Previous Commentaries

By Rabbi Joshua Kullock,
Comunidad Hebrea de Guadalajara, Mexico

Translated by Inés Baum - Proofreading by Ellen Zindler

Some biblical characters are simply memorable. Even when the Torah does not devote more than a few chapters to their stories, these men and women manage to transcend the text where they originated, taking root in our collective memory. Noah, for instance, only appears in a couple of chapters at the beginning of Genesis, but what child has not eagerly heard the stories of the flood, the ark, and the dove with the olive branch on its beak?

Bilam, the man hired by King Balak, is one of these memorable characters (although he surely is less known than Noah). He is memorable because, on the one hand, he stands as first testimony of the universality of prophecy, not just circumscribed to the Jewish sphere, and on the other, because Bilam is the one who, even while boasting about how he talks all the time with God, is unable to communicate with his own donkey, and achieves little success in his dialogue with Balak as well.

Moreover, the text is constructed in such a way that we can find a sort of deep irony concerning what being a prophet means, and how prophecy was understood both in biblical times and from the later rabbinical perspective. That is, what kind of prophet – paraphrasing the Midrash Tanhuma (Parashat Balak 1) – devotes himself to trying to curse an entire nation, instead of inviting people to repent and make Teshuvah? What kind of social responsibility does a prophet have, if he receives a salary and is hired with a specific end in mind, which is everything but noble?

Bilam, therefore, offers us a suitable space to comment on that which makes up the institution of prophecy according to the Tradition of Israel, and in this case, I would like to do it from Maimonides perspective. To Maimonides, prophecy is perhaps the most outstanding institution in the structure of Judaism. According to what he teaches us in the Guide for the Perplexed (basically in its Second Part), a prophet is one who manages to rise on the staircase of personal perfection, in both the physical sense as well as the moral and intellectual. It is from a path of constant improvement built step by step, through the acquisition of customs that become virtues, that each human being can manage to transcend and be worthy of the grace to prophesize. And I say “grace” because Maimonides held that prophecy is a space of encounter between the man who rises from his conscientious work of getting to be a better person in all fields and on all levels, and God, who descends and emanates part of His self in those who have proved themselves worthy of such blessing. Thus, Maimonides democratizes the prophecy institution, making it accessible to all men of good will, prepared to give their best in order to fulfill themselves.

In this context, it is worth to emphasize that, to Maimonides, the prototype of an ideal man is not the one who, having improved himself, shuts himself in his ivory tower, but precisely the one who, like Moses, knows how to come back from the highest heights in order to help others to continue rising. An indivisible part of being a prophet is their involvement and concern for the fate of the people. Because, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said many years after Rambam did, a prophet is the one who understands that, even if few of us are guilty for the imbalances that happen in our world, we are all responsible for their continuance and persistence.

Unlike Bilam, who never truly understood the intrinsic responsibilities of being a prophet, we are currently called to reflect upon everything we can do so as to approach in some way that stage of moral and intellectual improvement. For, and Maimonides is certainly correct here, when people reach a certain level of profound comprehension of reality, they get to understand that many conflicts and disputes are the result of ignorance, conformity, or pettiness, and that the only way to solve them is by elucidating, understanding, and distinguishing between the things worth living for, and those which just generate unnecessary discord and resentment. Such an illuminated existence was what Maimonides defined as the messianic ages.

May God enable each one of us to offer our best in order to build, in our current days, times of redemption, and may Moses’ words then be fulfilled, who said, in his own time, Mi Iten Kol Am Adonai Nevi’im… “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put His spirit upon them!” (Bamidvar 11:29).

This Parashah commentary was done by the Union of Jewish Congregations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and may be reproduced quoting its source.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to the Torah commentary, send an e-mail to: UJCL_parasha@yahoo.com .
If you wish to dedicate the commentary to the memory of a loved one, or in honor of some family event, contact us at: UJCL_parasha@yahoo.com

Forwarded by Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik, from Kol Shearith Israel Congregation, Panama.
Translated by Inés Baum and proofread by Ellen Zindler, from B’nei Israel Congregation, Costa Rica.

Copyright © 2001, 2002 UJCL