We spent the day in America’s first zoo in Philadelphia. My kids enjoyed the sights and scenes of wildlife, and I learned something new, courtesy of the big colorful signs near the wild cats exhibit: Lions sleep 20 hours a day, and after a good meal, can sleep up to 24 hours. This “Snapple Fun Fact” caught my attention because it connected to an interesting detail from today’s Torah portion and sheds light on something that has bothered me about Jewish history for a while.
In this week’s parsha, we learn about the paranoid Moabite King Balak, who hired the vile prophet Bilaam to curse them to extinction. Historically, Bilaam’s curses were fatal and had destroyed powerful nations before. But it all turned out for the best. Bilaam ultimately delivered beautiful blessings to the Jews three separate times, and rounded them off with the clearest prophecy of Israel’s future stratospheric rise and the arrival of Moshiach ever recorded in the Torah.
The Jews were completely unaware of the dramatic saga of how G-d foiled this fiendish scheme, and it was brought to their attention only through Torah’s prophetic record.
In two of the blessings, Bilaam described the Jews as lions. The first verse was famously used as the inspiration for the name of Israel’s recent miraculous war against Iran, “Operation Rising Lion.” “Behold a people that rises like a fearsome lion, raising itself like a lion. It does not lie down until it consumes prey, and drinks the blood of its slain enemies.” (Numbers 23:24)
The second time Bilaam invoked the image of a lion in his blessings, he said: “You will settle and dwell like a lion, like a fearsome lion that no one would dare rouse.” (Numbers 24:9)
In both, there is a focus on the lion sleeping and rising, and through understanding the deeper meaning of sleep and how it applies to the Jewish nation, we will appreciate the tremendous blessing herein.
During sleep, a person retains all their faculties and abilities, but they do not function properly. The eyes do not see, one cannot notice their surroundings, nor communicate properly. Even in the subconscious mind, which is working during sleep, dreams are typically a hodgepodge of random and chaotic events that usually make no sense. The most absurd things happen in dreams, and when we wake up, we are well advised to forget about them.
Reality can be experienced in two ways: either as a coordinated series of events choreographed by G-d to the minutest detail, or as a chaotic jungle of the survival of the fittest. The first option is the “awake” experience, where life functions according to a divine plan; the second option is a nightmare that only happens during sleep.
When Bilaam compared us to slumbering lions, he meant to emphasize that even when we may be making chaotic choices contrary to Torah’s clear plan for our lives, we are still majestic lions who only need to be awakened to the truth. And even when overwhelming forces of exile and persecution force the Jewish nation into a crouching, sleep-like position, it is only temporary.
I was always disturbed by the fact that the Jewish people have been forced into this position for the vast majority of our history. Today I learned this mirrors the experience of the lions we are compared to, who sleep most of the day, to conserve energy for their nocturnal hunts for prey. But even when we are sleeping, we are conserving and gathering the strength we need to overcome the final hurdles of exile to usher in the blessed era of Moshiach, who will awaken the entire world to the truth of G-d’s divine providence, and true peace and tranquility will reign for all.