The View from Balak’s Hill

When the curse comes from outside, inside, and occasionally from Mar-a-Lago

There are weeks when the parashah does not so much arrive as barge through the front door, throw the headlines onto the table and say, “Nu? Are we ready to discuss this, or shall we continue pretending human beings learn things?”

This is one of those weeks.

Parashat Balak lands at a moment when Israel is doing what Israel does with terrifying regularity: surviving. Not elegantly. Not calmly. Not in a linen dress with a sprig of lavender and a chilled glass of something botanical. More like survival with eye bags, missile alerts, arguments, grief, WhatsApp rumours, geopolitical whiplash, and a national nervous system held together by caffeine, Tehillim and sarcasm.

Into this comes Balak.

Balak, king of Moab, looks out at the Israelites and panics. They have not attacked him. They have not invaded his kingdom. They are simply there, existing in irritatingly large numbers, moving through the wilderness with that ancient Jewish talent for not disappearing on schedule.

This, apparently, is unbearable.

The Jewish people alive? Again? Still? After Egypt, slavery, Amalek, hunger, thirst, and endless complaints about the catering? How rude. How provocative. How very Zionist of them, several thousand years early.

So Balak does what frightened leaders often do when reality displeases them. He hires someone else to curse it.

Enter Balaam, prophet for hire, spiritual freelancer, moral contortionist, and possibly the first recorded example of a man who believed his gift made him exempt from decency. Balak wants Balaam to curse Israel because he understands something dark and horribly modern. Before you destroy a people physically, you try to destroy them narratively. You make them ugly. Dangerous. Cursed. You make their survival look like aggression. You make their presence feel like a crime.

Before there were hashtags, there was Balak.

Before there were campus encampments, international panels, newspaper op-eds by people who discovered the Middle East last week, and solemn men explaining Israeli security from cities where the greatest daily threat is a delayed oat milk delivery, Balak was standing on a hill, looking at the Jewish people and deciding they needed to be cursed.

But Balaam opens his mouth, fully intending to do the job for which he has presumably been handsomely compensated, because even ancient villains had invoices, and the curse will not come. The words twist. The weapon misfires. Instead of cursing Israel, he blesses them.

“How goodly are your tents, Jacob, your dwellings, Israel.”

The enemy looks at us and wants to see a monstrosity. G-D forces him to see a nation.

That is the miracle of Balak. Not that Israel has no enemies. Please. We have always had enemies. One could almost admire the consistency if it were not so murderous and exhausting. The miracle is that the curse does not get the final word.

But here is where Balak becomes less comforting and more uncomfortable.

In the parashah, the curse is supposed to come from outside the camp. Today, too often, the curse comes from within it.

There is a particular kind of Jewish betrayal that hurts more than ordinary hatred because it comes dressed in familiar clothing. It knows the songs. The trauma. The Holocaust references. The Pesach table arguments. The neurotic over-explaining. The inherited fear. It knows us.

And then it takes all that intimacy and hands it to people who despise us.

Let us be clear, because sloppy thinking is how civilisation ended up with comment sections. Not every Jew who criticises Israel is self-hating. Not every left-wing Jew is a traitor. Not every diaspora Jew who is confused, frightened, ashamed, overwhelmed or morally distressed is an enemy. Jews have argued since Sinai. If WhatsApp had existed in the wilderness, we would still be there now, trapped in a family group called “Children of Israel Updates,” with Miriam sending voice notes and someone’s uncle forwarding conspiracy theories about manna.

Criticism is not betrayal. Anger at the government is not betrayal. Moral discomfort is not betrayal. Demanding better from Israel is not betrayal. A people that cannot examine itself is not strong. It is brittle. And heaven knows Israel gives us enough to examine. We are not short on material. We are a nation, not a scented candle.

But there is a line.

The line is crossed when Jewish criticism stops sounding like love and starts sounding like an audition. When Jews distance themselves from Israel in the desperate hope that the world will stamp them as “one of the good ones.” When they use the word “Zionist” with the same sneer as people who clearly mean “Jew.” When they understand every person’s trauma except their own. When they can locate nuance in every terrorist manifesto but not in one Israeli mother’s fear.

That is not courage.

That is not sophistication.

That is Balaam with a tote bag.

And then, because history enjoys piling on until the chair collapses, we have the Trump problem.

For years, many Jews and many Israelis treated Donald Trump as a kind of orange Cyrus with a spray tan and a social media addiction. And yes, inconvenient facts are still facts, even when they arrive wearing ridiculous hair. Trump did things that mattered. Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem mattered. Recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights mattered. The Abraham Accords mattered.

Gratitude is not stupidity.

But gratitude is also not worship.

Political appreciation is not a covenant. No foreign leader is our redeemer. No Jewish future can be built on the mood swings of one American president, however loudly he declares his affection for Israel between complaints, threats, slogans and whatever fresh chaos the day has brought.

As Trump speaks about deals, understandings, frameworks and possible arrangements with Iran, Israelis are entitled to feel that familiar chill down the spine. We have seen this film before. It has terrible lighting and too many sequels.

There are always documents. Experts. Diplomats explaining that this time the inspection mechanism will be robust, the enforcement serious, the guarantees meaningful, and the regime that has lied for decades will now presumably become a model of transparency because someone found a pen.

Forgive us if we do not faint with relief.

Israel does not live inside a theory. Israel lives within missile range. The world may have the luxury of believing in frameworks. We have the obligation to bury our dead when frameworks fail.

For people outside Israel, Israel is often an issue. A conflict. A headline. A debate. A moral exercise. Something to discuss between lunch and a podcast.

For us, Israel is home.

Not metaphorically. Home. The place where we buy milk, dodge bureaucracy, complain about Arnona, check the news too often, argue about everything, and still somehow say “Shabbat shalom” to strangers with a lump in the throat because we know exactly what it means to still be here.

That is why Am Yisrael Chai cannot be allowed to become merely a slogan.

It is not a bumper sticker. It is not decorative Jewish wallpaper.

Am Yisrael Chai is a responsibility.

It means we live. It means we defend the living. It means we stop apologising for not dying politely. It means diaspora Jews do not get to purchase social acceptance by feeding Israel to people who will still hate them once they have finished clapping. It means Israelis do not get to confuse allies with saviours.

The distinction now is not between left and right, religious and secular, Israel and diaspora, Trump supporters and Trump critics, although heaven help the dinner table where that conversation begins.

The distinction is between argument and abandonment. Between conscience and performance. Between criticism and collaboration. Between love that demands better, and shame that wants to be excused from belonging.

Balak feared Israel because Israel was alive. That is the heart of the story. He was reacting to Jewish continuity. Jewish presence. Jewish stubbornness. The unbearable fact that the children of Israel were still moving.

And this is still what enrages our enemies.

Not this government or that government. Not this prime minister or that minister. Those are the excuses of the week. Beneath them lies the older fury: why are you still here?

Every generation produces a Balak. Every generation finds someone willing to curse us. Every generation discovers, with sickening predictability, Jews eager to help translate the curse into respectable language.

And yet, somehow, here we are.

Still lighting candles. Still burying our dead and naming our babies. Still sending sons and daughters to the army with trembling hands. Still saying Tehillim. Still fighting in supermarkets over who was next in line. Still making jokes in bomb shelters because if Jews ever stop making jokes under pressure, check the heavens immediately because something has gone very wrong.

Still here.

Not perfect. Not peaceful. Not universally admired. Not even close.

But alive.

Balak wanted Balaam to curse us from the mountain. Today, the mountain has moved. It is a television studio. A campus lawn. A social media feed. A foreign ministry podium. Sometimes, heartbreakingly, it is a Jewish mouth forming words our enemies would have written for us anyway.

But Parashat Balak reminds us that the curse is not sovereign.

The enemy does not get to define us. Neither does the frightened Jew who has mistaken self-erasure for enlightenment. Neither does Trump. Neither does Iran. Neither does the international community, that grand moral orchestra which somehow always finds its voice when Jews defend themselves and develops sudden laryngitis when Jews are murdered.

We are not blessed because Balaam said so.

Balaam said so because we are blessed.

How goodly are your tents, Jacob.

Not flawless.

Not safe.

Not fashionable.

Still standing.

Am Yisrael Chai.