Sermon by Rabbi Andrea 27th June / 12th Tammuz 5786

Havdala for the Tents of Israel 

This week, in many Reform synagogues and in Israel, we read Parashat Balak. It is one of the strangest stories in the Torah. It has puzzled readers for centuries, and I do not promise to clarify everything — only to make it relevant for today. So let us begin with the basic plot.

Balak, king of Moab, sees the Israelites approaching and becomes afraid. Already, this is not entirely obvious. The Israelites are not coming to wage war against Moab, Balak’s kingdom. They are a people moving through the wilderness, trying to pass through the region on their way elsewhere. But Balak does not want to know. He does not try to understand them. He does not ask who they are, what they want, or what they have suffered. He looks at the Israelites as a problem, as a danger. So he hires Balaam, a non-Israelite prophet, to curse them.

Mind you: in the whole story, not a single Israelite speaks. The Israelites are spoken about, interpreted, imagined. They are not even fully aware of the drama taking place above them, on the heights, where Balaam is summoned to look down at the camp and curse them.

And here the story begins to feel contemporary. Because it is about being looked at from a distance by people who think they already know what we are. Balak does not encounter Israel; he imagines Israel. Think of those public commentators, UN dignitaries, and rapporteurs who speak about Israel with absolute certainty while relying on information selectively provided by Hamas. They have never been in Israel. But they do not need to: Hamas gave them the data they need.

The story continues, and it is surprising. Balaam cannot curse. He cannot say what Balak wants him to say. Again and again, the curse turns into blessing. God places words of blessing in Balaam’s mouth before they can emerge as a curse.

And then comes one of the most powerful sentences in the Torah: the Israelites are “a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations” — hen ‘am levadad yishkon, u-va-goyim lo yitchashav.

What a strange blessing.

Historically, this verse has been used as consolation, as political slogan, and sometimes as an excuse for self-isolation. But let us first notice where it comes from. As we know, it is not said by Moses, nor by an Israelite prophet. It is said by Balaam, the man hired to curse. Israel is described as dwelling apart by someone who has been asked to turn Jewish distinctiveness into vulnerability.

Balak wants Balaam to look at the Israelites from above and say: they are separate, they are different, and therefore they are dangerous.

But the curse fails. What was meant as accusation becomes truth. It is true: the Israelites, the Jews, do dwell apart — but not because Israel is cursed. We dwell apart because there are moments when Jewish life, Jewish memory, and Jewish grief cannot be absorbed into the categories of others.

That matters today. Because today we know what it feels like to be looked at from a distance by people who think they already know what we are, what we mean, what we represent. Since 7 October, many of us have discovered that antisemitism is not only the hatred of enemies. Sometimes it is the silence of friends: those who aim to rule over our feelings, who exploit our vulnerability for grandstanding moral statements.

Immediately after 7 October, there was a moment when we expected, perhaps naively, a small and simple thing: concern. Not agreement with Israeli policies, not indifference to Palestinian suffering, just concern for Jews who had just lived through the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust; concern for families whose children had been murdered at a music festival, for elderly people taken from their homes, for hostages dragged into Gaza, for Israeli towns in which people had hidden in safe rooms while terrorists were still inside Israeli territory.

But, for many of us, concern never came.

Instead, almost immediately, there were demonstrations, statements, and conversations in which the murder of Jews was hurried past and absorbed into a pre-existing political script. The largest massacre of Jews since the Second World War was transformed into a discussion about Israeli militarism, colonialism, occupation, and the usual blah blah blah.

Even before we had buried our dead, we were instructed to contextualise. We were told that the massacre “did not happen in a vacuum.” We were instructed to condemn before we had been comforted.

And so relationships with non-Jewish acquaintances, friends, former friends, and even relatives began to fracture. This happened in every social circle where Jews and non-Jews intermingle: universities, workplaces, interfaith settings — tell me about that. People did not only say explicitly antisemitic things, although many did, and more allowed them to be said. They also revealed that they could care for Jews as historical victims, as symbols, as moral reminders from another century; but living Jews, frightened Jews, Jews with friends and relatives in Israel — these Jews were suddenly impossible to love.

Maureen Lipman captured something of the atmosphere when she said that there was “nowhere safe to be Jewish.” Others have said the same in quieter ways. At the March Against Antisemitism in London on 26 November 2023, Tracy-Ann Oberman spoke eloquently of the frightening and swift rise in antisemitism experienced by people she knew. Among students, the experience has been particularly acute. Friends were lost. The circle changed. Many doors closed.

This is one of the meanings, for us, of “a people that dwells apart.” Not that we despise the nations. The issue is not the non-Jewish world as such. The issue is the person who could not recognise antisemitism when it appeared; the friend who explained it away; the colleague who spoke of trauma and dignity, but suddenly became cold when those words had to be applied to Jews.

And so we are left with a very particular wound: the wound of disorientation. We had thought we knew who stood beside us. We had thought certain friendships, certain intellectual circles, certain shared values would be stronger than prejudice. We had thought that if hatred of Jews appeared, the people who had trained themselves to see hatred would see it.

And then they did not. Or they saw it and diminished it. Or they saw it and “put it into context.”

And we know what happens next, because it keeps on happening. We may block someone on social media, mute someone else, withdraw from a group, stop sending messages, stop going to certain gatherings, and for a few days we feel relief.

Then loneliness begins to do its work. We miss the jokes, the conversations. We are tired of speaking only to other Jews, tired even of being among people who understand, because being understood can also become a little claustrophobic.

And we begin to wonder whether we overreacted. We reread the message. We think perhaps we should have been more patient, more pedagogical, more generous. We reopen the door. We return to the person who left us alone, or to the circle that abandoned us, and something in us shrinks as we do so.

All this is terribly humiliating. In family life — especially in the complicated universe called “Jewish family” — we know the pattern of saying, “I will never speak to that idiot again,” and then, after some time, finding ourselves speaking to them again.

Human relationships are complicated, and loneliness does its work. So we return, and we forget all the curses we once pronounced.

But this is not a family quarrel. This is something different. We are not speaking simply about a misunderstanding. We are speaking about having been morally misnamed. We are labelled genocidal, racist, supremacist, oppressive, and all the sadly familiar rest of it unless we “condemn Israel” — which nobody knows exactly what it means; we only know that it is never enough. And we find ourselves inside vicious prejudices in which people we used to trust now imagine us as too rich, too powerful, too organised, too tribal, too well connected, always ready to exploit our own victimhood.

When we miss the old circle, the old acquaintance, and return to it, after promising ourselves that we would not, the humiliation is doubled. It is humiliating first because we were abandoned. It is humiliating again because we go back to people for whom Jewish attachment to Israel feels shameful. 

There is nothing wrong with reconciliation. We Jews literally sing the praises of reconciliation on the day of the year when the synagogues are packed: Yom Kippur. But reconciliation requires the other person to understand that something happened, that a line was crossed.

Without that recognition, returning is not reconciliation. It is humiliation.

And that is why I began to think that we need a ritual: a moment of reflection that helps us make the rupture real, a form that allows us to say: this happened; it hurt; I mourn it; and I will not keep reopening the wound.

We need a ritual for acknowledging that there has been a loss. When a friendship or an alliance fails in the face of antisemitism, something really has died: the part of ourselves that believed we were safe.

I have prepared this ritual. It is called “Havdalah for the Tents of Israel”.

It is a ritual that you can perform at home, in a moment of quiet and silence. You will find it available on my Substack.

Jewish tradition knows how to mourn losses that are too deep for ordinary speech. It gives us keri‘ah, the tear in the garment, the visible sign that something has been torn in the world. In this ritual, I have translated that gesture into the tearing of a small piece of paper. If you wish, you may write on it the name of the person, the group, the circle, the institution, the union, the community, or the environment that you are now leaving behind.

Jewish tradition also gives us Havdalah, the ritual of distinction, the blessing over the flame and the separation between holy and ordinary time. From Havdalah I have taken the lighting of a candle: a small flame against solitude and abandonment, but also a sign of difference. For us, that candle carries memory, boundary, dignity, and prayer. For someone else, perhaps, it is only a candle. That difference matters.

You will see the rest of the ritual for yourselves. It also contains its own particular Dayenu:

If I explained and you did not listen — dayenu.

If I explained again and you asked me to justify myself — dayenu.

If you saw Jewish grief and answered with suspicion — dayenu.

If your friendship required my silence — dayenu.

I have also included another phrase from this week’s parashah, from Balaam’s blessing, the blessing that was originally meant to be a curse: Mah tovu ohalecha Ya‘akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael — “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel.” These words should sound familiar to us, at least to those of you who come to synagogue in time for the beginning of the service.

When you think about it, this is profoundly Jewish. We begin our service by remembering that even someone who hates us, even someone who has been summoned in order to curse us, may lose control of his own hatred for a moment and be compelled to recognise our dignity, and our right to exist.

The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud, in Bava Batra 60a, ask a very beautiful question: what did Balaam see? What did he see, when he looked down from the heights and suddenly could not curse Israel? Their answer is incredibly profound. He saw that the openings of the Israelite tents were not aligned with one another, that one tent did not stare into another, that one Jewish household did not expose the private life of another. Each entrance had restraint, each dwelling had dignity. From that modesty came the blessing.

And modesty, privacy, that protected interior, is what we need again. We live in a world that constantly encourages us to share, to display, and then to explain, to justify, as though absolute transparency were the same thing as liberation.

But Judaism teaches something different. Judaism teaches the virtue of tzniut, modesty. It is an often misunderstood term. Tzniut is not only, and certainly not primarily, about controlling women’s bodies, as it is too often reduced to in narrow religious discourse.

Tzniut is the art of preserving a space of dignity: a space free from intrusion, free from moral exhibitionism, free from the gaze that judges before it understands. And in this time, when even the most intimate part of a human being — sexuality itself — is constantly scrutinised, examined, and politicised by inspectors searching for traces of patriarchy or oppression, the Jewish concept of tzniut becomes, quite simply, revolutionary.

Because it tells us that liberation is not the same as exposure. It tells us that dignity requires a threshold. It tells us that not every part of the self must be made available for public inspection or moral judgment. Tzniut means that a human being is not a public document.

The tents of Israel were beautiful because they were not arranged as instruments of surveillance. And this is what we must recover now: the courage to say that not everyone is entitled to enter our tent. Not every question deserves an answer. Not every provocation deserves our energy.

Our tent may become smaller. Some people may no longer enter it. But it may also become more beautiful, more Mah Tovu.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what I think I have learned this year from Parashat Balak, and what I wanted to share with you in the form of a ritual. Because, after all, creating and adapting rituals is part of the work of a rabbi. And I am grateful that this community gives me the possibility, the trust, and the freedom to do precisely that: to take an ancient text, listen to the wounds of the present, and try to shape from both of them a small act of healing.

You can find the  Havdalah for the Tents of Israel  below. A downloadable copy is available.

https://open.substack.com/pub/rabbiandreazanardo/p/a-people-that-dwells-apart?