The ongoing attempt to curse the Jewish People and to change the way we are seen, and if that wasn’t enough, the attempt to change how we perceive ourselves, as a People — as an Am.
This Parsha demonstrates that the Curses only turn into Blessings.
As my Catholic friends will often say: Better to be “seen than viewed”
(“Seeing ourselves” in “Balaam’s Ass”)
Numbers 23:9
כִּֽי־מֵרֹ֤אשׁ צֻרִים֙ אֶרְאֶ֔נּוּ וּמִגְּבָע֖וֹת אֲשׁוּרֶ֑נּוּ הֶן־עָם֙ לְבָדָ֣ד יִשְׁכֹּ֔ן וּבַגּוֹיִ֖ם לֹ֥א יִתְחַשָּֽׁב׃
As I see them from the mountain tops,
Gaze on them from the heights,
There is a people that dwells apart,
Not reckoned among the nations,
Here “seen,” almost viewed . . .
7:00 PM today: link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8521122430?mc_cid=9a31d20c70&mc_eid=UNIQID#success.
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Here, below, for further reading:
American Jewish Identity — Jewish Identity:
How we are perceived — and how we perceive ourselves . . .
. . . as go the Jews, so goes America, along with American civilization
News
Announcing the Natan Notable Books Summer 2025 Winner
JBC Staff
July 8, 2025
Natan and Jewish Book Council are thrilled to announce the Summer 2025 Natan Notable Book: As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us by Sarah Hurwitz (HarperOne, September 9, 2025).
Twice a year, Natan Notable Books recognizes recently published or about-to-be-published non-fiction books that promise to catalyze conversations aligned with the themes of Natan’s grantmaking: reinventing Jewish life and community for the twenty-first century, shifting notions of individual and collective Jewish identity, the history and future of Israel, understanding and confronting contemporary forms of antisemitism, and the evolving relationship between Israel and world Jewry.
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/announcing-the-natan-notable-books-summer-2025-winner
Author Sarah Hurwitz’s As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us was announced by Natan and the Jewish Book Council as the “Natan Notable Book” for summer 2025…
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Jews in Israel – Jews in America: Worldwide perceptions, both in America and around the world.
We are either an Am, a Nation, or we are not . . .
We are being pressured, actually threatened with social isolationism and physical brutalities, to relinquish our ties to our Jewish identity as a People, a Nation, and an “Am” — first by denying the Shoah (i.e. the Holocaust), then downplaying both its facts and the pogroms and slaughterings that both preceeded and led up to it and then now, the deligitimaization of the Jewish State . . . all of which have consequences.
Perceptions often become realities.
Fact: The Media can and does shape “narrative” — i.e., perceptions:
How we are “viewed” — how we “see ourselves”
Different lenses are the media’s main narrative warfare tool against Israel and us, the Jews, as a people, an “Am”, responsible for each other.
The mainstream news media does not just report on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It weaponizes language to create perception.
Two narratives, two standards, one blatant agenda: Seeing / Perception / . . . Viewed
Excerpt 1: When Israelis are murdered, whether by rockets or in pogroms, the coverage is clinical. The victims are statistics. The perpetrators are “militants” rather than terrorists. The violence is regrettable, but understandable. Footage of grieving Israeli mothers is not looped on CNN. The feckless and antisemitic United Nations does not even bother to pass resolutions condemning Hamas’ abominable sexual violence.
This ignoring of Jewish suffering even makes its way into news feature stories that purport to provide some historical context. The 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the Israel War of Independence in 1948 are mentioned routinely, but the 850,000 Jewish refugees dispossessed and expelled from Arab states in the same war are rarely mentioned.
Jewish suffering is treated as a footnote, while every Palestinian grievance is memorialized. Jewish pain is politicized; Palestinian pain is sanctified.
Excerpt 2: This asymmetrical framing fuels anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism. By presenting Palestinian suffering as pure tragedy and Israeli actions as cruel policy, the news media suggests there is a moral equivalence between a liberal democracy defending itself and a Jihadist regime seeking its destruction. This is obscene.
The media also holds Israel to Western democratic standards, while treating Palestinian violence as an inevitable reaction to alleged Israeli oppression. This is the bigotry of low expectations writ large. It infantilizes Palestinians and denies them agency, while demonizing Israel merely for existing.
The media is not reporting the conflict; it is laundering terrorism as tragedy and fueling violence. When the world sees only Palestinian tears and Israeli bombs, the result is marches through the streets of global cities in support of Hamas, calls for boycotts and sanctions that harm Palestinian livelihoods; and crazed campus mobs chanting “From the river to the sea.”
Journalists should report the facts and the truth. In this conflict, the truth is not balanced. It is a war of survival between Jihadists and Jews. Israel fights for its existence. Hamas fights for genocide. Even village idiots can see that these are not even slightly equivalent.
It is time to defang this false narrative, but it is not going to be easy. The anti-Israel bias in the media and in international organizations is not a bug; It is a feature of an ecosystem that ideology, fear, malevolent actors, and intellectual laziness, have shaped.
Demand better. Reject the lies. And never forget: Jewish lives matter.
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This must have been quite a sight: from curse to blessing.
“Better to be seen than viewed”
Numbers 24:5-7 . . . from this week’s Parsha of Balak: and recited by Jews every morning, until this very day.
מַה־טֹּ֥בוּ אֹהָלֶ֖יךָ יַעֲקֹ֑ב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶ֖יךָ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
How fair are your tents, O Jacob,
Your dwellings, O Israel!
כִּנְחָלִ֣ים נִטָּ֔יוּ כְּגַנֹּ֖ת עֲלֵ֣י נָהָ֑ר כַּאֲהָלִים֙ נָטַ֣ע יְהֹוָ֔ה כַּאֲרָזִ֖ים עֲלֵי־מָֽיִם׃
Like palm-groves that stretch out,
Like gardens beside a river,
Like aloes planted by יהוה,
Like cedars beside the water;
יִֽזַּל־מַ֙יִם֙ מִדָּ֣לְיָ֔ו וְזַרְע֖וֹ בְּמַ֣יִם רַבִּ֑ים וְיָרֹ֤ם מֵֽאֲגַג֙ מַלְכּ֔וֹ וְתִנַּשֵּׂ֖א מַלְכֻתֽוֹ׃
Their boughs drip with moisture,
Their roots have abundant water.
Their ruler shall rise above Agag,
Their sovereignty shall be exalted.
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