Balak: The Family

While we mostly tend to discuss Bil’am when discussing this week’s parashah, the name of the parashah is Balak, signifying that it is about our relationship to other nations. Pinchas Polonsky notes that while looking “from inside,” our time in the desert involves complaining, spies, Korach’s rebellion, etc.; from outside, it looks like triumphant development and progress. Both in an individual and in a national sense, throughout our history, we tend to judge ourselves much more harshly than those around us do, and this gap between the view from the inside and that from the outside seems nowhere greater than in modern Israel, of which we often talk almost as a basket case[1] while the outside world sees it as an unstoppably successful superpower—and, like Balak, is none too happy about it.

Bil’am seems to come from the same land that Lavan comes from—Nachor’s line of “moderate, tolerant believers in God” who do not smash idols like Avraham does—in that sense not so different from Christianity, which introduced Torah to the West while integrating their pagan rituals, from the Easter bunny to the Christmas tree—and Balak is perfectly willing to work with him. But our “intolerant, radical belief in God” is dangerous and alarming, and Balak calls on a “moderate monotheist” to curse us. Sometimes, it is these “moderates,” whether Jewish or not, whom we should fear the most when they oppose our “radical” beliefs.

One of our ideas that is rapidly starting to seem more radical is that of the sanctity of the family. To those of us who have not yet sensed the change in political winds, it seems innocent enough. Writes Rav S.R. Hirsch:

Like a brook, each household [of Israel] and each family branch passes down to the next generation the blessings of material prosperity and spiritual and moral welfare. At the same time, each is in itself a “garden of man,” blessed with material, intellectual, and moral abundance…. The secret of this lies in the moral aspect, in the sanctity of family life. The sexual life of Israel is sanctified and immunized against all traces of the vulgarity symbolized by Pe’or. The people of Israel respect the power of man’s seed as belonging to God and as sacred unto Him. Only in the Name of God and according to His teachings do they sow and plant human seed, so that the children should grow up by the wellsprings of His Teaching and laws, glorify His Name, and do His Will on earth.

This, writes Rav Hirsch, is what Bil’am is referring to when he says how good—not “how beautiful”!—are Yaakov’s tents.

To see where the winds are blowing, we need only look at what welfare programs have done to the institution of the black family in the United States. And while it will be difficult to explain when it becomes history, to today’s observers, it is fairly easy to sense that there is a connection between the culture of “hooking up” and the culture of irresponsibility that have been burgeoning in tandem in the United States over the last half-century. There are those among us who oppose one and not the other, but it seems to us that such a position is ultimately inconsistent and untenable.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton wrote a book about children, the title of which was It Takes a Village. This is also the title of the first chapter, and the second chapter is titled No Family Is an Island. This is an early manifestation of the idea that children don’t “really” “belong” to the family into which they were born; instead, it is the role of “society” to raise them. Today, this idea has been taken further. Among the many word salads for which Kamala Harris has been lampooned is “When we talk about the children of the community, they are the children of the community.” What she is attempting to articulate is the belief that children should be within the purview of the community rather than the family. On the other side of the political spectrum, Rick Santorum published the book It Takes a Family in 2005.

As we will BE”H learn in next week’s parashah, Bil’am, having sensed that this is our strength, recommends to Balak to “hit” us there for maximal damage, and it works. But before we go there, the final section of this parashah begins with the word וישב in reference to a place outside of the Land of Israel. Already, we become comfortable and complacent, wanting to settle and not move onward—and this is the opening of the story of our descent into sexual immorality. It is interesting to note that not only outside the Land of Israel, but even within it, those layers of our society that are comfortable remaining in galut—where one is likely to hear that the last thing we want is to go back to being a “sacrificial cult”—are those most prone to sexual immorality; though of course it would be wrong to say that this is universal, or that other layers of our society are perfectly immune to it.

As the daughters of Moav and Midian begin seducing some among us, much of the response appears to be hand-wringing and not knowing what to do. Many of the most important people in the community can be found crying by the entrance to the Mishkan. And this seems uncannily to describe where we are right now, when we look at much of the Jewish community’s response to the seduction of the ambient culture and the prevalence of intermarriage. When, in next week’s parashah, we learn that this was an intentional plan, orchestrated by Bil’am, that should not make us look away and say “oh, this is different,” but it should point us to the possibility that the progressive movement embracing hookup culture is perhaps not an accident, but a deliberate move, seeking to destroy the integrity of the family, the most serious bulwark in their path.

We then can look to the Torah to point a way out, but the path it points to is scary as well. The resolution comes through a violent act by Pinchas—one he could not have found by searching through halachah. What, then, must we do?

When we say מה טובו, Bil’am’s discussion of the power of the institution of the family, let us meditate on its integral importance, and on the terrifying lengths to which we may be expected to go when defending it.

[1] Almost, but not quite. After the first World War, quadriplegic veterans generally had to be carried around in baskets; it was expected that this would be the case for the remainder of their lives (affordable wheelchairs began appearing less than 20 years later, for those who made it that far), and the expression “basket case” connotes a sense of hopelessness that we do not tend to have when discussing the current State of Israel; however, almost all discussion tends to center on how frustrating it is and how much we hope it improves.