Blessings for Good

By Rabbi Roy Feldman

The story of Bil’am and his curses is perhaps the strangest in the Torah.

King Balak of the Moabites procured the services of the great gentile prophet Bil’am to curse the Israelites. Bil’am was a good prophet; our sages compared his prophecy with that of Moshe. But each time he attempted to curse the Israelites, God prevented him from doing so by changing the words of his curses into words of blessing. Why was this act by God necessary? What power could the curses of this prophet possibly contain that God found it imperative to interfere and change them into blessings? After all, are all blessings and curses not really in the hands of God? Why did God not merely ignore these curses?

In 1964, psychologist Robert Rosenthal performed an experiment at an elementary school to see what would happen if teachers were told that certain students in their class were destined to succeed. He had all the students take a test and told the teachers that this very special test from Harvard had the very special ability to predict which children were about to be very special, that is, which ones were about to experience a dramatic growth in their IQ. After the children took the test, he chose several children from each class totally at random. There was nothing at all to distinguish these students from the others, but he told their teachers that the test predicted that those children were on the verge of an intense intellectual bloom.

As he followed the children over the next two years, Rosenthal discovered that the teachers’ expectations of these students really did affect the students. He wrote, “If teachers had been led to expect greater gains in IQ, then increasingly, those kids gained more IQ.”

Why? Rosenthal found that expectations affect teachers’ moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: they consistently touch, nod and smile at those children more. The conclusion is clear: the way others treat us and regard us has a real effect on our own behavior.

Mitzvot in general and brakhot specifically are a means through which we integrate the divine into our everyday existence. Maimonides wrote in his Guide of the Perplexed that we as human beings cannot truly fathom God or Godliness. The only way we can even come close is if God creates ways for us to encounter Him on our level. Mitzvot are the means by which we fuse God’s eternal, infinite world with our temporal, finite one. Everyone eats, drinks, uses the restroom, and washes their hands. But as Jews, we live and see God in our daily lives. We have guidelines about what we can eat and we may or may not do; we have berakhot in order to make certain that we see God’s hand in our lives. These berakhot are meant to have some sort of influence on us and our cognizance of the Almighty.

By the same token, when someone offers a prayer or berakha for another person, it is not meant as a magical incantation but as a part of this very system. When we pray for the ill – it is not because God would not care for them if we omitted the prayer. God cares for the ill whether or not we offer a Misheberakh. The Misheberakh is for us to stop and think about our loved ones who need refuah (healing), it reminds us to think about them and to call or visit them.

When we say at a bris, “May this boy grow to a life of Torah, Chupah, and ma’asim tovim,” there is no guarantee that such will be the case. Even if a prophet were to say it, there would be no guarantee. And of course God doesn’t need our berakha God wants the best for the child even if you don’t say that phrase. The berakha is for us. It is meant as a charge - first to his parents, then to his educators, and ultimately to him to live such a life. We invoke God in order to acknowledge His presence and importance in our lives and to ask for His help, but what we do is ultimately in our hands. By creating and living in an environment that values those things – it sets the expectation up in a certain way: we are a people that values Torah and good deeds.

That is why it was so important for God to change Bil’am’s words. His words had no mystical power. But we all understand the power of suggestion by such a famous and powerful prophet – it is akin to the test result in Rosenthal’s experiment. If such an important world-renowned figure were to suggest to the Israelites enough times that they are sinners, they would believe it and they would become it. Don Isaac Abarbanel wrote in his commentary that the curses uttered by such a famous prophet would cause surrounding nations to view us as weak and vulnerable; they would thus be more likely to attack. But God wanted for the Israelites to hear words of encouragement and not be disparaged; He wanted to set them up for success.

We all have goals, hopes, wishes, beginnings, and ideas for the future. Let us remember to articulate those as prayers and as berakhot. To thank God for His help but to also remind us what we are doing and to inspire us to do more. God will do His part, and we must do ours.