Parashat Chukat–Balak recounts two successive moments of mystery and confrontation in the desert. In Chukat, the riddle of the red heifer appears—a ritual that purifies through something that remains incomprehensible in itself. Then Miriam dies, the people run out of water, and Moses, out of frustration, strikes the rock instead of speaking to it. Water flows, but Moses loses his right to enter the land. Later, the people are healed of snakebites by looking at a bronze serpent: a shift in perspective, from despair to hope.In Balak, the story turns into a political and spiritual thriller. Balak, king of Moab, fears Israel and hires the seer Balaam to curse the people. But time and again, a blessing comes from his mouth—the most famous: “How good are your tents, Jacob…” (Mah tovu ohalècha Yaakov). Ultimately, Balaam attempts to undermine Israel through temptation and idolatry, which leads to a plague. Together, these passages show that holiness is sometimes incomprehensible, and that even enemies can unwittingly become prophets.Chukat begins with a phrase that commentators have for centuries interpreted as an invitation to reflect on the very limits of human understanding: זֹאת חֻקַּת הַתּוֹרָה, “This is the statute of the Torah” (Bemidbar 19:2). In his commentary on this verse, Rashi cites the ancient idea that Satan and the nations torment Israel with the question of what this commandment actually means and what purpose it serves, and concludes with the formula that characterizes the entire genre of the chuk: גְּזֵרָה הִיא מִלְּפָנַי וְאֵין לְךָ רְשׁוּת לְהַרְהֵר אַחֲרֶיהָ — it is a decree from Me; you have no right to ponder it.The idea that the red heifer has something to do with the golden calf does not come from Ramban, as is often claimed, but from the Midrash — Rashi quotes it in the name of Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan: תָּבוֹא הָאֵם וּתְקַנֵּחַ צֹאַת בְּנָהּ, “Let the mother come and clean up her child’s filth.” Ramban himself is, in fact, more reserved: for him, a chuk remains, by definition, beyond a complete explanation—including this one.Hirsch interprets this restraint not as a capitulation to the irrational, but as a didactic program. The para aduma confronts precisely the person who thinks they can purify themselves through their own insight with the limits of that insight. A chuk teaches, in his reading, not that the world is incomprehensible, but that human beings are not the measure of all things.When the text states that Miriam died there and was buried there (וַתָּמָת שָׁם מִרְיָם וַתִּקָּבֵר שָׁם, 20:1), it is immediately followed by the announcement that the community has run out of water (20:2). Rashi links the two verses to the well-known teaching that the well was given to the people for forty years thanks to Miriam’s merit—מִכָּאן שֶׁהָיָה לָהֶם הַבְּאֵר אַרְבָּעִים שָׁנָה בִּזְכוּת מִרְיָם. Hirsch sees more than just a miracle story in this detail: for him, water represents a form of influence that stems not from power, but from character. Only her death reveals what her life had concealed, namely that this blessing was never a given.The people complain again, and Moses—exhausted after forty years of leadership—loses his composure. “Listen now, you rebels” (שִׁמְעוּ־נָא הַמֹּרִים, 20:10), he cries out, and strikes the rock. For Ramban, the mistake lay not in the strike itself, but in those words: a leader who accuses the people of being rebellious sets a different example than a leader who persuades them. Hirsch sees this as a missed pedagogical opportunity: Moses should have demonstrated that the word, not force, unlocks the source of holiness. The punishment follows almost immediately: he will not lead this community into the land (20:12)—one of the most bitter moments in the Torah, a leader who stumbles just before he arrives.Later on the journey, the people complain again, and this time God sends fiery serpents among them (וַיְשַׁלַּח יְהוָה בָּעָם אֵת הַנְּחָשִׁים הַשְּׂרָפִים, 21:6). Healing comes through a remarkable symbol: whoever looks up at the bronze serpent will live (וְהִבִּיט אֶל־נְחַשׁ הַנְּחֹשֶׁת וָחָי, 21:9). The Mishnah poses the obvious question—וְכִי נָחָשׁ מְמִית אוֹ נָחָשׁ מְחַיֶּה, does a serpent kill or give life?—and immediately provides the answer itself: as long as Israel looked up and submitted its heart to the Father in heaven, it was healed; if not, it wasted away. It was not the object that healed, but the direction of one’s gaze. Hirsch interprets the bronze serpent in the same vein: a person is healed when he lifts his gaze beyond immediate fear, toward something that transcends him.With Balak, the tone shifts from ritual and inner struggle to geopolitics and fear. Moab is terrified of the people, the text says (וַיָּגָר מוֹאָב מִפְּנֵי הָעָם, 22:3), and Rashi notes that this is not a fear born of strength. What emerges here is an early, recognizable form of what would later be called antisemitism: an instinctive image of fear, based on numbers. Balak sees in Israel no people, no culture, no bearers of a covenant—he sees a mass, a threat by sheer scale. In his commentary on these verses, Hirsch calls this the kind of fear of strangers that arises as soon as a people simply exists, without having done anything to deserve that fear. It is, one might say, demographic anti-Semitism. Now the issue is land. (For Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist movements, it was and is not at all about land, but about the genocide of all Jews everywhere in the world.)As soon as Balaam is hired, something shifts in Balak’s attitude. He no longer merely fears the people; he also begins to hate them—and not in spite of his lack of understanding, but precisely because of it. This is a second, distinct form: anideological anti-Semitism, which does not know Israel but seeks to destroy it, fueled not by what Israel does, but by what the enemy imagines Israel to be. Balak understands nothing of their God, nothing of their morality, nothing of their history, and it is precisely that lack of understanding that becomes fuel. Whereas the first model fears numbers, the second fears meaning.Balaam himself, in Ramban’s reading of his introductory verses, is a seer of an unusually high prophetic level—a level that Ramban explicitly compares, in degree, to that of Moses, without equating the two any further. But his gift serves his ego, and that comes at a price: his donkey sees the angel of the Eternal One before he does (וַתֵּרֶא הָאָתוֹן אֶת־מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה, 22:23). The Midrash interprets this as an almost satirical reversal—whoever uses his gifts for himself loses the ability to see the truth, even while his own pack animal still sees it.When Balaam tries to curse, a blessing comes from his mouth: “How can I curse what God has not cursed?” (מָה אֶקֹּב לֹא קַבֹּה אֵל, 23:8)? Rashi notes that he cannot change the word of the Eternal One. Then follows the most famous blessing in the entire parashah—מַה־טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ יַעֲקֹב, “How good are your tents, Jacob” (24:5)—where Rashi notes that the tent entrances were not directly opposite one another. Here, goodness is not evident in a grand ritual, but in the way people arrange their own small space in relation to that of others. Balaam, in spite of himself, sees further than he himself understands: he calls himself “the man with the open eye” (נְאֻם הַגֶּבֶר שְׁתֻם הָעָיִן, 24:3) and prophesies that a star will rise from Jacob (דָּרַךְ כּוֹכָב מִיַּעֲקֹב, 24:17)—a messianic flash, against his own will.The parashah ends on a somber note: Israel clings to Baal Peor (וַיִּצָּמֶד יִשְׂרָאֵל לְבַעַל פְּעוֹר, 25:3). What Balaam could not achieve with a curse, he achieves, according to the Midrash, with advice to Balak: if you cannot curse, you can still undermine. Hirsch sees in the Peor cult the antithesis of Israel’s calling: a cult that does not elevate but degrades humanity, and in this, the exact opposite of what Balaam’s blessing had just affirmed.Chukat-Balak thus follows a dual thread: a people learning that something need not be understandable to be valuable, and an enemy demonstrating that something need not be understood to be hated. In this way, Balak represents two forms of anti-Semitism at once—the older one, which fears numbers like the Pharaoh, and the younger one, which fears the value of the people. What the parashah ultimately emphasizes is that Israel is not defined by the gaze of its enemies, but by a blessing that even an enemy, against his own intentions, cannot stop.

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