Sermon Archives

Dwelling Alone

I. On Shabbat, June 10, 1967—the sixth and final day of a still-unnamed war in the Middle East—Rabbi Norman Lamm z”l, then senior rabbi of the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side, delivered a sermon titled Three Long Lessons from One Short War. “The difference in mood and temperament of our people between last Saturday and this,” he began, “can best be summed up by a verse from the Psalms we recite in Hallel: Min ha-metzar karati Yah—‘From the straits I called out to God’—anani va-merhav Yah—‘God answered me with expansiveness.’”

It was too soon, Lamm acknowledged, to grasp the full meaning—but not too soon to draw early lessons. The first came from another Psalm: Al tivtechu bindivim—“Do not trust in princes.” In 1957, Israel withdrew from Sinai under international guarantees. Ten years later, Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers and closed the Straits of Tiran—violations met with silence. President Johnson urged restraint: “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone.” In the end, it did.

“In essence,” Lamm said, “Israel fought alone—and probably will remain mostly alone in the diplomatic battles yet to come.” He added: “We must realize that in an ultimate sense we are, as a Gentile prophet noticed with great perception, Am levadad yishkon—‘a people that dwells alone.’” That loneliness, he reflected, is both our “greatest weakness and our greatest strength, a source of our deepest anguish and our highest joy.” We need and should seek alliances. “But after all is said and done, we are a lonely people.”

II. That “Gentile prophet,” of course, was Bilaam, one of the two central figures, alongside the Moabite king Balak, in this week’s parsha.

And what a strange parsha it is.

Uniquely, until the last nine verses, it is told entirely from an outsider’s perspective. No other Torah portion unfolds so completely beyond the Israelite camp—in the minds and mouths of foreign kings and prophets. And what we find there borders on the absurd. Bilaam, a celebrated seer, cannot see what his donkey sees plainly before them: an angel with a drawn sword. Then the donkey speaks, without the fanfare of a divine miracle, but as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Bilaam, hired to curse Israel, opens his mouth and blessings pour out instead. Balak grows increasingly frantic, dragging him from one vantage to the next, hoping for a better angle—each time with the same frustrating result.

And yet: from this strange, almost slapstick story come some of the Torah’s most enduring images of the people of Israel. It is Bilaam, this morally sketchy prophet-for-hire, who utters lines we still recite today:

• Mah tovu ohalekha Yaakov, mishkenotekha Yisrael—“How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel” (Num. 24:5)—from the daily morning liturgy, perhaps the second prayer children are taught.
• Lo hibit aven b’Yaakov, v’lo ra’ah amal b’Yisrael…—“He has seen no iniquity in Jacob…” (Num. 23:21)—from shofrot in Rosh Hashanah Musaf.
• And, of course, the verse Rabbi Lamm returned to in 1967: Hen am levadad yishkon, u-va-goyim lo yitḥashav—“There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations” (Num. 23:9).

III. “How can I damn whom God has not damned? How doom when Hashem has not doomed?” Bilaam asks—right before calling Bnei Yisrael a people that dwells apart. The implication would seem obvious: being an am levadad yishkon is a blessing, not the curse Balak had sought. That is how Rashi reads it. Echoing the Targum, he interprets Bilaam’s words as a theological promise: Israel’s aloneness is its spiritual inheritance, a future condition of divine favor.

Nearly a millennium later, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l was more ambivalent. Across history, he wrote, the verse had too often proved true: Jews found themselves isolated, unwelcome, even vilified. At times, that forged resilience. But Sacks warned that elevating this condition into a credo was dangerous. Jewish flourishing, he insisted, had always depended on engagement—with ideas, nations, and the broader moral world. “A people that dwells alone,” he cautioned, should not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

IV. Bilaam’s words have taken on new resonance in recent years. More than at any time in decades, many American Jews feel a deep, even existential, aloneness.

The shock of October 7 was followed, for many, by a second trauma: the silence—or worse, the hesitation—of those we once thought of as natural allies. Horror was met with hedging. What should have been a moment of shared outrage became a source of distancing. For many, it felt like betrayal.

And even when we are embraced, the terms of that embrace can feel conditional. We may be welcomed—so long as we leave certain parts of ourselves at the door. So long as we conform to a particular notion of the “good Jew.”

But this aloneness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s woven into a wider fabric of disconnection: pandemic solitude, public fragmentation, social-media echo chambers. Jewish aloneness is one thread in a broader pattern—the aloneness of Jews in America, of Israel on the world stage, of the hostages still in captivity, and, surely, of many who have returned.

But that sense of aloneness—so raw, so acute—can also be seductive. And here we have to tread carefully. When taken too far, the conviction of being an am levadad yishkon can breed a kind of smug self-certainty. It can turn “not being reckoned among the nations” into an excuse to ignore their concerns. It can harden into an ideology, or worse, an alibi for evading moral reasoning, as if divine election absolved us of accountability.

Looking back, we might even ask whether the spiritual ecstasy of that Shabbat Naso in June 1967 carried within it the seeds of something sobering. What many saw then as a berakhah is, at the very least, hard to view as unmitigated. Some might even—reluctantly—question whether it was a berakhah at all. But that, too, depends on what we make of our aloneness.

Rabbi Lamm understood this. In a sermon delivered in early 1974, three months after the Yom Kippur War, he reflected on the shifting mood in Israel. The euphoria of 1967 had given way to disorientation and uncertainty, as well as a desire to understand the spiritual meaning of what had happened. Lamm turned to the sidra for that Shabbat, Parshat Vayeḥi, where Jacob gathers his sons and says, He’asfu ve-agidah lachem et asher yikra etchem b’acharit ha-yamim—“Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you at the end of days.” But the prophecy is never delivered. The Rabbis explained: Jacob sought to reveal the End, but the Divine Presence departed from him. Lamm offered another view. The word yikra is from the root kara with an aleph, to call; not kara with a hay. Jacob’s aim wasn’t to disclose the timeline of redemption, but to teach his sons to perceive history as a kriyah—a call. Not what would happen, but how they would respond.

In this reading, the Yom Kippur War was just such a call—a moment that revealed something, though what was not yet fully clear. And Lamm was warning, gently but unmistakably, against pre-empting its interpretation. He was warning against reading history as messianic script; against the ideology emerging from figures like R. Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples, many of whom would go on to found Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”) later that year. Even in 1967, Lamm had insisted that Israel’s aloneness was the source of its “greatest strengths” and also its “greatest weaknesses.”

And so we return to Bilaam’s words: Hen am levadad yishkon u’vagoyim lo yitḥashav. In this moment, they land with particular weight. But aloneness is not fate—and it is not a license. Perhaps we can hear in them a kriyah: a call to choose how we meet our aloneness, rather than be ruled by it.