Bilaam The Hacker
Bilaam The Hacker
Even though the name of my blog is Rabbi On Rails most of my posts so far have been about Rails (and JavaScript, and just coding in general). This post is a break from that and ventures into “_Rabbi” space._
Q I’ve always heard the story of Bilaam brought as an example of G-D’s undying love to the Jewish people, going as far as replacing Bilaam’s curses with blessings.
Recently, however, I read the rest of the story, and it seems like there’s more to it. Apparently, after Bilaam’s plan to curse the Jewish people failed, he advised King Balak to entice the Jewish People to sin, which they succeeded in doing causing a great plague and many Jews died.
Am I missing something? It seems like at the end of the day it was Bilaam who had the last laugh.
A Ah, my friend, to understand why Bilaam lost this game you have to understand what he was trying to accomplish.
You see? Bilaam was a master hacker.
Back in the day hackers used to sit at their terminals, and do their best to break into systems. Companies didn’t want people breaking into their systems, so they invested plenty of resources to make their systems more secure. Thus started a mini arms race where companies would build better and better defenses around their systems, and hackers would work harder and harder to find vulnerabilities allowing them to break in.
Eventually, the hackers gave up. Security just got too good to make their efforts worthwhile. You still hear of the occasional breach here and there, but the majority of hacking moved to what’s known as “social engineering hacks.”
In simple terms, the hackers realized that instead of breaking into Google’s servers for example (a nearly impossible task), it’s a lot easier to send an email to your great aunt Sally offering her a vacation to Hawaii if she would just fill out the form with her username and password. Your excited Auntie doesn’t think twice, fills out the (fake) form, and before she can say Aloha her entire contact list is on a remote server in Nigeria. In effect, they discovered that instead of breaking into secured systems to retrieve people’s information, it’s a lot easier to get people to hand over that information on their own.
That, in short, is the story of Bilaam.
Bilaam knew there was a “secure connection” between G-D and the Jewish People. Nevertheless, like all good hackers, Bilaam tried finding vulnerabilities that would allow him to inject some malicious code.
Bilaam tried exposing the Jewish People’s sins and showing them in an unflattering light, all in an attempt to inject some “malicious code” that would get in between the connection between G-D and the Jewish People.
In that Bilaam failed miserably. He discovered, and proved to the world in the process, that the connection between G-D and the Jewish People is secure and unbreakable.
Naturally, this was disappointing to Bilaam and Balak, and in desperation, they went for the next-best thing, they “social engineered” a hack where they would get the Jewish People themselves to sever the connection between themselves and G-D.
This approach was successful, to an extent. Getting Jews to sever the connection between themselves and G-D is as useful as gaining access to someone’s account by phishing their password; it only works until the victim realizes what happened and changes their password.
Similarly, the disconnect that occurs when a Jew leaves G-D is temporary and only lasts until the person realizes what they had done and decides to return; as soon as a Jew does Teshuva and returns to G-D the connection is reestablished, and much more securely than before.
Bilaam and Balak may have won this one particular battle, but the cyber war has already been decided in favor of the Jewish People.