“Lo, a people that rises like a lion, leaps up like the king of beasts.” (Num. 23:24)
Commenting on the verse that provided the official name (Operation Rising Lion) for the recent war with Iran, which appears in this week’s Torah portion, Rashi offers two explanations. By way of midrash, he states “When they rise from their sleep in the morning, they are as strong as lions, ready to grab at [the opportunity to perform] the mitzvot: to don a tallit, to recite Shema, and to put on tefillin.” In a less fanciful reading, he suggests understanding the verse as saying that the people of Israel rise up to make war on its enemies and be victorious.
Our Sages taught us that we can learn from Balaam’s blessings what he wanted to curse (b. Sanhedrin 105a). The fact that in Balaam’s blessings we find Israel’s mighty acts of performing mitzvot and learning Torah combined with its mighty acts of war teaches us that it was precisely on this point that he wanted to curse them: that the Torah and warfare would be separate. He wanted a situation in which people of Torah learning would not engage in war and, conversely, warriors would be disconnected from Torah and mitzvot. The attempt to separate those realms is the opposite of everything written in the Torah and Jewish law.
