The Secret of Jewish Survival Was Never a President: Balak

“Without me,” Trump declared recently, “you wouldn’t be here.”

There is no doubt a hefty dose of self-aggrandisement in that statement — it is unlikely Trump was thinking about the theological or historical context of his words. But it is worth pausing for a moment, if only to help us realign our own self-perception and internal orientation in the world right now.

Iran is not the first, nor will it be the last, enemy to threaten Jews with extinction. The Amalekites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust — we have been through it all. And yet here we are: a people numbering barely 16 million, roughly the population of the Netherlands, 0.2% of humanity. A people who for most of their history lived without sovereignty, without an army, without a state — and yet have outlasted every empire that was certain it had finally solved the Jewish problem. Still topping the charts of civilisation. Still hated and loved in equal measure. Still here.

Why? This week’s parsha tells the story in the best way possible — through a talking donkey, a frustrated sorcerer, and the secret of surviving unconditional hatred.

Balak, king of Moab, is afraid. He has watched the Israelites defeat Sichon and Og and knows that conventional military confrontation is futile. So he reaches for a different weapon. He hires Bilaam — the most feared prophet-for-hire in the ancient world — to destroy Israel through words rather than weapons. Annihilation through incantation rather than genocide. Propaganda as a tool of destruction rather than conventional war.

The Balak narrative is the second-generation version of the Pharaoh story. The first generation faced an immediate, visible, physical threat — God saved them through visible miracles. The second generation faces something subtler: a hidden threat they aren’t even aware of, neutralised by a divine intervention they never see. The Israelites don’t know any of this is happening. Their downfall is plotted behind closed doors. The battle for their existence is fought entirely behind the scenes.

Bilaam belongs to this second, insidious category. The rabbis read his name as bli am — without a people. He is a man of pure self-interest, loyal to no one, defined by his own appetites and ambitions. He goes where the money goes. He serves whoever is paying. And it is precisely this man — rootless, transactional, without solidarity or covenant — whom God chooses as the unlikely vehicle for Israel’s blessing.

His lack of loyalty is made explicit in the famous donkey scene. In a narrow mountain pass, Bilaam’s donkey stops and refuses to move. Bilaam hits her. She stops again. He hits her again. Three times. And then the donkey speaks: “Am I not your donkey, whom you have ridden all your life until today? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?” (Numbers 22:30).

The Torah is using the image of the donkey as cultural commentary on the way we are in the world. It is a story about what loyalty looks like — and what it costs when we ignore it. The donkey stops not out of disobedience but because she can see what Bilaam cannot: the angel of God blocking the path. Loyalty means saying: I cannot see what you see, but I am going to try to understand before I reach for a stick.

Many Jews — particularly in America — know this feeling. They marched for civil rights. They showed up for every progressive cause. They were loyal. And after October 7th, when some of the most brutal crimes imaginable were committed against Jewish women and children, they were met not with solidarity but with silence, or worse — with moral inversion. The hostages sat in tunnels while UN human rights bodies debated proportionality. Jewish students faced campus tribunals for defending their right to exist. Like the Donkey so many Jews are trying to show the broader perspective – to highlight part of the picture so many have been blinded to. But instead  many just reached for the stick.

But here is where the parsha turns the mirror on us.

Bilaam goes to the mountaintop and looks out over the Israelite camp. The first time, he sees only the katzeh — the edge, the extremity, the fragment. And he pronounces: “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:9). We recognise this view. It is the view from inside our own divisions — secular against religious, Diaspora against Israeli, political right against political left. It is the view of those who see only the corner of our story and mistake it for the whole. It is, if we are honest, often our own view of ourselves.

We too are looking at ourselves from the katzeh — seeing our fractures, our failures, our isolation. And from that partial vantage point, Trump’s claim starts to feel almost plausible- being so divided we search for salvation from the outside.

It is this illusion the parsha challenges.

When Bilaam finally ascends to a place where he can see the whole nation, something shifts. “He raised his eyes and saw Israel dwelling according to its tribes, and the spirit of God came upon him” (Numbers 24:2). And then, against his own will, against every financial and political interest he has, the words that come out of his mouth are:

“How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.”

Ma tovu. Words so beloved we say them every morning — not as petition, not as praise, but as a vision of what we must become. Bilaam did not see uniformity or a people who had resolved their differences. He saw tribes — distinct, diverse, fiercely particular — dwelling side by side, each fully itself, and yet unmistakably one people. Unity that does not erase difference. Solidarity that does not require uniformity. The beauty that arises from our interiority, from the loyalty we have to our covenant with our people and with God.

This is not a description of a past reality but a mandate for the present one. Ma tovu is something we need to see in ourselves and is only possible when we stop looking at our own katzeh and climb high enough to see the whole; when we choose to dignify each other across our differences rather than weaponise them; when we allow our tents to stand side by side despite everything that divides us — that is when the blessing becomes real. That is when the forces working behind the scenes to destroy us lose their power. Not because the world suddenly loves us, but because we have become what our enemies fear most: a people who know who they are and cohesively united.

We have now been given sixty days. Not merely for a deal between America and Iran. Sixty days within which the Three Weeks fall — the period of Jewish mourning and introspection that culminates in Tisha B’Av. A period that has always asked the question God asked Adam in the garden, the question Jeremiah cried before the destruction of the Temple: Ayeka? Where are you?

Trump is no prophet. But perhaps, like Bilaam, he is a channel — and what comes through that channel, curse or blessing, depends not on him but on what we choose to see. If we can climb the mountain and see ourselves whole — not the edges but the entirety, not the fractures but the people — then perhaps our fate will be transformed.

Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov. The beauty is ours to create. The unity is ours to nurture. The source of our survival was never any single world leader, ally, or patron.

It was always us.

Shabbat Shalom.

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To Listen to Rabbi Sacks ideas on this topic through my podcast: Episode 3: Future Tense (Part 1) | Books & Beyond Podcast

Episode 4: Future Tense (Part 2) | Books & Beyond Podcast