We are commanded every day to remember the story of Balak and Billam. This commandment is found in the Haftara that we read this past week in Parashat Balak ( Micha 6,5)
עַמִּ֗י זְכׇר־נָא֙ מַה־יָּעַ֗ץ בָּלָק֙ מֶ֣לֶךְ מוֹאָ֔ב וּמֶה־עָנָ֥ה אֹת֖וֹ בִּלְעָ֣ם…. לְמַ֕עַן דַּ֖עַת צִדְק֥וֹת
ה׳
My nation, Please remember Balak’s plot and what Bilaam responded to him…to know the righteousness of God
As we should all know, there is a list of things to remember in our daily prayers (Sephardic siddurim list 10 remembrances, the Ashkenazi siddurim list 6), all of which come from pesukim in the Torah.
One is Shabbat, and another is this pasuk in Michah, where Michah is commanding, in the name of God, that we should remember what Balak and Bilaam did to us.
We will dedicate this week to discussing this topic, thus fulfilling this mitzvah every day.
(If you have a little time after shul, look in the back of your siddur after Alenu and you will see the list of things to remember.)
Our first point is- Why does it say,
Zochor -Na/Please remember
We rarely see God saying Please before He asks us to do something. So obviously, it’s very important.
But what exactly was the Sidkot Hashem/ Righteousness of Hashem?
24,000 people died because of Bilaam’s idea. So what are we supposed to remember exactly?
One of the Rabbis of Brisk explains with a mashal.
In the days of old, before yeshivot were common, a man would go from town to town, staying for a month or so to teach the children of that town. When he got to a certain town, they told him that the president of the synagogue had a very dangerous dog, and they warned him to be careful. The man was there for a few days, and although he was initially afraid of the dog, which was chained, the dog seemed to be nice and docile. After two or three weeks, he was convinced that there must be some kind of mistake, and he told everyone that it was cruel to keep the dog chained up. But as he went to unleash the dog, the dog began to attack him. He was lucky to get away alive. And he learned that if not for the chains, the dog would be attacking people all day. By remembering the attack, he was able to remember what could have been happening every day but wasn’t.
That is the message of the story of Balak and Bilaam. God, so to say, unleashed Balak and Balaam for a moment, and we saw what happened, and how many people died. This is what could be happening constantly, but God is keeping them on a leash. We have to think about the things that don’t happen. This goes back to the lesson than we have said many times from Rabbi Ades- When a person goes to sleep at night, and he’s in his own bed, not in an emergency room, he should dance a jig for what did not happen; what could have happened, but Hashem prevented from happening.
That is the explanation of what we are supposed to remember every single day. We are supposed to remember the miracles that happen every day, that we don’t even know about. It’s a daily responsibility of ours to remember, as God says, “Please remember this.“
B’Ezrat Hashem, this week we will talk about the different lessons we can learn from Balak and Bilaam.
Have a wonderful day.