Parashat Balak - Prophecy

This week we read a famous section. The Israelites are in a war with the Moabites, and the fighting is at a stalemate. The King of Moab, Balak seeks out a non Jewish prophet, Bilam, to curse the Jews and turn the war in Moab’s favour. But every time Bilam tries to curse the Jews, what comes out of his mouth is a blessing.

As usual there is lots here I could talk about, but what is most interesting to me is a section in the Talmud that says Bilam’s level of prophecy is equal to that of Moses. Think about that, Moses, being the most righteous person ever to live, is being compared to Bilam, who the Talmud says committed all sorts of heinous acts. In fact, the Talmud goes so far as to say that any accusation you can think of, you can accuse Bilam of. So what does the Talmud mean here?

To answer that, we first need to understand how prophecy works. Prophecy is not “seeing the future”, it’s setting the future. When a prophet sees a vision it is not a picture of things to come; it is a communication by G-d. When the prophet interprets the visions and puts words to it, that is what gives the vision power. The interpretation of the vision caused the prophecy to come true. That’s a difficult concept to understand, but an important one. So the power is in how the prophet interprets the vision, not in the vision itself.

So there is a problem with that, the vision comes from G-d, but the interpretation comes from man. And how man interprets the vision depends on that man’s perspective. For example, there are cases in the Bible where two prophets see the same vision, one describes it in a few lines, and the other takes a whole chapter. One vision, but two sets of words to go along with it (remember that it’s the words that have the power). This is not unreasonable. Take two people, one from New York and one from a small town in the deep south, and show them both a vision of mid town Manhattan at 10:00 on a Monday morning. The one from the small town will go on and on about what he saw. So many people moving every which way, the cars, the noise, people with green hair… The one from New York will probably sum it up in a few lines; typical Monday morning.

Now that we understand how prophecy works, how does this apply to Moses and Bilam? When Moses prophesied, he did not do it in the same way as the other prophets. He didn’t get a vision and give it words; G-d spoke directly to Moses. G-d supplied the words, and thus G-d gave the power to the prophecy. When the Talmud says that Bilam’s prophecy was on the same level as Moses’ it meant that Bilam also got the words from G-d, not just visions. Moses prophesized that way because he was on such a high level that he was able to “talk with G-d”. But Bilam was obviously not on such a high level, why did he get words directly from G-d?

Remember that Bilam was a horrible person, if he would be given a vision, he would interpret it based on his immoral perspective, and thus bring about disastrous results. G-d didn’t want that to happen, so he gave the words directly to Bilam in order to prevent any interpretation.
Moses received words because he was on such a high level, Bilam because he was on such a low level.

This also explains another important question about the portion. If Bilam wanted to turn the war in favour of the Moabites, why didn’t he just bless them, rather than trying to curse Israel? The answer should now be obvious. Bilam was such an immoral person, he was unable to bless, only curse.

Shabbat Shalom