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Writer's pictureRabbi Bonnie Koppell

Balak: Antisemitism 2600 Years Later


This week’s Torah portion. Balak, contains the well-known story of the talking donkey who tries to prevent the prophet Balaam from cursing the Israelite people.  Balak, the king of Moab, hires him to curse the Israelites during the journey through the wilderness.  Why, you might ask?  Balak expresses fear that there are so many of the people who fled Egyptian slavery, that they are so numerous that they “hide the earth from view.”  (Numbers 22:5)  Presumably he is concerned that the Israelites will overwhelm him in battle.  This was not the first incidence of antisemitism in the Torah.  Pharoah also articulated that the Israelites would side with the enemies of Egypt in battle and therefore needed to be destroyed.  (Exodus 1:9)


I don’t know what percentage of the population the Israelites were in the ancient world.  I DO know that today there are approximately 15 million of us in the world and that constitutes less than half of one percent of the world population.  So the virulent Jew-hatred we are witnessing and experiencing can’t be explained by our numbers.  So what is it then?

Jews have struggled with this question for thousands of years.  I don’t think we will ever have a satisfactory understanding.  Are we to blame for ethical monotheism or hated for the false charge of deicide?  We were blamed for the plague and for our economic success.  We Jews have been convenient political scapegoats.


My sweet husband has lately been obsessed, in general, with watching Israeli news on YouTube, and, in particular, with Piers’ Morgan’s interview with Roger Waters.  In it Waters expresses many antisemitic viewpoints.  Among other outrageous comments, he insists that the sexual violence of October 7th is a fabrication.  Ron can’t let go of the claim that young Israelis are brainwashed into thinking that they are better than anyone else.  Ron naively, I love you honey but it’s naïve, he naively thinks that if we could just convince people that this claim is false, then they would stop hating us.


The notion of the Jews as the chosen people and therefore, perhaps, better than anyone else, can be traced to the Biblical narrative, where we read the words, “For you are a holy people to Adonai your God.  Adonai has chosen you to be to God a treasured people from all of the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”  (Deuteronomy 14:2)


Despite this unique status and relationship to God, however, the Torah itself cites many non-Jews as also being close to God- Noah, Jethro, and Bilaam himself, and the Talmud assures us that “the righteous of all faiths have a share in the world to come.”  (BT Sanhedrin 105a)


The Midrash suggests that God actually offered the Torah to every other nation on earth before settling on the Israelites, and that we only accepted it when Mount Sinai was raised above our heads with the threat to destroy us in place.  (BT Shabbat 88a).  As Tevye so eloquently put it in Fiddler on the Roof, “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?”


Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, eliminated references to “asher bachar banu m’kol ha-amim- who has chosen us from among all peoples” from the liturgy, substituting, instead, the sense that we are called near to serve God, through word and deed.  He was concerned about the suffering this notion has historically brought down on the Jewish people and decided that it would be better to focus on our own sense of responsibility rather than our superiority.

David Wolpe put it this way, “To be chosen is not to be better than others.  To be chosen is to have a mission to improve the world and to feel that when we slight that task or abandon it, we are reneging on our deep purpose.”  It is hard to imagine anyone objecting to that aspirational definition.


So what drives antisemitism today?  A U.S. House committee recently released a series of texts from a group of deans at Columbia University who reverted to the focus on economic success.  Vice Dean and Chief Administrative Officer Susan Chang-Kim texted, “I’m going to throw up,” to which Cristen Kromm, Dean of Undergraduate Student Life, replied, “Amazing what $$$$ can do.”  Three of four deans were removed, but not fired.  Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Fox commented that “Jewish students deserve better than to have harassment and threats against them dismissed as ‘privilege,’ and Jewish faculty members deserve better than to be mocked by their colleagues.”


Anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias is becoming normative at all levels of education.  The stereotypes about Jews would never be tolerated were they applied to any other minority group.  We must fight all forms of hate and discrimination, and the demonization of one group over another for political reasons.  Tessa Veksler, who served as the student body president at UCSB shared in an interview, “It’s hard for me to remember before Oct. 7, but life was very different, and I wasn’t defined by one piece of my identity.  I don’t understand why I- just because I’m Jewish- should have to live a different life or have a different sense of self.  Everyone else in the world gets to be who they want to be, and I don’t understand why I should have to change that to make other people comfortable, especially to make antisemites comfortable.”


Jew hatred is increasing around the world exponentially.  A rabbi in Paris bemoaned the fact that “it seems France has no future for the Jews,” Australian war memorials were vandalized, and in the Netherlands only students and staff with palms painted pro-Palestinian can enter parts of Erasmus University.  Here is the US, 176 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Ohio were recently vandalized.


We cannot remain silent.  We need to remain vigilant and call out antisemitism, call out Jew hatred, wherever it rears its ugly head.  WE need to defend Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland, and Israel’s right to defend itself from attack, as every other country protects its population.  Is Israel perfect?  No.


Yet, it is a democratic haven and a place of refuge for the international Jewish community.  I don’t want to live in a world without the state of Israel.  I pray that you do not either.


The kingdom of Moab disappeared 2600 years ago.  We survived Balak’s attempt to curse us and we will survive this moment too. 


Am Yisrael chai- the people of Israel live!

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