balak: no nations, no borders
hello friends,
It's been a week, and that's a fact. I don't know about y'all, but I'm ready (once again) for Shabbos.
We're in Balak this week, which is the one with the talking ass, though I'm not going to talk about the talking ass this year.
To very briefly set the stage for what I want to talk about: Bilam has been invited by Balak to curse the Israelites. Unfortunately for Balak, Bilam can only speak the words that haShem tells him to, and so keeps blessing the Israelites instead of cursing them. Shenanigans ensue.
The first time Balak asks Bilam to curse the Israelites, he brings Bilam to a place where Bilam can see קצה העם, the edge (קצה) of the people (העם).
After the first time Bilam ends up blessing the Israelites, Balak says to him:
please come with me to a different place. you will see [the Israelites] from there.
אפס קצהו you will see, you will not see all of them. curse them for me from there
I usually think of אפס in the context of the phrase אפסי ארץ: the ends of the earth. So the phrase in our verse is kind of doubled: אפס means something like edge/end as does קצה. In the JPS this is just translated as "portion" again, but I think that's missing something.
This doubling is an intensifier: the edge of the edge. Okay, so you only saw a portion of the people before. Now you'll only see a portion of a portion. Maybe if you see fewer and fewer of the people, it will become easier to curse them. I think it is important to emphasize that Balak is wrong. Despite seeing Israelites from the furthest reaches of the people (the edgiest Israelites, if you will), Bilam still can't curse them. Perhaps the people from the borders aren't any less worthy than the people in the center (perhaps the discarded stone will become the cornerstone after all.)
There are (at least) two Rabbinic justifications for this read:
Rashi interprets (elsewhere) the phrase העם מקצה, the people of קצה, to mean the people from one end of a city to the other. In otherwords, Rashi believes that the people of the קצה, far from being just the edges of the people, are in fact all of the people from edge to edge (Rashi loves an...invert.) Note that I am specifically not reading this phrase in context (Sodom, ironically) as is my right as an inheritor of the Rabbinic tradition.
A midrash teaches that the second place Balak brought Bilam was the place of Moshe's death. No one could be more central to the Israelites than Moshe, and Balak wanted to take advantage of this loss. But the people of the border are all the people. Moshe's death would be a great loss. But, despite his centrality, it would not signify such a diminishment of העם as to allow Bilam to curse them.
This move brings the borders of the people to the center of the people, but the people are still defined by their borders. This Torah portion ends with the Israelites disrupting their border by ~intermingling~ with Moabites. As a result, haShem orders Moshe to impale the ringleaders of this interminglement. One Rabbinic count puts the number of dead at 157,200 (I cannot even begin to express a strong enough trigger warning, so read that sugye at your own risk.) If that wasn't bad enough, the Torah itself describes a resulting plague that kills 24,000. All because some of the Israelites were transgressing the border between one tribe and another (thank g-d Bilam wasn't allowed to curse the people! imagine!)
Rabbi Yochanan says that every place where the Torah says "וישב/and he dwelled" there is no meaning other than צער: narrowness and pain. Is this really necessary? Must all dwelling require restriction within hard borders, with deadly consequences if they are violated?
Rashi's inversion is to treat the border as the entirety of the people, since in some sense the border describes the people. But we don't have to stop there. We live on a sphere and every border on a sphere describes two things: the inside and the outside. But which is inside and which is outside is just a matter of perspective. So if Rashi is right, and the border is everything it contains, then the border doesn't exist because it contains the entire world.
The Psalmist writes:
...אלהי חסדי יקדמני אלהים יראני בשררי.
The god of my loving-kindness will go before me. Elokim will let me see in those who watch me...
And Rashi finishes the phrase for us:
מה שאני תאב לראות...
...that which i long to see
We are all watching each other across borders. This watching can imply enmity (the word שררי is usually translated that way) but it doesn't have to.
We are all part of העם מקצה. What will our gods of loving-kindness let us see in each other?
There's more here than I've said, but it is very late (9:45pm!)
good shabbos,
ada