Click here to listen to an audio recording of this Shabbat Message by Rabbi Dan Levin.
As he stood on the peak of Ba’al Peor, overlooking the settlements of the Israelites in the valley below, the prophet Bil’am felt a spirit of God wash over him.
alled on him to curse the Isrg incantations of curse, Bil’am instead cried out: “Mah Tovu Ohalecha Ya’akov, Mishkenotecha Yisrael – How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel!” (Numbers 24:5)
What was so beautiful about the Israelite settlements? What did Bil’am see, gazing at those tents and dwellings, that touched him so deeply?
Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the “Netziv,” was the leader of the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in the 19th century. He suggests that the “tents” refer to the places of daily family living, and the “dwellings” represent the manner in which a community’s leaders gather and govern.
Bil’am, he suggests, looks down and sees the entire structure of Jewish civilization: its families, its civic institutions, its centers of Torah learning, and finds it wondrous and beautiful. He marvels at its simplicity and complexity. He is touched by how each and every household sought to create lives of rich holiness and goodness, how the leaders endeavored not simply to ensure the physical welfare of their people, but to nurture their passion for wisdom, understanding, awareness, and holiness.
But let’s be honest. We know that the Israelites were so often, as Moses describes them, “a stiff-necked people,” constantly complaining and bickering with each other, often skeptical of Moses’ leadership, and less than cooperative partners in God’s covenant.
So what did Bil’am actually see?
iv points out that the phrase “Mah Tovu – how good” is not simply a compliment. Instead, it signals that God offered Bil’am a vision of Jewish potential – what Jewish life could look like at its finest. Bil’am look
And so for us, Bil’am’s prophecy echoes across the ages as a calling. How can we build homes and lives in our day and age that an outsider would look upon them and cry out, “Mah Tovu – how good!”
Our first task is to transform out tents, our individual homes, into sanctuaries of holiness. Our homes need to be safe and sacred spaces, where we feel the security to be our truest and most authentic selves. They need to be places where we practice gratitude and kindness, where we nurture the pursuit of dreams and find comfort from disappointment, where love is freely given and graciously returned, where we can evolve and grow to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.
But then for our homes and dwellings to be truly beautiful, they need large windows and doors through which we can see our neighbors – in all their similarities and difference – and love them as ourselves. We need to see their wants, their needs, their yearnings and desires, and make them our own. We need to open our doors to the needy, and we need to build bonds of love that engender respect, understanding, and mutual responsibility.
And our communal institutions need to be grounded in service, integrity, generosity and care for the greater good. They need to inspire curiosity, learning, respectful dialogue, and the pursuit of wisdom and understanding. They must inspire us to build a society in which we celebrate uniqueness while striving for unity, where we make room for the other with openness and understanding, pursuing justice and striving for peace.
How do we fashion homes and dwellings of such goodness and beauty? By making it our mission to do so – building our homes and community on a thick foundation of Jewish culture, by taking seriously our need to care for the spirit, by engaging in the study of Torah and the quest for wisdom, and by never compromising in our pursuit of the right, the ethical, and the good.
If we fill our community with that kind of holy beauty, then all the nations of the earth will feel the spirit of God wash over them, compelled to offer us only words of blessing.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Dan Levin
Temple Beth El of Boca Raton
