unashamedly universalizing.

And yet, through its prophetic literature and the key prophetic values of ‘tzedek u’mishpat’ (righteousness and justice), through the emphasis that we are all alike – Jew and non-Jew – created in G-d’s image, through the eternal example of Abraham himself with his open tent ready to provide hospitality to any passer-by, Judaism has a deeply universalist soul.

Maybe the role of Judaism in today’s world is about rebalancing towards particularity, but doing so without losing all that is good and important about universalism.

Maybe at this point in time, the Jewish message to the world is, ‘all peoples should dwell alone’ in the sense that, just as there is value to being and remaining distinguishably Jewish, so too there is value to being and remaining (to pick at random) distinguishably French, Thai, Guatemalan, Tuvalese and Burkinabe.

However Hashem in His infinite wisdom through His Torah provides an important corrective against too much particularism: 36 times we are told we must love the stranger that lives among us. Particularism – ‘dwelling alone’ in the sense of being and remaining distinguishably Jewish – cannot mean therefore that we must throw out, taunt or otherwise diminish the strangers that live among us. Particularism should not mean chauvinism or xenophobia.

But on the other hand, and this is where we finish up with our fusion of universalism and particularity, we can only ‘love [the stranger] as ourselves’ (Leviticus 19:34), if we also love ourselves.

Shabbat shalom!