Reading the Dinah Project

This is a difficult one.

We go about our lives, focusing on the next mini-crisis confronting us, and forget about some of the heavy tragedies we have to process. That’s how God created us so that we can continue to function and not be paralyzed by fear, sadness and loss. So we go on. But sometimes we are reminded. That is what happened to me when I read the Dinah Project report on sexual violence on October 7th.

Here are my thoughts and how they connect to parshat Balak.

Our Compass in a Confused World

It’s hard to speak—let alone write—in times like these.
I just finished reading parts of the Dinah Project’s report on the sexual violence of October 7th. It is exhaustive, painful, and almost unbearably sad. One would imagine that such documentation—meticulous, harrowing, human—would offer incontrovertible proof of unfiltered evil. But instead, we find ourselves staring at a world where sympathy is withheld, where clarity is blurred, and where somehow we are expected to explain ourselves.

Here is the report: https://thedinahproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/The-Dinah-Project-full-report-A4-pages_web.pdf

How do we even begin to process this?

In the wake of October 7th, we witnessed the return of a nightmare so archaic, so visceral, it seemed torn from the darkest recesses of Jewish memory. And yet, what followed was somehow even more disorienting: a moral confusion so complete, a reversal of justice so swift, that the victims became the accused. Entire communities—liberal, democratic, educated—turned their eyes away. Or worse: turned their voices against us.

That much of the Islamic world frames the Jewish state through the lens of colonialism and grievance is painful, but tragically unsurprising. It fits a long and familiar script. But what of the rational West? What of the liberal intellectuals, the champions of human rights, the progressive academics? What of our allies—those we marched with, voted with, taught and learned beside? Are they not reading the same reports I am? Have they been blinded by agenda-driven ideologues—or is it something worse: a collapse of moral clarity so deep it borders on complicity?

And what of the Jews within this storm? The ones amplifying the accusations, erasing their own people’s pain, and legitimizing the rage of those who want nothing more than to see the Jewish story undone?

Have we lost our minds? Or perhaps more pointedly—have we lost our memory, our moral compass, our sense of who we are and what we’ve endured?

Torah doesn’t offer neat answers to this chaos, but does give us something else: a wide, ancient lens. A recognition that history repeats, that hatred recycles. That we are not the first to face this inversion of truth. And that, in the heart of confusion, Torah always remains our moral compass.

It’s within this frame that I want to turn to the work of Rabbi Dr. Nethaniel (Nati) Helfgot—a scholar who brings depth and clarity to the book of Bamidbar, uncovering layers of meaning that feel strikingly relevant today. His essays in his book Mikra and Meaning, published nearly fifteen years ago, remain fresh and resonant.

In exploring the fascinating story of Balak, king of Moab—who hires the magician-mercenary Bilaam to curse and neutralize the wrongly perceived threat of Israel—Rabbi Helfgot draws our attention to an earlier iteration of this same irrational fear: Pharaoh, the archetypal enemy of Sefer Shemot.

Rav Nati highlights literary and thematic parallels: the same language of fear, the same desire to control or curse the Israelites, the same refusal to see God’s hand in history. He notes repeated words like am (“nation”) used by both Pharaoh and Balak. Both enemies describe Israel as atzum mimeni—“too numerous and mighty for me”—and use similar expressions of dread: vayakatz… mipnei bnei Yisrael. Both rely on magical figures—chartumim in Egypt, a sorcerer in Moab—only to see them humiliated by God. And in the end, both declare chatati—“I have sinned.” The Midrash already sensed this link, suggesting that Bilaam was among Pharaoh’s original advisors.

Rav Nati shows how the Torah itself invites us to draw these lines, to see the repetition of archetypes. The enemy changes names and places—but the pattern holds. Fear turns into hatred. Power seeks control. The story returns.

But this is not merely an academic exercise. Helfgot frames Bamidbar as a kind of second Exodus—a national reawakening not for the generation that left Egypt, but for the one born in its aftermath. The first liberation, from slavery, was only the beginning; the second liberation—internal, spiritual, generational—must happen anew. Every generation must walk its own path, face its own trials, and rediscover its own relationship to Torah and destiny. Redemption is not a moment; it’s a process.

I agree—and humbly add: there is something eerie in seeing the same tropes, the same irrational fears, the same tactics, generation after generation. Perhaps the Torah is teaching us a life lesson here, albeit a painful one. Because there is something deeply unsettling in the repetition of these patterns, as if society has learned nothing. The cruelty of October 7th and the moral fog that followed it are just the latest incarnations of a much older story. From medieval blood libels to modern conspiracy theories, from European pogroms to campus protests, it is the same hatred in different tongues.

It can feel endless. Sometimes, the only response is to endure—to stand upright in the storm, to refuse collapse. But even in that bleakness, there is a strange kind of affirmation: the very persistence of the enemy speaks to something enduring in us.

What is it that draws so much fury? Why have these small people, scattered and scarred, survived so many attempts at erasure? There is something in the Jewish story—in Torah, in covenant, in faith-that endures. And its very durability seems to provoke those who cannot understand it.

It is not all bleak; there are allies, and there is light. There are those who bless rather than curse, who walk beside us, who see not only our pain but also our purpose. I really hope we are showing them love and supporting them in return.

And there also is light, especially from the remarkable heroics of women who escaped Nova and then valiantly went back to the army to continue to serve. Neomi was at the festival, enjoying some time off with friends, when the terrorists opened fire. She tells of the harrowing escape and the near-death moments. After picking up stragglers, she kept driving east, avoiding rockets, and made it home safe. Neomi was given the option to take a respite from her army service, but chose to continue serving. When asked to make sense of it all, she replies from tradition and in line with everything we learn from the parsha:

“On Passover, we say that in every generation, people attempt to exterminate us. We happened to be present at the largest terrorist attack in the history of the country, and, unfortunately, it will not be the last attack. But we are here to stay. This is the country in which I want to raise my children and grandchildren.

“History may repeat itself, but we are only evolving and getting stronger. The State of Israel is something unique, as all the contributions upon contributions from citizens to fellow citizens and soldiers can attest.”

The ultimate message of Bamidbar is not just survival—it is renewal. It is the possibility of redemption even in the aftermath of devastation. It is the insistence that history does not trap us, that patterns can be broken, that our story continues—not because we are always strong, or always understood—but because we keep listening, keep learning, and keep walking forward. Even when the world does not.