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 Times of Israel (Blogs)