Bilam and the flotilla

 

This week's parasha (Torah portion) tells the story about a king called Balak, who hires a prophet (Bilam) to curse the Jewish people. He did this, because he saw, that the Jews recently won the war against the nations of Bashan and Emor through miracles. He was also preparing to fight the Jews, so he was afraid, and thought he has to first destroy the spiritual power of the Jews in order to be able to defeat them physically. For this he needed to curse them.



Let's look at modern history now:
When the State of Israel was established in 1948, the neighboring Arab countries immediately attacked to destroy the new non-Arab country. They couldn't reach their goal. Those countries tried it again a few more times, but always failed. Not only on the battlefield, but also morally: the Western World was supporting the small, democratic country against the bigger dictatorships. The Arab leaders realized, this way it will never work. So they came up with a new idea: to transform the picture from the "big dictators against the small free country" to "the poor occupied ones against the rich occupiers." Since 1973 Arab countries directly didn't attack Israel, but the 2 intifadas broke out. Through the media coverages the whole World could see the poor Palestinians with stones against the Israeli soldiers equipped with the most state-of-the-art weapons. The World opinion started moving against Israel, but still as the Palestinians using the method of terrorism, especially suicide bombers killing innocent people, it was close to balanced. Now they even stopped that (except the rockets fired from Gaza), to create a totally anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian sentiment in the World. The new method is the "flotilla-techniqe". Ships packed with food, medicines, human rights activists and reporters are set to sail for the Gaza strip. If it was really a humanitarian aid, if their goal was to send food and medicines to the poor Palestinians, they would send them through the legal borders, where Israeli border policemen would inspect it, and in case of not finding any weapons, they would let them in. But the senders know, that Israel has no choice not to check it, since smuggling weapons is very common at the borders of Gaza. And if they refuse to allow the inspection, the process can easily turn violent, and Israel might seize the ships. They tried this a year ago, and it succeeded. The World media was filled with pictures and coverages of Israeli soldiers "attacking" and seizing a "humanitarian-aid" ship... This was a very powerful attack against Israel. The moral picture of the Jewish State was probably at its lowest point ever.

This week, when we are reading in the Torah about our enemies trying to destroy our spiritual-moral state in order to defeat us, "humanitarian" flotillas full of reporters are about to leave the ports of Greece, Cyprus and Turkey to reach the Gaza-strip, to provoke Israel, and to destroy again its moral picture in the World!

But we can be optimistic. Bilam gets embarrassed by his donkey, when the animal refuses to move (those ships also have some problems), and when he finally gets to the place, his curse turns into a blessing! Maybe parallelly, instead of making the World see Israel as the devil, this time the provokers will be embarrassed and the curse will turn into a blessing, as the real intentions will be evident. What do we need to do? I am sure, that besides trying to wisely communicating the situation, our moral deeds can help too. If we help each other, and stop the enmity among us, if we stop saying lashon hara (bad things about others), and if we control our negative emotions, like anger, envy or selfishness, and turn them into positive ones, like empathy, giving, and altruism, we can show God that we are still fitting for turning the curse into a blessing, the moral destruction into a moral victory!