“To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” Thoughts on Parashat “Balak” - Rabbi Shira Levine (5783 - July 2023)

Parashat Balak is one of my favorites. It’s a story, one that offers an opportunity to immerse in it, to escape the harsh summer reality into an alternative reality, one with a speaking donkey, a king, and a magician. In the midst of the drama there are power dynamics: violence and unnecessary pain. Just as the donkey asks Balaam:

Three times tried Balaam to curse Israel, and three times he did not succeed.

Isn't it enough?

Until when we will try to curse our enemies, instead of talking with them?

Until when each side will continue to stand on their own hilltop and look from a distance towards the other’s camp, without sitting, trying to talk, get to know eachother, live?

The news are filled with riots, combustion and fire.

The West Bank is on fire: the terrible murder of four Jewish boys near the settlement of Eli, pogroms inside Palestinian villages that blaspheme God's name. A delegation of Rabbis visited this past Tuesday the village of Turmus - Aya, in order to witness the crimes. The gap between the text of prophet Micah (that we will read this Shabbat), and reality is gradually closing:

It seems that there are citizens in the State of Israel that think that it’s possible to live the text just the way it appears: wildly, without judgment, without objection.

Micah describes the terrible possibility to continue the circle of pain and violence. While the people of Israel were dispersed around the world and did not have any substantial political power, the prophet posits the possibility of trampling and preying, inhuman behavior as a choiceable option, to live life of “predatory lion and there is no rescuer”.

Toward the end of the Haftarah, the prophet guides us to choose a different path, which is the path of our organization: to act justly, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.

Many commentaries were written about the order and the hierarchy of these three virtues: acts of justice, loving kindness and humbleness. I feel we are so far away from them that now is the time to increase their overall quality. To continue and work hard in order to live in a country in which there is life of justice for all, in which all its residents have equal rights, a country that we are proud of, in which the judicial system is not just a formalistic tool but has an essence of equality and justice.

I wish the judicial system wasn't needed so much. Let it simply be and the law will be a shield and not a sword. We can live a life of love, kindness and law. May we be able to live a life of austerity with our God. A life not of consuming fire but of modest fire, of benevolent warmth, of people who do good for one another, who have connections one to another, that are not estranged to one another, that they do not stand idly by.

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