Rabbinic Reflection: Rabbi Samuel Kaye

The Torah’s Worst Influencer  

 Last month, I fell victim to the algorithm.  

As many of you know, I grew up in Denver, Colorado. So, when a terrorist attack targeted the Jewish community in Boulder, just 45 minutes away, it hit me hard. I couldn’t stop reading news, scrolling through profiles, listening to the stories of the victims, and learning about the attacker.  

I even read the comments.  

I stopped sleeping well, I was anxious and nervous to be in public… and the portal of unlimited knowledge in my pocket, my phone, certainly wasn’t helping. It kept feeding me a steady drip of poisonous material that I greedily consumed.  

I knew it was bad…and so I did the only sensible thing I could think of. I uninstalled the last remnant I had of social media. Within days, I felt like myself again. A month later, I don’t miss it at all.  

In the Talmud, our Rabbis ascribe a specific and special ability to the wicked prophet Bilaam, who appears in our Torah portion this week. They argue that Bilaam’s great power is not that he is a normal prophet, who understands the mind of God. Rather, Bilaam’s talent is that he knows the exact moment when God is angry, that he knows what to say to get God even angrier, and that he can exploit that for his own benefit.  

Bilaam is, for the purpose of this story, the negative algorithm on social media. God, this person is sinning. This person is cruel. This person is hateful. This person doesn’t care. This person is causing pain. This person… etc., etc. Just like when we are doom-scrolling. A terrible flood. A war. An injustice. An unanswerable cruelty. Oy. Yet we can’t look away. Our hearts harden at the sight of it.  

Balaam’s plan is to get God good and angry, by showing God all of the failures and foibles of humanity, so that the Jewish people will receive a terrible fate, and a miserable curse. Of course, as we read in our Torah portion this week, his plan is foiled and God exercises compassion and restraint, and transforms negativity, curses, and spite into an eternal blessing.  

While not everyone can ‘log out’ of social media, I encourage everyone to internalize the lesson of this parshah. From its most ancient words to its most modern relevancies. There have always been outside forces right now that seek, sometimes openly and sometimes quietly, to affect the way we think, feel, and act. 

But, like Bilaams curse, these influences do not need to determine our actions. We write the blessings of our lives with our choices, our faith, and our hopes.  

מַה־טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ יַעֲקֹב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל׃ 

How good are your tents oh Jacob, your dwellings places Israel. 

May it always be so.