[Avodah] Was Bil'am Jewish?

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Jul 01, 2018 at 12:01:59AM -0400, Akiva Miller via Avodah wrote:
: What Bil'am said was, "I can't do what HASHEM MY GOD doesn't let me
: do." (B'midbar 22:18) I was very surprised by this phrase...

: Very unusual. There must be something going on here. My understanding
: has been that Bil'am was a rasha, but nevertheless he was a deeply
: spiritual rasha, and that spirituality enabled him to nevuah. But now
: it seems that on top of all that, he was a monotheist. It must not
: have been easy to be a non-Jewish monotheist in those days. But I
: guess cognitive dissonance is a useful tool for reshaim of all kinds.

This works well with my recent (few minute old) blog post.
<http://www.aishdas.org/asp/bilam-frum>
I argue that the whole point of Bil'am might have been to illustrate
how monotheism and deveiqus don't guarantee being good people.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

Aspaqlaria
Bil'am the Frummy
by micha · Published 18 Tammuz 5778 - Sun, Jul 1, 2018
Sun, Jul 1, 2018

The Medrash Tankhuma (Balaq 1) says:
    And if you ask: Why did the Holy One blessed be He, let his Shechinah
    rest upon so wicked a non-Jew? So that the [other] peoples would have
    no excuse to say, `If we had nevi'im, we would have changed for the
    better', He established for then nevi'im. Yet they [these nevi'im]
    broke down the moral fence of the world...

For that matter, the Sifrei says on the last pasuq of the Torah:
    And another navi did not arise again in Israel like Moshe: In Israel,
    [another] one did not arise, but among the nations of the world,
    one did arise. And who was it? Bil'am ben Be'or.

So here you have a prophet with the abilities of Moshe (whatever they
meant by that) and yet he was no paragon of moral virtue. He didn't
teach them how to lift themselves up, but how to corrupt the Jews.

So how does that address the complaint of the nations? They had their
navi, but they said it was unfair that they didn't have nev'i'im to
give moral instruction -- and Bil'am wasn't capable of leading them in
that way.

Perhaps Bil'am stood for them as an example to teach them just that
point. The nations are described as complaining that if they only had a
navi they would have been as good as the Jews. But Bil'am was there to
show them nevu'ah wasn't the answer. Even being a navi and having the
Shechinah rest upon them is not sufficient to make an ideal person.

The whole detour into telling us about an event in the lives of Balaq and
Bil'am is such a departure from the rest of the Torah, it is considered
a separate book. "Moshe wrote his book and Parashas Bil'am" (Bava Basra
14b) So why it it included?

Based on the above suggestion, the section teaches us about the dangers
of frumkeit. We can get so caught up in the pursuit of deveiqus, one's
personal relationship with G-d, one can end up as self-centered and
honor-seeking as Bil'am. We need to start out pursuing moral and ethical
behavior, ehrlachkeit, and then the connection with the Divine can be
harnessed to reach those goals.