"Stop the Boats!"

 

Let’s start with an image, a picture - a celebrated, iconic image from March 1965.

There in the middle is Martin Luther King, Baptist minister and civil rights campaigner, on an interfaith civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery along with - to his left, our right - his  colleague and friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (with his distinctive prophetic-looking white beard). 

It’s a wonderful  picture - I love the fact that they are all wearing the Hawaiian lei, symbol of friendship, honour, celebration. It was after this march for social justice and voting rights that Heschel is memorably quoted as saying that, “as we walked, I  felt that my feet were praying”. So a wonderful moment in history captured - but the picture also feels that it belongs to a long lost era: a time when there was an active Black-Jewish interfaith alliance in the United States which brought together Black Americans suffering from continuing social and legal discrimination and Jews, both religious and secular, who as a people had only a couple of decades before that experienced in Europe the discriminatory, dehumanizing and murderous consequences of another form of racism.

In the early 1960s King came to see Jews as “the most consistent and trusted ally in the struggle for civil rights”: he came to value the friendship and support of, for example, a young Reform rabbi, Israel “Sy” Dresner, who recognised that, as he put it, “silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time”. Dresner’s activism frequently led to him being jailed for his non-violent anti-racism activities: four times between 1961 and 63, once together with MLK.  But, as I said, it’s a long gone era because such solidarity between these two groups - whose histories contained parallel narratives of systemic denigration, oppression, and often deadly victimization - fractured in later decades.

Questions of identity politics came along with their competing hierarchies of victimhood; then after 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank the Israel-Palestinian conflict gradually loomed larger; and then what’s come to be known as ‘white privilege’ emerged as a theme: and all this came to overshadow what these two historically-victimised peoples might have had in common, and how they might have been able to support each other in the face of deep-rooted societal strands of anti-black and anti-Jewish prejudice.

That’s very much an American story, but there are parallels to it here in the UK, the fragmenting of shared solidarity into silos where every group starts to feel they have to look out for themselves in the face of institutionalized injustice. This is not the whole story of course - we now have London Citizens which brings different groupings together, there’s the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE), and there’s active Jewish-Muslim co-operation - but something has changed since those times when that inspirational picture was taken. A competitive embitterment has set in. And of course inspirational leadership is in short supply.

It takes a rare form of leadership to see what kind of pain those outside one’s own tribe might be suffering, one’s own group, one’s own class. To see what one might share as human beings with those who don’t belong to ‘us’. It’s always easier to focus on what differences there might be. It can be important to acknowledge differences, but a sense of solidarity with those who are different is one of the things that the Torah portion read today in our synagogue highlights.

The text of Numbers chapter 22 contains a comedy masterpiece - it’s straight out of Walt Disney. A man, Bilaam, is sent on a mission - but the success of the mission depends on a fantasy talking donkey who is able to see more clearly than the human character.  Bilaam’s a kind of sorcerer, who is supposed to have this so-called prophetic gift - he can bless, he can curse. But the point is he’s for hire. He’s freelance. You pay him enough and he’ll cast a spell on your enemies, you pay him a bit more and he’ll praise you to the heavens, or promise you the earth. He’s smooth talking - he might not quote Latin or Greek like our late unlamented prime minister, but he’ll tell his audience what it pays for him to say. Or what he’s paid to say.

You might be surprised we have a comic sequence in the middle of the Torah, but that’s what the text gives us. You have sorcerer Bilaam, the PR guru, who knows how to use words, and you have the sorcerer’s apprentice, the donkey, who can see God’s messenger each time it appears. Yet Bilaam can’t see what’s in front of his eyes. The donkey first wanders off the path and has to be dragged back, then the donkey manages to crush Bilaam’s foot against a wall, then the third time the donkey just collapses in a heap - because Bilaam again refuses to see what’s staring him in the face. The Biblical storytellers invented this cartoon-like interlude as a counterpoint to the more serious themes. Just as Shakespeare did in his dramas: one recalls the doorkeeper in Macbeth, in the midst of the bloody mayhem: “Knock knock, who’s there?”.  (The first ‘knock, knock’ joke). It is the storyteller’s art to juxtapose the lightness of being with its seriousness.

And the themes in this text not only highlight serious issues but they are surprisingly contemporary ones as well. Political ones.

The story shows how Balak, king of Moab, is worried about what the Israelites might do to his land as they continue on their journey through the desert. That’s why he hires Bilaam to curse them. You can see what’s going on here because it’s in the news every day. Balak sees all these potential immigrants on his border. He doesn’t know they are only passing through, that they are en route to a supposed better life. So he panics. He thinks “Stop the Boats!”, as it were. He thinks these foreigners are going to consume all his  resources, his benefits, his hospital beds and houses:  “this multitude will eat up everything around us as an ox devours the grass of the field”  (Numbers 22:4).  This is brilliant storytelling: the Torah describes these foreigners, through Balak’s eyes, as being like greedy animals - “as an ox devours the grass of the field” - the rhetoric is a classic case of dehumanizing strangers who arrive at our borders.

The Torah is haunted by the future.

So what does Balak do? He didn’t have the tabloid press to do his dirty work, but he did know a man who could make a good speech, Bilaam, who was always for hire. Balak hoped Bilaam could use his way with words against those threatening to ‘swamp’ the land, ‘flood’ over the borders. You see, that’s the power of words - that they can be used  to denigrate and curse as well as support and bless. Words can be used to make people hate each other, or have compassion for one another. It’s the power of language.

And as the Torah text unfolds it shows that Bilaam is a poet, a wordsmith, a conjurer with language:  that was his gift, his power, the slippery arts of the soothsayer, the leader writer, the speechwriter, anyone paid to sow fear, spread distrust. And as the Torah text shows, that’s particularly easy to do against the stranger, the traveller, the immigrants  arriving at a nation’s borders. Words slip, slide, they don’t stand still, they can be used - then or now - to curse, to manipulate, to denigrate; or they can be used to bless, to heal, to comfort.

And the power of this story - and it is a timeless narrative, up to the minute in its significance - is that it illustrates how the most gifted speakers can be more stupid than donkeys, just unable to see what is in front of them - whether it is divine messengers (as in this text) or fellow human beings (who are also, in the Jewish mystical tradition, agents of the divine, carriers of the divine spark).

In the end, Bilaam’s rhetorical gifts are used to benefit life - the life of the Israelite community - rather than to bring to fruition Balak’s fear-driven hatred of the outsider.   And it is solidarity with the outsider that Bilaam gives voice to: “How good are your tents o Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5); and, amazingly, we begin every prayer service with just these words, which means we begin each service with a quietly crafted irony.

The Hebrew storytellers created a character who was not a Hebrew -  he’s an outsider, he’s not one of ‘us’, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people - but we’re told he has access to God, to the divine dimension of life. And this outsider can see that there is something special about this people, our people. He’s not one of ‘us’ yet he can see something special about us - the storytellers make him into a character who blesses Israel. And then the rabbis came along and lifted those words out of the Bible and said: Yes, that’s how we will begin our services! Each service will start with a blessing, a quote from the Torah - but from someone the Torah says was outside our tribe, our group, our people.

Each service will be a reminder that although we are (or like to think we are) a special group, a distinctive group, we live in a world where not everyone is like us: we live in a world of difference - but let’s try and remember that difference is a blessing, can be a blessing, if we see each other as we really are, not as a threat, but from a perspective of solidarity.

In the end we are all outsiders. We are all outsiders to someone else, some other group, or nation or religion. Actually there is no central group, no core group: we are all spokes on the wheel of life. But our work - spiritual work, psychological work, political work - is to appreciate that what makes us different from each other is not a curse for humanity but a potential blessing.

As we journey on, in whatever community we belong to, as we journey on like Israelites through the desert, we can develop, practice, the art of bringing a blessing to each other, of seeing the best in others and not always fearing the worst. Is it a lost art? Let’s hope not. Let’s imagine we can be bearers of the prophetic spirit, like Bilaam in the end, like Martin Luther King, like Abraham Joshua Heschel: let’s imagine we can be carriers of hope not hate.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, July 1^st, 2023]