Hard Cut, Hard Truth
There is a moment in the Indiana Jones movies that I always think of when I think of the Torah portion Balak we read today. Not snakes (that was last week) or, for that matter, any famous scene. Just a clever moment when Indiana is describing his colleague as someone so versed in the local culture, languages and terrain that he will blend in perfectly and never be found by the bad guys. The next cut,
of course, is to a stiff and proper professor asking “does any one here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?”
The technique of the hard cut that completely contradicts the preceding dialog is pretty common in movies, but there is an example of it in the Torah portion this week, the story of the soothsayer Bilaam, hired by the King of Moab to curse the Israelites.
The big moment in the story is that Bilaam is unable to speak words other than what G*d places in his mouth and instead of raining down words of woe, he speaks of the beauty, nobility and immeasurable power of the twelve tribes. His words include one of the most famous blessings in the Jewish tradition “How goodly are your tents O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” which opens the morning prayers each day. A major theme of Bilaam’s panegyric is the modesty and propriety of the Israelites. And then Bilaam turned to go home. The next verse? “The People of Israel began fornicating with the women of Moab who invited them to feast and worship [Baal Peor]s.” Hard cut.
As one would expect, these acts of lasciviousness and idolatry go poorly for the Israelites. There are plagues and a dramatic moment of sex and murder before the altar that definitely loses this film its PG-13 rating and gives us a lot to think about for next week's Torah reading. For now, though, it is that moment in between the blessing and the curse that holds my attention.
The Torah is a book of extremes. Moments of elevation and promises of unerringly righteous purpose. Moments of degradation and actions by both individuals and whole generations that betray even the most basic decency. Still, the juxtaposition between the blessings bestowed on Israel and the accursed actions that follow drive home a point: The Israelites are never as perfect as they are in the moments we enshrined in our triumphant narratives or as terrible as they are when they are at their cautionary worst. How much more so must this be true in our own maddeningly inconsistent world? In trying to draw strength from faith and belief in the righteousness of our cause while knowing that we are also capable of terrible things. The temptation to only believe in one or the other - a people that can do no wrong or a people that can do no right is very real. The Torah’s hard cut makes it impossible to ignore that even on the heels of our most cherished blessings, we must attend to the harder truths as well.