A Kavvanah for Ma Tovu
Kavvanah describes the concentration of the mind on prayer while praying. I began my thinking around Parashat Balak with Ma Tovu ringing in my ears thinking of how the blessing of Balaam could imbue my prayers and encounters with the diversity of contemporary Judaism. In this week’s parashah, Balak King of the Moabites attempts to entice Balaam to curse Israel as he is afraid because they are atzum, strong in numbers. Balaam, after many attempts to avoid the assignment, agrees on the condition that he will only speak the words that are put into his mouth. This does not work out as Balak planned because on the first two attempts Balaam utters a blessing:
And Balak said to Balaam, what have you done to me? I took you to curse my enemies, and behold, you have blessed them (Numbers 23:11)
Balak then leads Balaam to another place, hopeful that ‘Perhaps God will deem it right that you damn them for me there.’
Balak is sure that on the third attempt with the right vantage point Balaam will be able to curse the people of Israel. Balak takes Balaam to the peak of Peor, and it is there that Balaam opens his eyes and pronounces a blessing that spans Numbers Chapter 24 verses 5-9. The words that come out of Balaam’s mouth in verse five are central to Jewish liturgy.
Mah tovu ohalekha Yaakov, mishk’notekha Yisrael
How good are your tents Jacob, your dwelling places, Israel.
In Bava Batra 60a Rabbi Yochanan explains that the blessing arises from the fact that as the Israelites were dwelling together tribe by tribe and the entrances of their tents were not aligned with each other. This gave each tent privacy and made the people worthy of having the divine presence rest on them.
Anybody who has been camping with a large group can appreciate this strategy for living together in harmony in close quarters in impermanent dwellings, a design that values both the individual and the collective, unity and diversity.
The singing of Ma Tovu as a practice captures much of the essence of this unity in diversity with musical settings which reflect the diversity of the places and spaces where we have pitched our tents. LBC is blessed with caring for a very small Czech Torah from Brno and one of my favourite photographs is a picture of Josef Heller’s arrangement for Ma Tovu from Kol T’hilloh.
Josef Heller was well known as the cantor of the Brno Synagogue between 1889 and 1927, a liberal community of nine thousand Jews. Copies of his published work are in the archive of the Prague Jewish Museum. The image with this piece is just one example of the unique ability of melody to connect a lost past to our present.
This week, as I visited the Kotel for the first time Parashat Balak was in my thoughts as I considered the intentions I would take into my prayers.
Balaam does not want to go to curse Israel, and his compromise is that he will abdicate responsibility and only utter what he is told to by God. Balaam is an outsider who sees how beautiful Israel’s camp is. It is not a view from the inside, it is a view from the outside. The challenge for us from the inside is to gaze on the diversity of our tents and see goodness.
Sinat chinam, baseless or senseless hatred is considered the sin of the generation which brought about the destruction of the Second Temple (BYoma 9b) and with this is mind I consider what Rav Kook, said in the Orot
If we were destroyed, and the world with us, due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love — ahavat chinam.
This is the intention I bring to my prayer, to gaze on the hyper diversity of life that surrounds me and to bless it with baseless love, love that has no reason.
Kavvanah is not always easy. Like all liturgical moments, sometimes we think about what is left out of the liturgy and sometimes we try to ignore what is left out of the liturgy. When a text is abbreviated to omit the difficult, troubling, or violent parts how does this impact on Kavvanah?
In the case of Parashat Balak, when we read verse five, we encounter the end of the blessing of Balaam.
El motzi’o mimmitzrayim keto’afot re’em lo yokhal goyim tzarav ve’atzmoteihem yegarem vechitzav yimchatz.
Pretending that the blessing Mah tovu ohalekha Yaakov, mishk’notekha Yisrael in verse five isn’t followed in verse 8 by descriptions of crushing the bones of enemies is not helpful. Neither does it inherently contradict my original Kavvanah of imbuing my vision of the hyper diversity of Jewish life with a baseless love.
What can be helpful is considering post Shoah scholarship like the work of theologians Alastair Hunter and Professor Stephen Leonard Jacobs who critically unpick the discursive practice of re-using biblical names and narratives to refer to contemporary contexts, providing Biblical justifications for violence. It is hard enough dealing with tragedy, war, and violence without what Alistar Hunter et al. (2003) calls de-nomination where specific proper names are de-historicized, emptied of their original content, and re-appropriated in ways which implicates contemporary groups in a negative discourse which they have no means of countering.
Is it the same discursive action to re-appropriate and re-use the blessing of Balaam in the way that I am thinking? Emptying it of its context? Disenfranchising the original diviner and implicating contemporary groups in a discourse, albeit one intended to be filled with love that they have no means of countering? Can we choose to use a biblical justification for baseless love while rejecting biblical justifications for hatred? Not really. There needs to be another path towards the Kavvanah of gazing on the diversity with love.
This brings me back to where I started with Ma Tovu ringing in my ears as I gaze out across the Kotel. In Tuning the soul: music as a spiritual process in the teachings of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratzlav our beloved teacher Dr Chani Smith explains that in the teachings of Nahman of Bratslav
In order to resist depression and find joy, every person has to gather the ‘good points’ within him. The inner core of goodness is an element of holiness that is shared by all Jewish souls. As Nahman explains in LM I melodies are created by joining together the ‘good points’.
My melody for Ma Tovu does not ignore Numbers Chapter 24 Verse 8, rather it connects the points in the blessings across the parashah. In my Kavvanah I am not Balaam, but simply one Jewish soul connecting with an inner core of goodness with the other souls gathered at the Kotel, a place towards which much of the Jewish world prays. I am singing one tune for Ma Tovu with the Kavvanah of joining together the good points in a melody which yearns for baseless love.
Jennifer Verson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.