Unobstructed Views

Unobstructed Views
Rabbi Andrew Kaplan Mandel

During my trip to Rome last month, I could feel the weight of Jewish history.

In the 1st century, Jews were captured in Jerusalem and brought to the city in chains, forced to build the Colosseum. The triumphal Arch of Titus famously showcases the menorah stolen from the Second Temple. 

Today, the 14th of Tammuz, in 1555, Pope Paul IV signed the decree creating the ghetto, requiring all Jews to spend every night locked in a small, infested area of the city constantly flooded by the Tiber River. Jews were prohibited from owning property, forbidden to hold most occupations, and obligated to wear yellow scarves and caps. 

During February Carnevale, Jews were forced to run naked through the Via Del Corso, racing donkeys and mules, jeered by crowds.

While the ghetto was dismantled in 1888, the city’s small Holocaust Museum displays the various grotesque caricatures and slanders against Jews in the 20th century. You can draw a straight line from this propaganda campaign to the transport stop outside the museum where Nazis rounded up over 1000 Jews then sent to Auschwitz.

This week’s Torah portion explains how this happened.

We meet the Moabite King Balak, who fears an Israelite takeover and hires a well-known prophet, Balaam, to issue an epic curse.

In Numbers 22:41, when King Balak takes the Prophet Balaam to a spot to see the Israelites he’s been commissioned to curse, the text says, Va-yar misham kitzai ha-am: “He could see a portion of the people.” It feels like a throwaway line, but why does the Torah say that?

In any event, before the curse, G-d plants words inside Balaam’s mouth, so when the prophet speaks, he offers a blessing.

In Numbers 23:13, it’s the same pattern, even more pointed: King Balak says to the Prophet Balaam, “Come with me to another place from which you can see them—you will see only a portion of them; you will not see all of them—and curse them for me from there.”

In a Broadway theater, this is what is known as a partially obstructed view.

Once again, Balaam opens his mouth after a quick meet-up with G-d, and G-d’s blessing comes forth.

At this point, Balak is like one of those cartoon villains, frustrated that his plan is unraveling, and tells Balaam to stop talking.

But, in Numbers 24, Balaam is now at the very top of the mountain and can see the entirety of the Israelites. 

He doesn’t have G-d’s word implanted in him to resist the mandate to curse the Israelites. Our tradition teaches that the prophet beholds these foreigners in their fullness, each tribe next to another. Out comes Ma Tovu Ohalecha Yaakov – how fair are your tents, oh Jacob. This group apparently doesn’t seem so dastardly and dangerous after all. 

Ma Tovu became such a hit on the Biblical Pop Charts that we sing it every morning when we enter synagogue

It seems reasonable to speculate that King Balak’s strategy had been to prevent Balaam from seeing the wholeness of the Israelites. If you want to curse a people, don't look holistically at them. Don't look carefully. Look at a small section. Look quickly. See what you want to see, and make easy snap judgments.

This is what happened in Rome for centuries: Jews were not seen for who they were. When you enslave people, you fail to recognize their full humanity. When you ghettoize people, you intentionally seek to remove them from your sight. When you stigmatize people, you exaggerate or fabricate details about them in order to make it easier to dismiss them. 

This teaching makes Ma Tovu all the more poignant to me. It is not merely an ode to the Jewish community, its verses now engraved on the walls of Rome’s glorious Great Synagogue built at the turn of the 20th century. Given its context, Ma Tovu is a prayer that those who might be inclined to curse us take a second look and see us for who we truly are.

It is also a reminder for us to extend the same grace to others – that those whom we have been told to judge and hate, but who themselves have done nothing wrong, deserve full consideration. 

Sadly, it’s a lesson that hits close to home for many reasons. Whether we’re talking about the left wing or the right wing or Palestinians or Zionists, it's so easy and sad and destructive to take the narrow view.

This happens even within the Jewish community. There was a deep irony I felt when I toured the Great Synagogue, and the official tour guide explained to those assembled that Rome had 18 synagogues, all Orthodox.

Afterwards, I approached her and said, “My family and I are actually attending a Reform service here in the city tonight for Shabbat.”

The tour guide looked a bit sheepish and said, "Well, yes, there is a community, but it is small and not recognized." 

With all of the division, with all of the pain, with all of the strife in our world today, are we really not going to affirm one another? The Pope recently had an audience with the city’s progressive Jewish community, but the Roman rabbinate is willfully taking an obstructed view.

If the powers that be had come to the service at Beth Hillel that night, they would have seen a full room filled with the joyful sounds of Kabbalat Shabbat in a city that had tried for centuries to silence them. If they had come the next morning, they would have seen five adults celebrating their b’nai mitzvah – people who were reclaiming their Judaism from a disaffected youth, people who had discovered Judaism as adults, people who read the Torah with all their heart and all their might. 

If the powers that be had come to the service and had beheld this tribe of Israel, I would like to think – I pray – that, when they opened their mouths, they would have exclaimed:

Mah tovu ohalecha yaakov, mishkanotecha yisrael.

May the words of this ancient teaching flow to us and through us. Shabbat shalom.