How Goodly Are Your Tents, O Jacob. How Goodly Is Your Society, O Britain.

In this week’s double-Parasha Torah reading, the wicked Bilaam is commissioned to curse the tribes of Israel and finds himself unable to do so. Instead, he looks over the Israelite encampment and remarks Mah Tovu Ohalecha Yaacov.

What was it about our encampment, Rashi wants to know, that struck Bilaam as so good? Our greatest commentator supplies an answer drawn from Talmud Baba Metzia, “It was that the entrances of their tents weren’t directed one facing the other.” The Mishnah in Baba Metzia is concerned with how houses should be set up to ensure privacy. But I wonder if what really made the ancient society of Israel good in its sprawl of non-lined-up tents had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with a celebration of the multi-directionality of how each of our ancestors set up their individual tent.

It’s easy to imagine that a society is at its best when everything is lined up neatly in disciplined rows. There’s a certain kind of efficiency that arises when everything and everyone is neatly arrayed. It can feel optimised. But optimisation isn’t the same as goodness. Efficiency isn’t the same as delightful and vibrant. Humans are designed to be different. I love the Mishnah in Sanhedrin which suggests that the reason all humanity began with the creation of a single Adam is to demonstrate God’s magnificence, for when a King of flesh and blood creates a coin to mint, each subsequent coin comes out the same, but when the King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One, mints a coin, each of us come out diverse and unique.

I’m just back from three days as part of the Senior Faith in Leadership Programme hosted at Windsor Castle, spending time with Christian, Muslim and even different-to-me Jewish faith leaders. I’m living in a society that is richer – both pecuniary and culturally – because of its openness to difference. Actually, I’m only tolerated here, as a Jew, because of a conception of British society that knows – even we struggle always to remember – that we are better as a society because we don’t insist everyone lines up their tents in efficient normativity. It feels a dangerous thing to claim, at a time when society seems intent in retreating away from a celebration of human difference. Indeed, I think there is something irreducibly radical about the claim. It requires a suspension of the reflex animalistic response to the outsider – fight or flight. This suspension opens up possibilities that are, perhaps, invisible in the immediate moment we are confronted by difference, but far richer not only in spite of their immediate invisibility, but precisely because of their transcending what we can immediately understand. Perhaps this is why the Mitzvah of loving the stranger sits alongside the Mitzvah of loving God and loving our fellow. We need to be reminded that goodness requires a love of that which we don’t understand in all its sprawling complexity.

Shabbat Shalom