Antisemitism: Then and Now Musings for Parashat Balak

 Antisemitism: Then and Now

Musings for Parashat Balak

Rabbi Ari Kahn

Historically, people have been critical of Jews even when they did not personally know any Jews. They have feared Jews without ever meeting one. They have hated Jews without contact, and plotted against them for imagined slights. The Jew, in many such cases, is not encountered as a person, but as a construct—a figure shaped by narrative, closer to literature than to lived reality.

One of the earliest biblical expressions of what would much later be recognized as antisemitism appears in the figure of Balak, who turns to Bilaam in search of a way to undo a people he neither knows nor engages. Pharaoh had already dehumanized the Israelites and reduced them to a labor force. Balak and Bilaam are searching for something else—not subjugation, but a formulation that would make annihilation conceivable.

If one studies carefully the unfolding of Parashat Balak—not as an isolated episode, but as part of a recurring pattern—one begins to recognize that the danger does not begin with action. It begins earlier, elsewhere.

The Jewish people in this parsha are not attacked. They are not even addressed. They are simply observed.

Balak looks at them, and from that act of seeing, everything follows.

The Torah is precise. It does not tell us what Israel did to Moav. It tells us what Balak saw—and what he concluded. And the conclusion is immediate, total, and disproportionate: this people will consume everything around us.

The claim is neither argued nor tested. It becomes the premise upon which an entire political and spiritual campaign is built.

What begins as perception is already charged. It is not only a matter of what is seen, but of how it is received. A people is encountered, and almost at once transformed into something else—something threatening, expansive, undefined. The reaction tells us as much about the observer as about the object of observation. It is not only a misreading of Israel; it reveals the one who sees.

This is the first step, and it is one that repeats throughout history. Antisemitism begins not with evidence, but with interpretation. A people is observed, misread, and fixed within a narrative that is rarely reexamined.

Once that narrative is in place, it develops a life of its own.

Balak does not keep his fear to himself. He gives it language, and in doing so transforms it into something shareable. What begins as perception becomes a collective understanding. Once articulated, it no longer belongs only to him; it acquires form and coherence, and can be taken up by others. Midian joins him—not because they naturally belong together, but because they now inhabit the same interpretation.

This is not incidental. The Torah is pointing to a mechanism: those who have little in common can be united through a shared hostility toward Jews. The alliance itself is artificial, even unstable, but it is effective. It creates a coalition where none previously existed.

What binds this coalition is not shared identity, but a shared reading of reality. Different groups, with different histories and interests, come to see the same object through the same lens. The narrative provides enough structure to hold them together, even as everything else would keep them apart.

This, too, repeats. There is no need to search far in history to find moments in which competing forces—political, ideological, even theological—discover that cooperation becomes possible when the object of their opposition is the same.

But the next step in the parasha is even more telling.

Balak does not prepare for war. He turns to Bilaam.

That decision reveals something essential. Balak does not understand Israel as merely a military threat. He senses—however vaguely—that what he confronts cannot be addressed on the battlefield alone. And so he turns to speech, to interpretation, to influence. He seeks someone who can reshape reality through words.

Bilaam is introduced as a figure whose words have power: whom he blesses is blessed, and whom he curses is cursed. The language should sound familiar. It echoes what was said about Avraham. That is precisely the point.

Bilaam is not simply an outsider. He stands within the echo of Avraham’s legacy—and distorts it. The resemblance is not continuity, but inversion. Where Avraham’s speech emerges from covenant and responsibility, giving form to blessing, Bilaam deploys language as an instrument of control, severed from obligation. The structure remains, but its direction is reversed.

The opposition to Israel, then, does not arise only from distance, but from distorted proximity. Moav comes from Lot. Midian comes from Avraham. Bilaam presents himself, in effect, as a kind of alternative Avraham—a figure with access to divine language, but without the covenantal commitment that gives that language meaning.

Antisemitism, in this sense, is not always the product of ignorance of the Jewish story. At times, it emerges as a corruption of that story—one that preserves its forms while emptying them of their content.

Yet even this does not capture the full complexity.

In one reading, Bilaam is a pagan sorcerer. In another, he is far more unsettling: a person who recognizes the truth, who speaks with God, and yet cannot live in accordance with what he knows. A “tortured monotheist.” The problem is not ignorance. It is that knowledge and being have separated—that what is grasped intellectually never fully takes hold.

He can articulate truth with precision. But articulation does not bind him. Speech remains intact—even compelling—while the self stands elsewhere. What is revealed is not ignorance, but dislocation.

This, too, echoes in later history. Opposition to Jews is not always rooted in ignorance. At times, it emerges from an encounter with ideas that are partially understood, deeply felt, and ultimately resisted. The resistance does not undo the encounter; something remains—fragments, severed from their source and rearranged.

The attempt to curse Israel fails.

But that failure is misunderstood if one assumes the story ends there. The significance of Bilaam lies not only in his inability to curse, but in what follows.

If Israel cannot be defeated from the outside, it must be undone from within.

This is the turning point. The strategy shifts—from confrontation to infiltration, from curse to seduction. The goal is no longer to destroy Israel, but to dissolve it. The episode of the women of Moav and Midian is not a separate story, but the continuation of the same plan.

And here the Torah’s insight sharpens.

Israel does not fall through weakness. It falls through strength—through openness, through chesed, through a model of giving that traces back to Avraham. The seduction succeeds precisely because it exploits that strength. What appears as moral virtue, under altered conditions, becomes a point of exposure.

This is among the most difficult lessons carried by the narrative. The danger lies not only in external hostility, but in the misapplication of what is best within us. Chesed without limit, openness without boundary, does not disappear—it is redirected, and can be turned against the very people who embody it.

 

And when that happens, the collapse is severe. The number twenty‑four thousand—the victims of the plague that follows—appears not once, but in recurring moments, as if marking not a single failure but a pattern: the inability to hold together generosity and restraint, openness and form.

If one steps back from the details and looks at the pattern as a whole, a structure begins to emerge.

It begins with perception—distorted, unexamined, yet compelling. What is seen is quickly drawn into narrative, shared and repeated until it takes hold. From there, strategy follows: at first external, and when that fails, internal. And finally, there is execution—not always by those who first conceived the idea, but by those who come to inhabit it.

Between Balak and the women of Moav there is distance. Between idea and action lie many intermediaries. Yet the Torah insists they belong to a single continuum. The movement from one stage to the next is not abrupt, but cumulative—each layer preparing the conditions for what follows.

This, again, is not limited to the ancient past. The planning of atrocities and their execution are rarely carried out by the same individuals. One group imagines, another organizes, another implements. Those who act often do so within a framework already constructed for them—a framework that shapes not only what they do, but how they understand what they are doing.

They do not experience themselves as originators, but as participants. The actions feel immediate, even necessary, while the assumptions beneath them remain unexamined.

Responsibility becomes diffused, but the process remains unified.

A further element deepens the problem.

Moav and Midian, as the Torah presents them, lack proper historical consciousness. They encounter Israel without integrating its past. The covenant of Avraham, the descent into Egypt, the redemption, the trajectory toward the Land—these are known, but they do not shape the response.

When history is not integrated, it is replaced by invention.

And when that happens, fear fills the space where meaning should be. What might have been understood within a larger unfolding is instead experienced as an immediate threat. Without memory to give it form, the present becomes unstable—open to exaggeration, to projection, to distortion.

At this point, the question presses itself forward: what is the response?

The material we have been tracing does not offer a simple solution, because it does not point to a single cause. It does, however, suggest several directions.

First, there is the internal dimension. Again and again, the moments of greatest danger coincide with a loss of clarity—clarity about identity, about purpose, about the balance that defines the Jewish condition: between openness and boundary. Unity, in this context, does not mean uniformity. It means coherence: the ability to live as a people that knows what it stands for, even when it debates how to express it.

There is also the preservation of memory. Not a simplified memory, and not a defensive one, but a living narrative. The response to distortion is not silence, nor the abandonment of storytelling, but its refinement. A people that loses its own story becomes vulnerable not only to attack, but to disorientation from within.

There is, as well, the recognition that Jewish existence itself carries a claim. It is not neutral. It embodies a tension—between the particular and the universal, between distinction and responsibility—that is not easily resolved. That tension can be misunderstood, resisted, or turned against the people who carry it. But it can also be lived in a way that remains faithful to its source, without dissolving either side.

And there is a dimension that cannot be overlooked.

Throughout the entire episode of Balak, the decisive force is not Balak’s fear, nor Bilaam’s gift, nor the alliance between Moav and Midian. It is something that operates beneath them, shaping the outcome before the human actors have completed their plans. Plans are made, alliances are formed, curses are prepared—and yet they do not succeed.

The Torah is unambiguous about why. God is not absent from this episode. He redirects Bilaam’s journey, transforms his curses into blessings, and makes clear that the destiny of Israel is not subject to human speech, however powerful. The parsha does not present this as a rupture or interruption, but as part of its structure: there is a limit to what human hostility can accomplish, and that limit is not set by Israel’s strength, but by what stands behind it.

This is not a simple triumph. The protections of the parsha do not prevent the tragedy of the twenty‑four thousand. They do not eliminate danger, or suffering, or the consequences of internal failure. What they establish is something more precise: that the extermination of Israel from the outside—the project Balak conceives and Bilaam is brought to execute—is not within the range of what human coalition and spiritual manipulation can achieve.

From within the story, this is not always visible. The actors do not see what the reader sees. Bilaam does not fully understand why his words keep changing. Balak does not know what has intervened. The protection is real, but it does not announce itself.

Read across the longer arc of history, it becomes unmistakable.

The Jewish people move forward, often unaware of what has been attempted against them. The curses prepared for them become, in the mouth of their would‑be destroyer, some of the most beautiful words ever spoken about Israel: “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob.”

That inversion—of curse into blessing, of intended destruction into involuntary praise—is not incidental. It is the parsha’s final word.

If there is something to be contributed in the present, it begins with recognizing these patterns without surrendering to them. It requires clarity without simplification, strength without hardness, openness without naïveté.

It requires, above all, continuity.

The same structures that generated hostility in the past reappear in new forms. The same confusions about history, the same manipulations of fear, the same attempts to fragment and infiltrate can be discerned again and again.

The response, too, must be continuous.

To remain, to remember, to think clearly, and to live in accordance with a story that transcends the moment—this is not a solution in the technical sense. It is something else.

It is not the resolution of the pattern, but the refusal to be absorbed by it.

That refusal is itself the contribution—not by erasing the pattern, but by insisting that it does not have the final word.