Poscast #21 Parashat Balak

In this podcast episode, the hosts discuss the parashah Balak and the concept of personal will versus collective ideology. They explore the idea of competing commitments and how individuals balance their personal will with the will of others or of God. They also delve into the theme of free will and its importance in Jewish thought. The hosts reflect on the blessing of being able to read the parashah and discuss its insights each week. They examine the story of Balak and Balaam and the question of where personal will comes in when it clashes with other wills. They discuss the concept of being a blessing to the world and how Jewish ingenuity and creativity have impacted society. The hosts also touch on the idea of fatalism and its potential impact on taking action. They explore the paradox of God's will versus individual will and the role of determination in personal and societal growth. The hosts conclude by discussing the issue of respecting old knowledge while also challenging and cr Shalom, shalom, and shalom to all those who are going to be listening to this podcast this week. Maybe, who knows? Maybe in the coming years, maybe a hundred years from now, who knows? So we have this incredible, incredible parashah, magical parashah actually, and I would also add that this was the parashah that I had my aliyah for my bar mitzvah, I was twelve and a half, because on the kibbutz the whole class together did a bar mitzvah together, and I was the youngest in the class, so this happened to be my parashat bar mitzvah, not the one I was born in, so I feel very close to this parashah, it's parashat balak, the amazing parashat balak. And Elisha, the title of your drashah, taken from your book, Ayeka, is parashat balak, a blessing after all, and I just want to say, this is what, our twenty-first podcast? It is, it is. And for me, this has been an incredible blessing, because every week it brings me to really read the parashah, read your drashah, and do some research, and I have some insights because of this wonderful podcast, wonderful opportunity that we have to discuss it. And let's jump right in, Elisha. So I'm going to read a short passage from your short and punchy drashah. You write that the faithful kibbutznik in me is still dealing with the issue of personal will versus that of the collective ideology of the kibbutz. The army officer in me is still attentive to orders from above, and the Zionist Jew in me is still committed to the calling of our national revival. And this reminds me of something I've learned from Sharona, a psychologist, most of what I know is from Sharona. She deals with a technique called competing commitments, and this quote, Elisha, reflects exactly this. We all live in a world where we have competing commitments, competing marching orders that we need to follow, and we need to juggle and balance them, and I think it's reflected in the parashah. You, especially as a rabbi, see these competing commitments. Your family, your son, the community, Israel, your parents, and many other things. Right, yeah, that's a good point, that's a really good point. Maybe it's worth kind of giving the context of the parashah for those who are less familiar. The issue of will, of free will, of where do our personal will, how does that kick in as opposed to the will of others or of God. We have a situation where Balak, the king of Moab, is seeking the help of a great sorcerer, the magician of the east, Bil'am, to annihilate, to kick out, to weaken the children of Israel who have settled in Balak's land, in Moab, on their way to the promised land. And Bil'am consults with God whether to take the mission or not, and God said, absolutely no. And Bil'am wakes up in the morning after dreaming this conversation and says to Balak's messengers, the answer is no. They come back with some more money. And he consults with God again, even though he knew the answer, but nevertheless, we know that he wanted the money and maybe also the fame and everything that goes along with that. And God then says, okay, okay, I see that you really, I'm adding, these are my words that I'm adding to the text, I see that you really want to go, whether it's for the money or for the fame or for the fun, for the ride, whatever it is, you really want to go and fulfill the mission, I'm giving you a green light, however, you can only say what I tell you to say, et cetera, et cetera. So the question that we're kind of asking ourselves is where does our will come in when it opposes other wills, when it clashes with other wills, which is, I think, this is essentially what you're, the point that you're raising, correct? Exactly. And we have free will. This is so important. We have the will to choose good and choose evil. I can't imagine a world in which we were just puppets and this imposes obligation upon us and is directly related to us as the Jewish people because we have an extra obligation and it appears kind of in a backhanded way in the Parshah. We have an obligation in the world to bring ethical issues to the world. Let me ask you about this, Elisha, two questions. A lot of questions emerge out of this Parshah. So Bil'am insists against God's desire, Bil'am decides that he's going to go and curse Israel like so many people in the past who have meant ill to the Jewish people. In the end, he blesses us, but wait a second. The end of the blessing is really weird. Am levadad yishkon, ba goyim lo yitchashav. This nation will dwell apart from everybody and the nations won't recognize us. What the heck? What kind of blessing is that? What is going on here? Yeah, well, first of all, I just want to say that's a very interesting interpretation, which you just brought in a really interesting interpretation, I never thought of it that way. Goyim lo yitchashav is saying, and the goyim, the other nations, will not take us into consideration or whatever. I always understood the sentence as that we will not take the other nations into consideration. We will do what's right for us, we will be committed to our truth and disregard the will of the nations. But either way, you're right. Is that a blessing? Is that a curse? To be forever alone, and I think maybe it's neither a blessing nor a curse. It's almost like it's a destiny. But what is a destiny? It's not a destiny of being isolated, it's not a destiny of being hated, it's not a destiny of being taken or thought of in all kinds of evil ways by the nations. I think that especially in that time, and that's also true for today, that the path of God, the path of monotheism, the path that we are instructed to follow in the Torah, is incredibly, incredibly unique. It comes and says, our salvation is never going to be in things, in objects. It's not going to be in money, it's not going to be a tree in the field, or a holy rock, or a holy stone, or a star in the heavens. It's going to be God and God alone, the ultimate free will. You pointed out, you talked about free will earlier. Free will, I think, is a key concept in Jewish thought, and that goes back to the exodus from Egypt. That's where free will is coming from, but there's only free will if we can free ourselves from the enslavement to all the things that most of humanity is enslaved to. Most of humanity is enslaved to money, and kavod, honor, power, sexuality, etc., etc. And being able to free yourself from all of that is a very difficult thing. One of the beautiful things, I think, we can say about the Haredi world, we often criticize, but if we think of it really carefully, the self-imposed ghetto, spiritual ghetto that the Haredi world has built around itself, not wanting their kids to have smart phones, not wanting their kids to see everything that our kids are exposed to, because they know that the addictions of the world are so luring, they're so enticing, and it's so easy to fall for them, and being free of all of that, and being totally committed to God, being totally committed to free will, to the Almighty, the Creator, is a very difficult task. So, yeah, go ahead. I want to give an example. You mentioned freeing ourselves from the lust for money and so on, and I have an example of that that came up just today, Alicia, and I want to mention it. Yesterday, a man named John Goodenough passed away. He's not Jewish. Is that a real name? It's a real name. Wow. John Goodenough. He's the inventor of the lithium-ion batteries. Wow. These are batteries that are in our smartphone, in our computers, in our cars. The world has changed because of this man. He's an engineer. He invented them in Oxford. He's an American. He had a difficult childhood. He had dyslexia. His parents sent him off to boarding school. They didn't really want him around when he was 12. He had a really bad start, and he made this incredible invention, but my point is, the person who invented lithium-ion batteries could be the wealthiest person in the world today. All you have to do is patent it, and then you get a royalty of every single battery that's produced in the world. This man, who was a deeply religious man, an Episcopalian, Episcopalians are kind of the Protestant version of Catholics. He decided that he would be a blessing to the world, and he gave it away. He did not patent it. Wow. This, of course, created the possibility that it could be produced widely all over the world at a low cost. It leads me to a question, Elisha, and you mentioned this in your Dreschah. We are commanded, the Jewish people are commanded to be a blessing. Tell us where that appears. That's long before the other mitzvot, right? Right, right. I always tell our Bar Mitzvah kids that it's the last thing we do in our Bar Mitzvah program. We have a little mini ceremony at the end of our Bar Mitzvah program where all the kids stand in line, and we kind of throw them out of the class. We throw them out of the class by asking them, what is your blessing to the world? We tell them that this was God's commandment, first, first commandment to Abraham. To Abraham. We said, you know, go forth, leave everything behind, go to the land that I will show you, and keep kosher, and keep Shabbat, and none of that, that came later. Be a blessing. Be a blessing. May all the nations of the world be blessed through you. So we tell each kid, you know, what's your blessing, and the kid says whatever he says, you know, I'm going to take good care of my siblings. So beautiful. We give them a pat on the back, we kind of like symbolically throw them out of the class, and that's how our program ends. So you have to be a blessing. So our granddaughter is with us now from New York, and she'll be Bar Mitzvah next year. I hope she has the opportunity to go through that. But I want to go back to this issue of Am L'Vadad Yishkun, a nation will exist separately, and take issue with one of the things that you said before. We are vilified and ostracized by the nations. The Technion Elisha was founded because Jews couldn't study science or medicine in Russia, and Martin Buber and some others decided, okay, we'll start a university of our own in the Holy Land. We are vilified, we have been in history, we still are, by non-Jewish people, and this is part of the reason we are a blessing, Elisha. The company called Mobileye started by a brilliant man, Amnon Cheshua, sold for $15 billion to Intel, and he was told that he had an idea, I'm going to make a single camera that can warn cars of crashes. And all the automobile experts told him, you can't do that. Elisha, if there's one thing that Jews love, it's when people tell them, you can't do this. You can't study medicine, you can't study science, you can't make this camera. And then we go and we prove it, we are a blessing to the world. I have a list of creative ideas developed by Israeli Jews that have changed the world, and it goes from here to Antarctica. We are a blessing to the world, and when I study creativity, and I see some of the amazing ideas, Elisha, we are a blessing to the world. This is one way, a major way, we are a blessing to the world, this powerful creativity, and part of it comes from what I call dafka. People tell us, you can't do this, it won't work, it won't happen, forget it, and we're just stubborn. We just do it anyway. Or if we just do it anyway. Right. The stiff-necked people. Right. So if we take it back to, is this a blessing or a curse, I would read, Am levada di shkonu ba goyim lo yid cheshab, being secluded and not taking the nations into consideration. The nations is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for what we call in philosophy, determinism. The nations, so to speak, stand for the forces of determination. What that means in philosophy is that everything has a cause that caused it, and this cause has to cause this particular effect, and every effect becomes a cause of the next effect, meaning there's no free will. And in determination, if there's no free will, there's no ingenuity, there's no creativity. So ba goyim lo yid cheshab, it's not a personal thing. Don't care about what America says or England says. Absolutely do care. But it's a metaphor for not to fall for the philosophy of determinism, which at least at the time, the goyim, the other nations believed in. In Egypt, if you look at Egyptian theology, Egyptian theology is very deterministic, and the exodus from Egypt is the exodus from determinism. It's the exodus from cause and effect, cause and effect, into a philosophy of freedom of choice. So Jewish ingenuity can only happen when we don't take no for an answer. So if we connect all the dots here together, so maybe we do need to be told, no, you cannot do that, and then we can not take no for an answer and do it. So there's a paradox here, and I have a question. I'm astonished very often by very religious people who suffer terrible losses. They lose a child in an accident in a terrorist event, and they respond to it by accepting it as God's will. And there's something beautiful about this fatalism that we live in God's world, and God does things that we don't understand always, but everything, not just the good, the good and the bad are part of God's will. But Elisha, does that fatalism, does that make us sort of apathetic? If everything is God's will, what's my role? What's my role in this? I know I am an agent of God, and I believe that. Some of the people I talk to create these amazing things. I believe they are agents of God, but does this fatalism, which gives you tremendous faith and resilience, does it also prevent action? Well, if we see it as fatalism, then I guess it probably does. But why see it as fatalism? We can see it as… At the end of the day, this is a complicated issue. I love this topic. It's complicated, therefore I love it. When we say to do God's will, how do we understand God's will? On the one hand, we believe everything is God's will. So even if I disobey God's will, that too is God's will. So at the end of the day, it's all God's will. So nevertheless, why would we be punished for not doing God's will? What is God's will at the end of the day? And is there indeed a difference between God's will and my own will? I'd like to suggest that this is a topic for much deeper consideration. We have to devote a whole podcast to that, I guess. But even when we… There's a very, very famous Talmudic story of Tanurosh HaAchnai, the oven of HaAchnai, which every rabbi or every Jewish teacher or scholar loves to teach and loves to quote it because it's a classic. There are very few Jews who studied a little bit of Judaism who haven't encountered the story. And in that story, the rabbis actually supposedly defy God's will. They refuse to accept Rabbi Eleazar's Halacha, which is favored by God. Even a divine voice comes and says, yes, this is indeed… I stand behind this Halacha. And the rabbis say, we do not follow a divine voice. You spoke at Sinai. We are now going to discuss it ourselves. We're going to delineate the truth out of what you said. So you keep quiet, which is shocking, absolutely shocking. And then there's a legend that goes on to say that one of the rabbis met Eliyahu Hanavi and asked him, how did God respond to this blasphemy? What did God say? And the answer was, God smiled, God laughed and said, And it's a beautiful term, but it's really difficult to translate. Because usually it would be translated, my children triumphed. Triumphed, right. And that's triumphed over what? Over God? Over God, as a question mark. In Hebrew, also means, it comes from the word, My children have made me eternal. My children have eternalized me. By basically following their own will, I have become now eternal. Almost suggesting that my will, my will is infinite. I will will infinite options. And I'm waiting for you to develop. That's what creativity is all about. Exactly. So I've studied creativity for 40 years, Elisha. And you've just illuminated. 40 years, that's a great number. I hope for the next 10 years it will remain 40 years. Thank you. But you've illuminated a key point of creativity, which is that it requires you to argue with what's called the conventional wisdom, which we could say is God's knowledge. You have to argue with everything, everybody. We Jews are great at it. And that is, Shlomo, that is, Not to take the goyim into consideration. It's not a social or historical thing. It's like, it's argue, wrestle, wrestle with everything. When people tell you, no, you can't, wrestle with that. And that raises a problem for me, Elisha, because I'm a teacher. So I teach students, and I have to teach them old knowledge. And while I'm teaching them to have great, great respect for that old knowledge, I have to also teach them to argue and quarrel and challenge everything and to think critically. Those two things are difficult, respecting the old stuff and challenging it all the time, every day. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. You have a wonderful phrase, Elisha, that I want to read toward the end of your drashah. One can try to hijack the divine movement of life, use it and abuse it. And I love that, because you speak in the drashah about the evolving challenge of life, the evolution of life. And that led me to look up evolution, which began with Darwin's wonderful book, The Origin of Species. And it raises a fascinating question, and it's relevant to this drashah as well. Elisha, there's a problem with evolution. According to Darwin in evolution, survival of the fittest. We all battle each other for a mate and battle each other for resources and money and food and so on, and the fittest survive. And that means that we should all be selfish people who do everything for ourselves and our own ego. But we know that's not how things work. We know that there are communities and we have the ahavta. And in our community, we love each other, we help each other, and we do things that don't directly benefit us. Darwin, Charles Darwin, was a deeply religious man. He was bitterly attacked for evolution. What? We descend from apes? Are you serious? But he had another problem. If you believe in evolution and the origin of the species, how can you explain people who sacrifice themselves for others and for the benefit of others, not just their family, their community, or even complete strangers? How do you explain altruism? And he wrote a book about it in 1871, two years after the origin of the species, where he tries to deal with this. He tries to explain it. And basically, Elisha, it's so simple. In life, we live in communities. And it's in my interest to live in a strong community. And I, therefore, will do everything to strengthen my community, like the ahavta. And this is known, there's data on this, for older people, and I belong to those older people. When you have a community, Elisha, and you're not just alone, you live longer. Not only do you live longer, you live better. So, Darwin apart, and evolution apart, it explains a lot in nature, but it doesn't begin to explain human society, which begins with what you said at the beginning. You shall be a blessing. You'll be a blessing by serving others, by helping others, by giving to others. And that blessing returns to us, comes back to us. Right. That's beautiful. Thank you for... I wasn't quite aware of the second book. Because there's a third book that he didn't write, but there are, I want to mention, three great Jewish thinkers that I think changed the way we understand evolution. One of them is Henri Bergson from France, whose amazing light shining brightly at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, during that same period, Rav Kook, and towards the end of the 20th century, Professor Eugene Gendlin, who I'm a great follower of. And Henri Bergson wrote his incredible book about evolution. He attacked Darwin bitterly. He believed in evolution. He said, yes, there is evolution, but evolution is not driven by the survival of the fittest. Evolution is driven by a force called, he called it the Elan Vital, the force of life. There's a life force that drives evolution forward. And Rav Kook took that and said, that life force is a force of goodness. Rav Kook believed in evolution only what drives evolution, not the survival of the fittest, but the force of goodness in the world that is driving it continually forward. And it's like, what is this thing called? What is this, like a pendulum, or there's a better word that I'm kind of not thinking of right now, where there are difficult times. And our period right now is a difficult time. Things are falling apart. But it's only in order for a better world order to emerge. And the better world order that we can't even fathom right now is going to be even better than what we have right now, what we're trying to protect, democracy, etc. In a few years, when the dust settles with this evolution, even a better world order will appear. And I'll put Eugene Jenlin aside right now, because that would be too much to explain. But evolution, yes. But what is the driving force that drives it? And what we can say from Alad Rasha, the driving force is, and you shall be a blessing. Being a blessing is the driving force of evolution. It's interesting because Darwin, Elisha, Darwin had a cousin named Francis Galton. And Francis Galton invented eugenics. And eugenics basically is making human beings into God. By eugenics, you choose the strong and the beautiful and the smart. And the ones who are not, you do away with, literally. Literally do away with. And we can almost do that today with genetic engineering. And of course that's what the Nazis were about. And Darwin bitterly opposed that. He thought that was terrible as a religious person. But there is a different kind of evolution, social evolution. We progress as human beings and communities by making mistakes. And we stumble and we have crises. And out of the crises, often better things emerge. It helps a lot to understand the crisis we're in now in Israel. Because I really believe that out of this mess, and it's a terrible mess, something much better and stronger and more durable will emerge. But when you're in the midst of it, it's really hard to bear it sometimes. Right, absolutely. And since this thing goes out to our friends overseas, the situation is not only difficult in Israel. It's around the world. We can see what's happening in Germany right now, and not to mention America and other places. So having this amazing, incredible space, that this curse will turn into a blessing, which I think is what Parashat Balak is all about. Exactly, exactly. You know, in management, one of the things I taught my students was that sometimes we have a recession. And in a recession, companies lose money. And some of them are in big trouble. And when they do that, it's a natural thing. They cut their budgets. They cut their spending. They don't do innovation. They don't do research and development. And when they emerge from it, they are behind the eight ball because there are smaller companies who use this crisis as an opportunity, and they invest in new things. And when the recession ends, they come up to market with these beautiful new products, and they move up the ladder. They gain their market share. This happens again and again. So we have to, as intelligent people and as intelligent societies, we have to look at these crises and learn from them and emerge with something better. We need to be doing that now in Israel. Beautiful, beautiful. That's a good place to end, I guess. So let's be conscious of being a blessing in the world, being a blessing and moving this evolution forward and having tremendous faith that when the dust settles, things will look a lot better than they do right now. That's such a simple idea and such a powerful message, Alicia. If you wake up in the morning and you ask yourself two questions, what am I going to do for others today? And the second question, what am I going to do for myself today? And I do that all the time. And guess what? It's the same question because when you do things for others, you really do things for yourself because your life has meaning. And having a life with meaning is everything. I love that. I love that. I love that. Okay, so Shlomo, thank you. Thank you for this inspiration and thank you all for listening. Feedback is always, always welcome. And have a great Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom and we'll see you next week. See you next week. Shabbat Shalom, everybody.