I spent last weekend in Harrisburg with a close friend. A kind of random choice for a weekend away, I know. We chose Harrisburg in order to fulfill our 3 criteria for the weekend - seeing fireworks on Friday night for July 4; my friend being able to say Kaddish in a minyan at least once a day; and being in walking distance to both fireworks and shul to accommodate Shabbat. We also wanted to be away from home, but not too far away. So Harrisburg it was!

We stayed downtown, easily walkable both to the island in the middle of the Susquehanna where the fireworks were set off and Temple Beth El, one of Harrisburg’s Conservative synagogues. After arriving on Friday, we decided to walk around the city’s 4th of July festival, grabbing lunch from one of the gazillion food trucks lined up along the riverfront, petting baby goats, and people watching. Everything was absolutely lovely. Even the beastly heat from earlier in the week had retreated, especially with the breeze off the river. We noticed the charming architecture and historical markers as we walked along the city’s greenway. People were friendly and we also noticed almost no one smoking or vaping. It felt pretty idyllic and we congratulated ourselves for picking a great place for a quiet weekend away.
At first, our perspective on the city was entirely rosy. We saw lots of great things and our positive viewpoint shaped our opinion of the city. Walking back to our hotel after the street fair, we began to notice details we had previously missed. A significant number of shuttered storefronts showed us a picture of a struggling city. Groups of homeless people congregating on church steps and at bus stops let us know that the city’s struggles extended beyond businesses to individual people. And our awareness of Harrisburg's finer details continued to expand throughout our time there, adding both a tinge of sadness and more depth to our view. The more we saw the city, it seemed, the more we saw the city.

I was still thinking about my weekend when reading this week’s parashah, and was surprised to find a new approach to a very familiar text. Parashat Balak is a bit of an outlier, the only parashah since the birth of b’nei yisrael when the people are not the subject of the story. Instead, we read of King Balak of Moav, who is petrified of the Israelites, seeing as they’ve just won a bunch of battles in the region. Balak engages a prophet, Bil’am, to curse the Israelites, hoping to gain a competitive advantage. God gives Bil’am warnings about trying to curse Israel, but he goes ahead and agrees to do it anyway. When he opens his mouth to curse them, only blessings come out. His prophetic power channels only God’s blessings for the people of Israel.

Most of the parashah is a kind of humorous coda to the journeys of the people through the wilderness. Last week’s reading has the people perched on the precipice of the Jordan River, seemingly ready to cross into the land. The praises proclaimed by Bil’am are flowery and emphatically positive. In his final proclamation, he utters these words: מַה־טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ יַעֲקֹב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל׃ | How fair are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel! (Numbers 24:5) These words should sound familiar - they are how we start our Shabbat service each week and have been woven into our siddur as the words traditionally used when entering a synagogue space to pray each day.

Those are some serious words of blessing that Bil’am gives to the Israelites. Numerous commentators, building on the Talmudic and Midrashic traditions, amplify the praise in these words. Some say that their tents were called fair (or good) because they did not open directly across from each other, affording those who dwelled in them a measure of privacy, even in the close quarters of the wilderness. Others compare the tents to Torah academies, and the dwellings to the Temple. In these tellings, Bil’am’s praise is not only wholeheartedly unequivocal, it is also well-deserved, both in the present and into the future.

But, like my weekend in Harrisburg reminded me, the dwellings of b’nei yisrael deserve a closer look. Let’s not forget what so much of the rest of the book of B’midbar has shown us - complaining, strife, rebellion, punishment, short-sightedness, loss, despair - comprising most of the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering. The peaceful dwellings seen by Bil’am from high above the camp were a good bit less so from down on the ground.

The end of the parashah speaks to this reality even more strongly. In the final scene, some men of Israel find themselves enticed by the Moabite women, acting out with them sexually and following their gods. God, Moses, and the rest of the community are distraught, and God demands that the perpetrators be punished. 24,000 people die in the plague that ensues. “Fair” and “good” are not adjectives I would use to describe people who so easily and so repeatedly go against their (theoretically) most deeply held beliefs and values.

There are midrashim and commentaries that acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, imagining the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people - the very tents and dwellings of the verse in Bil’am’s prophecy - as God repossessing property when b’nei yisrael did not follow through with their end of the covenant. The goodness attributed to their tents and dwellings speaks to their value as collateral - and their collection by God serves as atonement for the people’s sins.

Bil’am saw the people from high above and found them worthy of great blessing. We, having walked with the people throughout their journey, know that a closer look complicates the picture. That’s not to say that the Israelites only looked good from far away and that up close they were wicked. It would be easy to write the people off entirely, having seen their worst behavior up close. But nothing is that black and white. When viewing things from a distance, we only get part of the picture. Seeing the people’s flaws - even their worst ones - doesn’t make them unworthy; it makes them real.

To carry the analogy another step forward, this is often how we relate to one another. We see another person, a family, a friend group, a community, from a distance and we paint them in broad strokes, often creating an ideal picture of who they are (and creating an image of ourselves as inferior by default). We encounter someone else’s life as curated through social media, or only see them in superficial settings and assume our impressions formed from those interactions extend to all parts of their lives. We see them only from Bil’am’s perspective.

When we come down to ground level, as it were, allowing ourselves to know others more deeply, our image of the other becomes more complex. We see the vulnerability, the struggles, and the failings alongside the celebrations and successes - as well as everything in between. We begin to see each other - and let ourselves be seen - as we really are.

Tomorrow is the 17th of Tammuz, the beginning of the 3 week period leading up to Tisha B’Av. The traditional theology of this mournful period teaches that the Temples were destroyed due to our failings - disloyalty to God for the first Temple and dismissal and hatred of each other for the second. It’s a time of year when we bring ourselves low, searching for ways those destructive traits may still be operative in our lives and our relationships and seeking ways to rid ourselves of them. What Bil’am teaches us is that, while a superficial look at ourselves doesn’t yield the entire truth, examining ourselves closely doesn’t only show us our flaws. We also see how we have built loving relationships and connected communities, how we have cared for one another and worked to improve our world.

We are not perfect, like Bil’am’s praise might have us think. We are complex and complicated and real. We have enormous potential for good and much that is good within us already. My prayer for us is that this low point of our Jewish year serves as a springboard for us to bring all that good more fully into our lives and into the world.