If I were to
start singing this song…(mah tovu) I imagine many of you could pick up the
words and melody and begin singing with me.
After all, you probably recognize it as part of the early morning
prayers in our siddur or as a camp or Hebrew school song. In reality, it is a phrase uttered by Bilaam
which means, “How good are your tents, Yaakov, your encampments, Yisrael.” Bilaam had been asked to curse the Israelites
by Balak, the king of Moav who is the son of Tzippor. His request for the curse
was based upon hatred and fear. “Look a
people, has come out of Mitzrayim. They
have now blotted out those who kept an eye on the land, and are living to
destroy me. So now, please come and
curse this people for me…and maybe then I can make it possible that we will
smite them and I shall drive them out of the land….”
Compare
Balak’s statement with this statement of Pharoah found in parashat Shemot: “Look, the people of the Children of Yisrael
are more numerous and stronger than we are.
Come let us deal with them cleverly, so that they do not increase; for
if war should happen, then they too, will be added to our enemies, and they
will fight against us and leave the land.”
Fear of numbers and strength of opposition appears to be driving
Pharoah’s decision to subject the Israelites with hard labor.
Another
comparison can be made between Balak’s desire to curse the children of Israel
and the story of Haman found in Megillat Esther. In Chapter 3 we hear Haman say, “There is a
certain people scattered and separate among the peoples throughout all the
provinces of your kingdom, and their laws differ from those of every people,
and they do not keep the king’s laws. If
it pleases the king, let it be written to destroy them…..”
What do
these three individuals, Balak, Pharoah, and Haman, have in common? They all want to see the Jews destroyed. They all express discomfort with having Jews
in their midst. They all see Jews as
separate and as being a danger to their own way of life.
We know that
the reasons given by these three anti-Semites is not unlike those given by
anti-Semites today. #1- We Jews are
hated because we have maintained our separateness. #2- Jews are warmongers. #3- Jews want to control the world. #4- Jews
are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they live.
Unlike those
excuses, a reason associated with anti-Semitic rants that holds true is that we
Jews have a role to play in the world that is not conducive to the comfort
level of those who hate us. When we are
seen as messengers of conscience and morality for the world, then any individuals
or societies that prefer to destroy those messages also prefer to destroy us as
the messenger. When we are viewed as valuing life, having a desire for recognizing
the equality of all people, being a defender of the downtrodden, and of having a
belief in the ability to transform the world for good, then those who want
power or fear to rule feel the need to speak out against us.
Of
course we don’t have to look into the Torah or Tanach to find examples of
anti-Semitism. We can listen to the
words of a Sermon delivered by 'Atallah Abu Al-Subh, former Hamas minister
of culture, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV, April 8, 2011,
translation by MEMRI:
"The Jews are the
most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth,
because they have displayed hostility to Allah.
"The Jews kill
anyone who believes in Allah. They do not want to see any peace whatsoever on
Earth."
Or the recent words of
David Duke, former KKK leader and a former member of the Louisiana House of
Representatives. “Jews are
“the real problem” and the “reason why America is not great.”
The
Anti-Defamation League ran a survey in 2015 in which it interviewed 53,100
people in 96 languages in over 100 countries about anti-Semitic attitudes. It covered 88.4% of the world’s adult
population in 9/10 of the most populous countries in the world. Its results were somewhat astounding. It found that 26% of the people polled in
these countries harbored anti-Semitic attitudes and believed in the majority of
the traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes that were tested. That boils down to 1.09 billion people in the
world who harbor those attitudes.
Let’s take a
look at the data broken into its component parts:
See http://global100.adl.org/did-you-know
What we
discover by this data is that anti-Semitism knows no national, religious,
social, or economic boundaries. That
certainly makes it a problem for which we do not currently have an answer. Perhaps, having an intervention by G-d to put
words of praise in the mouths of those who would curse us….might in the end be
the only way to achieve this goal!
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