What Kind of Prophet Will You Be?
Billam, the gentile prophet hired by the king of Moab to curse the Jews, was as great a prophet as Moses. He, too, possessed the ability to see the mystical energies that lay beneath the surface, hidden in the subconscious. Despite G-d’s reiterating to Billam that the Jews are blessed and must not be cursed, he nevertheless traveled to the plains of Moab with the intention of cursing the Jews. Billam knew that he would be unable to curse the Jews without G-d’s permission, but Billam was confident in his own ability to persuade G-d to allow the Jews to be cursed.
Billam’s plan was to draw attention to the negativity and sins of the Jewish people. He would evoke their shortcomings by looking toward the desert, gazing at the places where they had committed sins. Billam was sure that by focusing on the negativity within the Jews, G-d’s attribute of judgement would be awakened, allowing him to use that moment to curse them.
Billam’s plan failed. Instead of cursing the Jews, he offered the most beautiful blessings. He tried to get G-d to focus on their negativity, yet G-d would not pay attention:
He does not look at evil in Jacob, and has seen no perversity in Israel; the Lord, his God, is with him, and he has the King's friendship.
Rashi offers two interpretations as to why G-d would not see evil in the Jewish people despite their being far from perfect. The first interpretation, from Onkelos the translator, says that the sin that G-d did not see, was the sin of idol worship; while the Jewish people may have had other sins, at that point they were free of idol worship.The second interpretation is far more profound, and Rashi himself refers to it as a “beautiful” interpretation:
Another explanation: According to its plain sense it can receive a beautiful exposition: He does not see — i. e., the Holy One, blessed be He, does not see the iniquity which is in Jacob: when they transgress His words He does not deal so strictly with them as to pay regard to their iniquitous doings and their transgression by which they infringe His law.
According to the second interpretation, G-d does not focus on the negativity, because He sees their core and essence. To his loving eyes, their shortcomings do not define them. Their frailties and imperfections are but an opportunity for transformation and elevation.
The western world’s notion of love is that people fall in love because they are blinded to the shortcomings of the other. Once the intoxicating effect of love wears off, the shortcomings emerge and challenge the love. The Jewish idea of love is radically different. When one experiences love one is not blind to the other’s shortcomings, they simply don’t have any effect on the love because they are seen against the backdrop of love. The shortcoming does not define the person and is therefore not a contradiction to the love.
There are generally two perspectives one can have in life. The first is the path of Billam who had the trait of finding fault in every circumstance and person. Anticipating the negativity became a self fulfilling prophecy. The second perspective is the G-dly one. “He sees no iniquity in Jacob”, for He focuses on the positive within every experience and within every person. This perspective, too, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, allowing the negativity to be channeled and transformed to goodness and beauty.
What Kind of Prophet Will You Be?