Address by Rabbi Benjy Morgan
As part of Fforestfach Colloquium VII
I was born in New York to British parents who happened to be living there at the time. By what seemed little more than an accident of birth, I became an American citizen with an American passport. To me, it was simply a passport. To my grandmother, it meant something altogether different.
She had escaped Vienna in 1939. She belonged to a generation that discovered, through unimaginable suffering, that civilisation is far more fragile than it appears. She had watched one of the world’s most cultured societies descend into barbarism within a few short years. Whenever she saw that passport, she would point to it and say, ‘Benjy, never give up your American passport. One day you may need somewhere else to go.’
As a child, I couldn’t understand her. Leave where? Britain was my home. My friends were here. My education was here. My future was here. Like every child, I assumed history moved in only one direction; that each generation learned from the mistakes of the last, and that what had happened to my grandmother belonged to another age. For most of my life, I believed she was wrong.
Yet over the past two years in my position as Rabbi for the largest young Jewish community in the UK, I have found myself returning to those conversations with increasing frequency. Not because I intend to leave Britain – I don’t – but because, for the first time in my life, I hear young British Jews asking questions I never imagined I would hear:
Rabbi, should I build my future here? Will my children have a future here?
Those are extraordinary questions – not because they are being asked by Holocaust survivors, but because they are being asked by young people standing at the very beginning of their lives.
Whenever antisemitism is discussed, the obvious question is, ‘What does this mean for the Jews?’ It is an important question. But I believe there is another, that is even more important: ‘What does it mean for Britain?’ Because the true measure of a nation is not whether the majority feels secure. It is whether its minorities still feel they belong.
It is perhaps no coincidence that this past Shabbat, millions of Jews throughout the world read the portion from the Book of Numbers. For more than three thousand years, wherever Jews have lived, they have shared the same weekly conversation with the Bible. We have always believed these readings are more than memories of the past. They are conversations between eternity and the present. The words never change. We do. Every generation must therefore ask not only, ‘What did these words mean then?’ but, ‘What are they asking of us now?’
This week’s reading tells the story of two very different men. One is Balak, King of Moab. The other is Balaam, a prophet whose blessings and curses were believed to shape the fate of nations. Balak looks across the wilderness and sees the Israelites camped on his border. They have defeated neighbouring kingdoms and are on their way to the Promised Land. Although they have not attacked Moab, Balak is overcome with fear. Convinced that he cannot defeat them by force, he sends for Balaam with an extraordinary request: ‘Come, curse this people for me.’
The story that follows is one of the Bible’s most remarkable. There is a frightened king, a reluctant prophet, an angel standing unseen in the road, and a donkey that sees what the prophet cannot. In the end, every curse Balaam attempts to pronounce becomes a blessing.
It is a dramatic story. But beneath the drama lies a profound question. The Bible is interested not simply in telling us that hatred exists. It wants us to understand how hatred begins.
The answer starts with a single Hebrew word: Balak saw.
The Bible could have told us that Balak hated. It could have told us that he plotted against the Israelites, or that he was paralysed by fear. Instead, it tells us something far more subtle. It tells us simply that ‘Balak saw.’ That is a remarkable choice of words, because it suggests that hatred begins not with violence but with vision. Fear rarely changes the facts; it changes the way we interpret them. The facts remain the same, but the story we tell ourselves about those facts slowly changes until reality gives way to perception. Long before people commit acts of hatred, they begin to see the world differently.
That process unfolds almost immediately. Balak no longer speaks about men, women and children. He no longer speaks about families, neighbours or individuals. Instead, he speaks only of ‘this people.’ The Israelites have ceased to be human beings with names and faces; they have become a category, a collective threat. The Bible understood thousands of years ago what history has confirmed ever since: before people are stripped of their rights, they are stripped of their individuality. Every hatred begins by reducing human beings to a label. This people is a destructive force destroying everything in its path – like the way an ox licks up the grass in the meadow. Here comes the justification part. This is the reason why they must be eradicated: they are a cancerous force whose only cure is eradication.
It is only after that transformation has taken place that Balak sends for Balaam. His words contain, I believe, one of the most profound questions in the entire Bible: ‘I know that those whom you bless are blessed, and those whom you curse are cursed.’ Every year, when I hear those words read in the synagogue, I find myself asking the same question. If Balaam possessed the power to bless, why did Balak never ask for a blessing? Why not say, ‘Bless my people. Bless my kingdom. Bless our children and protect them with peace and security.’ Why ask instead for a curse?
The answer, I believe, lies at the heart of the psychology of hatred. A healthy society asks, ‘How can we become stronger? How can we build a better future?’ A society that has lost confidence in itself asks a different question altogether: ‘Who can we blame?’ Balak had become so consumed by Israel that he could no longer imagine the flourishing of Moab. His imagination had become captive to his fear. Instead of asking how his own people might prosper, he devoted his energy to preventing another people from flourishing. At that moment, hatred ceased to be a means of self-protection and became an end in itself.
The Torah then adds one final and unforgettable scene. God tells Balaam not to go, yet he goes. An angel stands in the road before him, but the prophet cannot see what his donkey sees with perfect clarity. The donkey stops, Balaam strikes it, and eventually the donkey speaks. It is one of the strangest episodes in the Bible, but its message is deeply profound. Imagine this: if a donkey suddenly spoke to us, most of us would stop and question everything we thought we knew. Balaam does not. He simply argues back. Once an idea has taken hold of us completely, evidence alone is rarely enough to change our minds. Facts no longer matter. Reason no longer matters. Even the miraculous no longer matters. The greatest blindness is not the inability to see. It is the refusal to allow reality to challenge the story we have chosen to believe.
That, I believe, is why this ancient narrative continues to speak with such urgency today. It is not merely telling us about a king who lived three thousand years ago. It is describing the moral and psychological progression by which every prejudice develops: fear distorts perception; distorted perception dehumanises; dehumanisation becomes obsession; and obsession eventually blinds us to reality itself. By the time hatred reaches that point, its greatest victim is no longer only the people it targets. It is the society that has surrendered its capacity to see truth.
The story ends with a remarkable irony. Balak believed that Israel posed the greatest threat to Moab’s future. The Torah quietly suggests the opposite. The greatest threat to Moab was never Israel. It was the fear that had taken hold of Moab itself. A society that becomes consumed by cursing others eventually loses the ability to bless itself. It invests so much energy identifying enemies that it neglects the far greater task of building its own future. The tragedy is not simply that hatred harms its victims, although it does. It is that hatred ultimately impoverishes the civilisation that embraces it.
That, I believe, is why the Torah preserves this story. It is not simply recounting the actions of an ancient king who lived more than three thousand years ago. It is offering every generation a mirror in which to see itself. Every civilisation experiences moments of fear. Every nation faces uncertainty. Every society reaches moments when it is tempted to explain its problems by locating them in someone else. The question the Torah asks is whether we will resist that temptation. Will we respond to fear by strengthening ourselves, or by searching for someone else to blame?
There is a reason the Torah so often places blessing and curse side by side. They are not merely opposite words; they represent two fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. Blessing begins with responsibility. It asks, ‘What can I build? What can I contribute? How can I leave the world better than I found it?’ Curse begins with blame. It asks instead, ‘Who is responsible for my frustrations? Who can I hold accountable for my disappointments?’ One way of thinking creates the future. The other slowly consumes it.
Perhaps that is why antisemitism has always been unlike any other prejudice. It is never simply about Jews. Jews are its object, but they are rarely its cause. Antisemitism is what happens when a society loses confidence in itself and begins searching for a scapegoat instead of a solution. The names change from age to age, but the mechanism remains remarkably constant. Fear gives way to grievance, grievance gives way to blame, and blame eventually hardens into hatred.
The victim may change, but the moral collapse always belongs to the society that permits it. The greatest danger is not simply that Jews are blamed. It is that Jews are made to feel different. A healthy society does not ask its Jewish citizens to explain themselves, hide who they are, or wonder whether they have a future in the country they call home. The moment a society becomes comfortable with one of its minorities living in fear, looking over its shoulder, or feeling like a guest rather than a citizen, the crisis is no longer Jewish. It is national. Hatred flourishes not only because some people embrace it, but because too many others learn to tolerate it. And a civilisation that tolerates the othering of its Jews is already beginning to lose the very values that made it worth defending.
My grandmother belonged to a generation that witnessed that collapse. She watched one of the most educated, cultured and sophisticated societies in history descend into barbarism. It did not happen because Germany lacked science, music or philosophy. It happened because it lost something far more fundamental: the moral confidence to build a shared future. It ceased asking, ‘How do we become a better nation?’ and began asking, ‘Who is preventing us from becoming one?’ History has answered that question many times, and it has never answered it differently.
Only weeks ago, two minutes from my own home and Jewish synagogue, Jews were stabbed for one reason alone: because they were Jews. That was not simply another antisemitic incident. Violence is never the beginning of the story; it is the final chapter. Long before the knife comes, the suspicion, the stereotyping, the isolation and the quiet acceptance that Jews somehow stand apart. We have learned, at terrible cost, that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. It rarely remains confined to its first victims. It spreads, until the values that once held a society together begin to unravel.
Of one thing I have little doubt. The Jewish people will endure. We have endured Pharaoh, Haman, the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, the pogroms and the Holocaust. Ours has never been an easy journey, but it has been an enduring one. The real question, therefore, is not where the Jewish people will be. History has already answered that. The real question is where Britain will choose to be.
I continue to believe in this country. I believe Britain is at its best when it is confident enough in its own values that it has no need to fear those who are different. I believe its greatness has never lain in the uniformity of its people, but in the values they have chosen to share: liberty under the rule of law, the dignity of every human being, the ability to disagree without hatred, and the conviction that our differences need not become our divisions.
My grandmother feared that one day I might need another passport. For most of my life I believed she was wrong. Today, I still hope she was.
Because, in the end, every generation is handed the same choice that confronted Balak: not whether to choose between one people and another, but whether to build a society whose instinct is to bless or whose instinct is to curse. The future of every civilisation depends upon that choice.
Rabbi Benjy Morgan was born in New York City and raised in the UK. He has spent 14 years studying in the top Rabbinic training academies in the world. Today he is the Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Learning Exchange (JLE), a London-based organisation which aims to teach Judaism’s relevance and deeper meaning to 21st-century Jewish youth and young professionals, so as to enable them to connect with one another and make informed life decisions.