The prophecy of Balaam “A people that dwells alone” or the prophecy of Isaiah, “A light to the nations”: Thoughts in this Precarious Moment

(for Simcha, because he asked)

There has been much writing these past days about Israel’s choice to strike Iran, and Iran’s response. What I have read thus far is pretty predictable, some opinions more enlightening than others. Israel’s defenders claim the attack was “preemptive” and legitimate, even necessary, Israel’s detractors view it as an act of aggression. And there are some middle positions that explore the war’s global implications.

Here I choose to take the advice of R. Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar. During the Six-Day War in 1967 Teitelbaum refused to make any public statements critical of Israel. Instead, he sent money to his communities there, and organized communities to gather in synagogues and recite psalms. His message was clear, “when Jewish lives are in danger, one prays and recites palms on their behalf.”

And so, I will not weigh in on whether the choice to attack Iran was right, wrong, or somewhere in-between. I simply do not know and can only hope the loss of life and injury is kept to a minimum.

I understand that war compels solidarity, unity, and collective angst. I share all of that. And yet, as a scholar of Judaism, and as a Jew, my thoughts also take me elsewhere.

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There is a larger issue I would like to address, one that this occasion may, perhaps should, evoke for us, an issue that precedes this moment, and will extend far beyond it.

In the history of the Jews, there have been three basic competing visions of self-fashioning that are drawn from the tradition. The first comes from the mouth of Balaam, a prophet hired by Balak the King of Moab to curse the Israelites as they passed through his territory. Famously, in the Book of Numbers, instead of cursing the Israelites as Balak directed him, Balaam praises them, part of which states “A people who lives alone, not reckoning themselves one of the nations” (Numbers 23:9).

Was this a blessing, a curse, an aspiration or a description? The tradition is not quite sure. After the state of Israel was founded, Zionists took this verse very seriously. Yaakov Herzog, son of a Chief Rabbi of Israel and brother of Hayim who became Israel’s President, published a book with the title, A People that Dwells Alone (1975) and Naphtali Lau-Lavie prominent Israeli journalist and diplomat, published a book entitled Balaam’s Prophecy (1998). I am sure there are many others.

Balaam’s declaration applied both to Jews in the Diaspora, and the nascent state of Israel. Naftali Zvi Berlin, one-time rosh yeshiva of the famous Volozhin yeshiva in Lithuania wrote on this verse in his commentary to the Pentateuch Ha-Amek Davar to Numbers 23:9 “If it is a people content to be alone, faithful to its distinctive identity, then it will be able to dwell in peace. But if Jews seek to be like the nations, the nations will not consider them worthy of respect.” Berlin was not speaking about a Jewish state, but rather the state of the Jews in the Diaspora. In Berlin’s Shearei Yisrael, one of the first books in Hebrew about antisemitism published in the 1870s, Berlin argued that animus against the Jews was precipitated by Jews not acting as Jews, that is, by assimilating. When they live separate from the nations and adherer to the tradition, he claimed, they were able to maintain a basic status quo of co-existence. The conventional understanding of this is that assimilation is discarding one’s Jewish distinctiveness to “melt” into the nations. But I will suggest below there is another kind of assimilation worth considering, the assimilation of nationalism. Berlin was not suggesting that traditional Jews were not subject to antisemitism. Rather, he was making a quasi-metaphysical point to suggest that Jews who abandoned tradition set in motion a gentile animus against them that also affected traditional Jews.

The second aspirational vision to define the Jews comes from the prophecy of Isaiah, to be “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6), that is, as I explain it here, to be an exemplar, and not an exception. Whether Isaiah’s vision was a description of a messianic time or a posture that could cultivate the messianic time, is debated. But it is a vision of exemplarity nonetheless.

There is a third rendering of Jewishness that comes into play here comes from 1 Samuel 8:19, “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.” Martin Buber in his book The Kingdom of God, called this the beginning of Jewish secularism. The mandate of Jewish difference and the seemingly perennial inclination of Jews to be “like all the nations” begins in 1 Samuel and filters through the entirety of Jewish history. (For more on this see Moshe Halbertal and Steven Holmes, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel, 2019).

In any event, three visions: to be alone, to be an exemplar, or to be like everyone else. This is one way to historically frame the parameters of Jewish self-fashioning.

One can argue that throughout Jewish history these three visions return in various forms to describe how Jews see themselves, how they want to see themselves, and how they want others to see them. Jonathan Sacks argued in an essay, “A People that Dwells Alone” (A People that Dwells Alone | Balak | Covenant & Conversation | The Rabbi Sacks Legacy) that the state of Israel enables Jews to, in some sense, embody all three of these models. I disagree. I think, in fact, that the establishment of a state puts these three models of collective identity in even deeper tension, even irreconcilability, and perhaps in this precarious moment this can be articulated anew.

Between exemplarity and exceptionality

Isaiah’s prophecy is a prophecy of exemplarity. The distinctiveness of the Jews, he argued, is that they carry a wisdom tradition that can be a gift to the world by suggesting a template of human affairs that can maximize compassion, to “love the neighbor” as well as to “love the stranger.” This vision, which also was reflected in Jesus’ teachings as well as in the Quran, has arguably served as the template of modern ethical teaching. The exceptionality of the exemplarity is embedded in the universalism that emerges from Israel’s particular destiny. For some it too the form of “ethical monotheism,” for others an “exemplary state.” But there is another exceptionality – the exceptionality of Balaam’s vision, “to dwell alone,” either because no one wants to dwell with you, or because you do not want to dwell with others. Ot both. This version exceptionality is buttressed by Jewish victimhood, most prominently in the Shoah.

The choice of the Jews to engage in the politics of statecraft, as some say, to “re-enter history” was monumental and shifted the entire trajectory of Jewish destiny. Setting aside the practical component of physical safety and refuge, that decision would have significant consequences in terms of the three visions of Jewishness described above, exemplarity, and assimilation.

Aaron Shmuel Tamares, in his 1921 book Knesset Yisrael argues that Zionism as a form of nationalism is an instantiation of “assimilation” no less than, the non-affiliated post-emancipatory secular Jew. It is different only in that the Jews want to assimilate nationalism as a collective and not assimilate as individuals. But in both cases, Tamares argues, it is the adaptation of a foreign idea that becomes the central tenet of Jewishness, in some cases, at the expense of Judaism. I do not say this critically as much as descriptively.

But in that assimilatory collective state, the three visions remain: exemplarity, exclusivity/exceptionality, or sameness/assimilation.

The vision of Israel was hotly debated in those early years on these three visions. There were those such as Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, Rav Binyamin, Judah Magnes and others that focused on exemplarity, that is, Zionism as an opportunity to instantiate Isaiah’s vision. They fought to make Israel an exemplary nation, against the tide of the nationalist thrust, which is why they favored a binational state. The Jewish-Arab state was not a compromise for them; it was an attempt to embody a different kind of nationalism. In their estimation, if the nationalism of Zionism could not be exemplary, it is abandoned Isaiah, it would not be “Jewish,” which is why so many in that circle had such little patience for Herzl.

But there were others, Zev Jabotinsky (and disciples, including Ben Zion Netanyahu), Ben Gurion et al who favored the Balaam vision of “a national that dwells alone,” in Ben Gurion’s case, and also in Jabotinsky’s view, because he did not believe, as Buber and others did, that the Arab world would accept Israel on any circumstances, so it was futile to even try to create regional allies. Ben Gurion achieved short-term success. He founded the state, aligning himself with the US who helped solidify UN support.

Between the secular and early religious Zionist there was a debate about how far the nationalist assimilation should go. Some radical secular Zionists such as Brenner and Berdichevsky believed it should go all the way to the point of replacing Judaism altogether. Others like Ahad Ha-Am believed the assimilation to nationalism could produce a new form of modern Judaism. And then Rav Kook believed that religion would eventually transform the secular vision of assimilation into a new sacred form of ethical difference.

These were all lofty visions, and each tried to incorporate the three aspirations mentioned above, albeit in a different and in a very hierarchical, order. In all these alternatives these three visions always existed in tension, almost never in a state of complementarity.

I think many of the debates between the Jewish progressive left, liberal Zionist center, and religious right also revolve around which of these three visions is possible today, which should be pursued, and which should be abandoned.

As I see it, the path Israel has chosen at this moment, and here I include the Gaza war and now the Iran war, is the path of Balaam combined with the path expressed in the Book of Samuel, ironically to dwell alone and to be like all the others. We have chosen to express our “normality” in an exceptionalist, and not an exemplary, fashion. There may be many reasons this this, Realpolitik, proximate history, trauma, etc. I do not discount any of these. But one of the great things about Jewish modernity is agency. We get to choose. And as I see it, today we have chosen the Balaam vision because in large part we have come to believe, true or not I do not know, in a kind of “eternal antisemitism” which means that we will be hated whatever we do and if that is the case, we needn’t consider the vision of exemplarity at the cost of being “like all the nations.” And our history of victimhood offers us a case of exceptionality that, coupled with Balaam’s vision, offers us the license to make certain choices that lock us into being “like all the nations,” for good and for ill. But such a choice, like evert choice, comes at a price and I simply reject the common adage “we had no choice.” We always have a choice. That’s what being a “free people” means.

We have staked our roots, and even our destiny, in nationalism without considering Rogers Brubaker’s thesis in his 1998 essay “Myth and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” what he called “the myth of resolvability,” that “nationalist demands, quench nationalist passions, and thereby resolve nations conflicts.” As Brubaker sees it, “nationalist conflicts are in principle, by their very nature, irresolvable.” If so, what are our options? I do not know, but one can posit what is not possible without knowing what is. And what price will Judaism pay for this choice?

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War has not been kind to the Jews, not as victims and not as perpetrators. In some way the grand victory of 1967 was a mixed blessing. It saved the state but created a veneer of invincibility that has eroded from each war since, perhaps most starkly in the military collapse on October 7.

The sages posit that the Davidic kingdom was destroyed because it overextended its militarism. And of course we have been victims to many wars, some directed at us, and some not.

I don’t know if this war with Iran will be just another war in the history of Israel, or some kind of turning point. I don’t know if it is justified, or not. Necessary, or not. I don’t even know what its realistic goals are.

What I think I have some idea about is how this is another stage of a choice, a choice to accept Balaam’s prophecy and reject Isaiahs, a choice to collectively “assimilate” into nationalism that makes war if not inevitable, then all too likely. I do not agree with Rabbi Sacks. I think he makes a crucial mistake about nationalism more generally. I do not think a nation-state can embody all three visions, I think a nation-state creates increased tensions and even incompatibility. It makes choices. For many Jews, that may a choice worth making.

For me personally, I didn’t devote my life to a beautiful wisdom tradition called Judaism just to become like everybody else.