This week’s Torah portion, Balak, turns on the strange and charged encounter between the Moabite king Balak, the Midianite prophet Bilaam and the Children of Israel, giving us the famous line: “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5).

In seeking to understand this week’s Torah portion, I believe it’s instructive to look at the role that tents have played in biblical and post-biblical times. 

Sjo/Getty Images

Illustrative. Rows of tents at a campsite seen from above.

Full disclosure: I am not a great camper, and when I think of a tent I think of something I hope somebody else has already set up before I arrive and will take down after I leave. That said, the tent can be seen as both a real thing and an analogy for community. The midrashic explanation of Abraham’s tent, for instance, is used as the paradigm for hospitality. His tent was open on all four sides, and Abraham sat outside looking for passersby so he could invite them in. He did not live in a hospitable environment, and yet his tent was open, because his belief was that welcoming people inside was his responsibility and his mission.

In this week’s portion, there is a different kind of tent. These are the tents of the people whom Balak hires Bilaam to curse. The narrative goes back and forth, even including a memorable interlude with a talking donkey, but when Bilaam finally stands to speak, he finds he cannot curse. Instead, he blesses. There are different explanations of what he saw that was so remarkable, but the common themes center on two things: he saw respect for privacy, evidenced by the openings of the tents not facing one another; and he saw community, an encampment in which everyone was part of something larger than themselves. Individuals maintained their own space, and yet they belonged to a whole.

I wonder what Abraham would see, and what Bilaam would say, if they were observing our Jewish tents right now.

It seems to me that our tents are getting smaller and smaller, and their openings narrower and narrower. Many now have their doors closed, so that no one else can come in. And we are already at the stage where some have been bolted and padlocked shut. How have we arrived at this place, where we teach Abraham’s tent as the ideal and the tents that define today’s Jewish community are the polar opposite?

Much of this flows from a phenomenon found all over the world, one that Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks described in his BBC Radio 4 series “Morality in the 21st Century,” where he sat with teenagers and examined the moral choices facing their generation. It is the phenomenon by which holding the approved view becomes the price of entry, a precondition not only for belonging but for being heard at all on anything else.

The trouble is that the price keeps changing depending on which tent you are standing outside, and our community right now is divided because of it.

Living in the United States, and having spent much of my working life in the Jewish community here, let me draw my examples from this country. In one tent, the price of entry is a willingness to condemn Israel without context and without question. Consider Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who was turned away from a Brooklyn coffee shop over the war in Gaza. It was not really about the war. Goldman is on record as a critic of the Israeli prime minister and of much of Israel’s conduct during the war. His offense was narrower: he would not use the language of the Holocaust, words such as genocide, to describe it, because he did not believe the comparison was right and would not make it.

Ironically, the coffee shop’s own founder had described his cafe, in writing, as a place where the door does not close on anyone, where tea is poured before anyone asks who you are. A tent open on all sides… until a Jew walked through it without uttering the correct password.

In another tent, the price of entry is silence. Political movements now have people who are clearly antisemitic at their edges, and too often closer to the center than the edge. A conference takes place. A member of the audience asks a question that is vehemently antisemitic in both substance and intent, and a large part of the room shares the sentiment openly. A very senior figure in the current administration sits on the stage. And yet there is no condemnation, during the conference or after it. And many Jews within that movement don’t criticize the silence, not, God forbid, because they support antisemitism, but because they fear that any criticism of leadership marks them as disloyal, and could cost them on the issues they care about most, including support for Israel.

So the price is exacted from both sides: in one tent, you must condemn without context; in the other, you must stay silent for fear of being called disloyal. A person’s identity comes to be shaped by the choices demanded within their political group, rather than by their place among their own people.

We cannot always change those choices, and we will not always understand them. They can be very different from our own, and the distance between them can be painful. But, however painful, that distance cannot be a reason to close the tent. Because when we close the tent, the same thing happens every time. Good, committed people leave — because they have been made to feel they do not belong. Assimilation continues and quickens, because being Jewish has simply become too complicated to be worth the trouble. And a divided people exposes itself to those who have always wished it harm, exactly when it can least afford to.

Rabbi Norman Lamm, the former longtime president of Yeshiva University, saw this coming decades ago. In his address “70 Faces,” he warned of an unbridgeable and cataclysmic rupture in the Jewish people if we ever lost the ability to disagree without casting one another out. He was not pleading for a soft, no-opinions middle. He argued for what he called a finite pluralism: 70 faces to one Torah, real difference held within real commitment.

That difference, held together, is the whole achievement. It is also exactly what Bilaam saw from the hilltop, and exactly what we are losing.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in New York City has named the danger in our own time, warning of a community trying to impose a litmus test on itself, telling people they are either with us or against us, and, in her words, pitting Jew against Jew and rabbi against rabbi.

But this is not how it has to be. There truly is a different approach. It is difficult, because the world is difficult. It’s not black and white, because the world isn’t black and white. And it asks something almost countercultural of us: a wide and attentive belief that inclusion in the tent does not mean agreement, nor endorsement of anyone’s views, but simply that we belong together.

This theme was central to much of the thinking of Rabbi Sacks, whose wisdom I am honored to share in my role as CEO of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy. One of its clearest articulations is developed in his book The Home We Build Together, where he draws the distinction between a contract and a covenant: a contract is a transaction entered for mutual advantage, while a covenant is a relationship, a bond of belonging in which people commit to one another while respecting the freedom and difference of each. A people is not a contract to be abandoned when the terms stop suiting us. It is a covenant, and a covenant does not dissolve the moment we disagree.

He also distinguished between two ways of living with difference: face-to-face, the direct work of debating what divides us, and side by side, where people who see the world differently still stand shoulder to shoulder and build on what they share. A healthy community needs both. We do not have to resolve every difference to remain one people. We only have to refuse to let our differences be a barrier to entry. Although some of these ideas were articulated in the context of Jewish relationships with the non-Jewish world, arguably they apply even more within our own.

It is easy to dismiss these notions as idealistic, simplistic and naive, and there is good reason to believe they are. However, the alternative is far worse. While many might think it impossible, we need to find the people in our institutions, in our schools, synagogues and organizations who are willing to take the risk of opening the doors to people on all sides, whose worldview, understanding of Israel, understanding of Judaism and understanding of political ideology differ widely, perhaps irredeemably, from our own. We can speak to the value of unity, but we must find ways in which our actions reflect that desire, and not hide away from our covenantal responsibility because it seems so overwhelmingly difficult, and because it involves including people with whom we fundamentally disagree on core issues.

The prophet Isaiah, who addressed the Jewish People during the Babylonian exile, spoke about tents. You might have expected him to say that, because Judaism was facing existential challenges, the most important thing we could do was to narrow our tents and shut the door. And yet here is the advice he gave, which we should internalize and act upon at this moment:

“Enlarge the space of your tent, and let them stretch the curtains of your habitations, spare not; lengthen the cords, and strengthen your stakes.”

The work of redesigning our tents is both urgent and essential. Please treat this as an invitation to be today’s architects of the Ohel Moed, the Tent of Meeting, where like in its biblical counterpart, the community can come together as one, in the presence of God.

Jonathan Cannon is CEO of The Rabbi Sacks Legacy and has been a head of school for over 25 years, most recently at Ramaz in New York City.