Perspective
Sermon Shabbat Balak 5785
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
We have just returned from a brief vacation in Southern California, visiting family and good friends who reside in the Golden State. It was a great trip, if a short one with a lot of driving, and it was wonderful to share time with people we don’t get to see often enough, and whom our daughter Ayelet loved connecting with and charming. It is clear just who the main attraction in the Cohon family is these days, at least when my dad isn’t traveling with us…
Now, I have been following the press reports about how things are going in California, how everything is out of control, everyone is leaving the state, it’s all going to pot. I must say, we saw exactly no evidence of that during our five or six days visiting San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, and Ventura County. The weather, of course, was perfect, which no one even notices in California, but which came as a relief to those of us ensconced in the Sonoran Desert over the summer. The traffic, which we expected to be terrible, was quite mild, in part we were told because we came over the 4th of July weekend, which is when lots of people go on vacation to avoid the traffic—which means there really wasn’t much. We saw no evidence of civil unrest, certainly, and sensed no great tension over civil affairs among any of the folks we visited.
While we stayed in suburban locations, we spent time in the center of both San Diego and LA, did tourist things in the middle of both towns, attended a Dodgers’ game near Downtown LA and grabbed a bite on a nearby street, went to Sea World and Balboa Park and generally found things to be pretty darned normal, even a little more laid back than on previous visits. There are plenty of homeless people in California, but there are plenty of homeless people right here in Tucson, and in San Diego and LA they aren’t dealing with 106 degree temperatures every day.
In fact, the biggest change I noticed is that the population signs for LA city, which always read three million residents, now read four million residents, and the news says the State of California’s population will soon reach 40 million overall. 40 million people.
Meanwhile, online it’s easy to find media reports howling about the disaster the state has become and insisted everyone is leaving. You can’t prove it by me, or us.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it? Travel around California for about a week, spend time in various places and with a variety of people, enjoy it all and see no signs of trouble. Go online and someone is convinced it’s a devilish hell-hole and no one gets out of it alive.
Perspective matters.
Then there’s this brief true story about perspective, from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“I had gone to catch a train, in Cambridge, UK. I was a bit early for the train. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
“Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing we British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?
“In the end I thought, ‘Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it,’ and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, “That settled him.” But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.
“We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.
“A moment or two later the train was coming in, I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper… and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.
“The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.”
Perspective, you see? So, I guess, next time you are convinced that you know everything and that you are right, make sure you check under the newspaper first. You might just be missing something important.
Which brings me to this week’s Torah portion of Balak.
The Israelites are closing in on the Promised Land, finally after 40 years of wandering getting the opportunity for a permanent home; may it happen for us at Beit Simcha after nearly 7 years of wandering in the desert! Anyway, up until now, we have had the Israelite—that is, the Jewish—perspective on everything. No one seems to be happy. The people constantly complain. Moses, the great leader, is stressed and frustrated. An often angry God continually comes close to wiping out the entire Israelite population and starting over. It’s a bleak situation indeed.
But then we get this week’s portion. For the first time in the middle three books of the Torah we get a profound change of view. Instead of seeing things as the Israelites do, or as Moses does, or as God does, we go abroad, scene-shift to the viewpoint of the enemies Israel is encountering. It is a profound shift.
Balak is the King of Moab, a small Semite nation in today’s Jordan, similarly-sized to the Israelites, but located just outside the Promised Land of Canaan. King Balak has a very different view of the Israelites from how they see themselves: he sees a huge, overwhelmingly powerful enemy on the very borders of his land and is terrified at the prospect of facing them in battle. In his perspective, they—we—are not a fractious group of former slaves who can’t get along with their own leader, or each other, but a dynamic force that will wipe him from the field and conquer everything in its path, licking up his forces like an ox licks up grass.
To prevent this, feeling conventional military options aren’t adequate, he
resorts to sorcery, calling on Balaam, the greatest wizard of the day, the Sauron or Gandalf of curses, to stop the Israelites through magic. Balaam is a pagan prophet, but apparently also a believer in YHVH, the God of the Hebrews. He refuses to go and curse the Israelites without God’s permission. Having secured that, and with the assistance of his talking donkey—who has her own perspective on all of this—Balaam arrives at Balak’s camp.
The king is eager to have Balaam rush out and curse the Israelites, and wants to pay him richly for doing so. And so he brings the prophet Balaam to a high viewpoint from which he can see the whole people of Israel spread out below him. From this perspective Balaam sees the size and power of the Israelite people and offers not a curse but a blessing.
King Balak is, of course, torqued. He angrily responds to his hired sorcerer, upset at the way this is going. But Balak knows about perspective, too. He has Balaam try again to curse the people of Israel, this time from a different, elevated spot. Again, he is bitterly disappointed with the result.
King Balak tries to change eye level yet again, moving Balaam a final time. And again, from this new perspective the pagan prophet sings out a long poem celebrating the greatness of the Israelites, Ma Tovu Ohalecha Ya’akov he begins, which we will sing tomorrow morning at the start of services.
That’s the end of this charade for King Balak, and he sends Wizard Balaam back home without his fee, and with chastening words that have no apparent impact. The story then turns back to the Israelites where, shocker, trouble and rebellion are brewing once again.
We are left with a great tutorial in perspective. While Moses has been pedaling full speed just to keep this group traveling in the same general direction, Balaam has been singing Israel’s praises in operatic hyperbole. In spite of the political and social reality on the inside, to an outsider these Jews look spectacular. There is a lesson here, and it is one that we Jews need to be reminded of today: our self-perception is often not in harmony with the way others see us. Although we are used to viewing ourselves as the disputatious, argumentative, stiff-necked people we know that we truly are on the inside, the outside world sees us quite differently.
Jews are viewed by others today as successful, highly educated, talented, and part of an influential peoplehood. The big complaint is that nowadays the “Jewish Lobby” has too much influence. We have made it in every area of economic, artistic and social endeavor. It’s not that we are all rich; we aren’t. It’s that we have risen from the abject poverty and persecution of our early days as immigrants to become an extraordinary success story, here in America and around the world. Only our own vision of ourselves is blinded by some odd sort of lingering spell; we can’t really see ourselves for what we truly are.
Even the Anti-Semites, and they have been coming out of the sewers in far greater profusion recently than in quite a long time, are influenced by some weird sorcery, a kind of perverse alchemy. They genuinely believe we Jews are so powerful that we control the economy and the press and social media and the government and the banks and Hollywood—well, OK, we do control Hollywood; still, their websites and conspiracy theories and protest rallies are an updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And yet we ourselves spend so much time on infighting, and agonizing over how we are supposedly disappearing, failing. To the outsiders we look great. To ourselves? We still look like, well, shlemiels.
The truth is that we Jews, and our Jewish communities, have incredible strengths and remarkable resources. We are truly blessed—in Balaam’s words, how good are our homes, how beautiful our dwellings. But we often have trouble seeing that, like the prophet whose donkey has better vision than he does.
All that’s really required of American Jews today is a change of perspective, a commitment to our religion and our practice, and some hope and optimism—or perhaps it’s just realism. If we can have the courage of our accomplishments, our synagogue and our Jewish community will expand and grow and flourish, as Balaam predicted all those centuries ago. We don’t need to agonize about our place in American society as loyal citizens. We just need to be proud of our Jewish identities, and active as religious, committed, liberal Jews.
On this Shabbat of Balaam’s praise of Israel may we come see all we have, all we already are, and all that our amazing tradition offers us. And may we then come to embrace our own Judaism and our community, and live fully, proudly, and cooperatively, as Jews. Now that’s a perspective worth embracing.