The Bilaam Look-Alike

By Moshe Feiglin

When I think of Bilaam from this week's Torah portion, the immediate association in my head is Germany; lofty spiritualism the roots of which are sunk in impurity; a nation that is antithetical to the eternal Nation of Israel and that seeks to destroy it.

"We have no place in the world as long as even one Jew exists within it," said the German oppressor, and he was right. Moses and Bilaam are two poles of tremendous metaphysical energy. They cannot exist together.

"The Jew brought morality to the world and thus must be destroyed," he said. Only the nation that brought Beethoven and Goethe to the world could understand the depth of the essence of this war. The threat that they felt was real and the solution that they found was the only one possible, from their viewpoint.

"And he saw Amalek and he lifted his parable and he said, Amalek is the first of nations and his end will be destruction" (From this week's Torah portion, Balak, Numbers 24:20).

The first of nations? Rashi explains that Amalek was the first to fight against the Nation of Israel. The world's predisposition to always search for the "final solution", its rehash of the "Jewish problem" garbed as the "Israeli problem", the establishment of an ever-growing question mark over the necessity and the right of the Nation of Israel to exist - have all taken place after the Amalek of our generation has called for Israel's destruction.

In our times, Amalek is Ahmadinijad. The fact that Israel has not attacked him has opened the gates to attacks by other nations; Bilaam-like attacks- academic/spiritual attacks in the universities of London where they debate how the world will look without Israel. Spiritual attacks are just the promo for physical attacks. That is why Israel must make a strategic pre-emptive strike: not against the nuclear plants in Iran, but against Ahmadinijad.

The Holocaust was the greatest desecration of G-d's Name in history. But it was also a sanctification of the Nation of Israel. For when absolute evil that controls the most powerful army in human history sees a little Jewish boy as its greatest enemy - it actually declares that the Jews are the representatives of the other side - the side of absolute goodness, the children of G-d.

Shabbat Shalom