EVIL BALAK. RIGHTEOUS Rus. Polar opposites. One tried to destroy the Jewish people, the other joined them. One was the antithesis of Moshiach, and the other was his ancestor. Ironically, the former was the reason for the latter, as the Gemora states:
As a reward for the forty-two offerings that Balak, king of Moav, brought, he merited that Rus descended from him, from whom Shlomo HaMelech came, regarding whom it writes that he brought many offerings: “Shlomo offered up a thousand Burnt Offerings” (I Melachim 3:4). And Rabbi Yosei ben Choni similarly says: Rus was the daughter of Eglon, son of Balak. (Sotah 47a)
Why? Everyone knows that the only reason why Balak brought those sacrifices was to bribe God to let Bilaam curse the Jewish people. And if you had told Balak at the time, “You know, if you offer those sacrifices to God, even for the sake of your evil plan, they will one day result in a descendant who will not only convert to the people you are trying to destroy, but become the ancestor of the very savior who will destroy your people!” he would have gone home and made a private barbecue instead. On the contrary, he wouldn’t have seen Rus as a reward for what he was doing, but as negative by-product of it! So what is the Gemora talking about here?
The first thing is what the Gemora says elsewhere, that God does not leave any good unrewarded (Bava Kamma 38b), even the tiniest of goods that we ourselves might completely overlook. God doesn’t, and His scales of justice demand that every last good get rewarded in some way, at some time.
So yes, Balak offered his sacrifices for the wrong reasons. But at least he offered them to the right God and not to some idol. At least Balak and Bilaam acknowledged that nothing happens unless God approves, and that counted for something. For that little bit of good within his very big bad, Balak had to be rewarded.
The second point is more profound. It is how God can “manipulate” people and reality to bring about a good result from a seemingly bad act. The person doing it may be guilty of the sin and even punishable for it, because they intended for bad. But the net impact of their act on history will be positive, because that is what God intended.
How many times has Divine justice been done by a single act that has both punished the guilty and rewarded the meritorious? When you’re God, you can do that. You can be so precise as to punish and reward a person from a single act, exactly as they deserve. A person might suffer whiplash for a couple of weeks to atone for some sin they did, but the insurance money they get for it might be their reward for some chesed they also did.
It gets even deeper. Life is about one thing, though most people do not know this or think in these terms. The kabbalistic term is, Aliyas M”N, or the elevation of Mayn Nukvin. You may have heard of it as the elevation of holy sparks, or nitzotzei kedushah. They are the spiritual energy that fuels all of reality on every level of existence, without which nothing can exist or function.
There are a lot of questions that need to be answered to fully understand the idea, but not now. For now it is enough to know that that every time a good thing is done in history, it elevates sparks and rectifies Creation. Just what is done, and how it is done, determines how many sparks actually get elevated, how much reward a person earns for doing so, and how much closer Creation comes to completion.
Even sin causes sparks to ascend, just as using a car to rob a bank uses up gasoline. The only difference is that the spark can only partially ascend after a sin. It can only go the final distance up to Heaven if the person does teshuvah, and suffers punishment as a result of the sin. This cleanses the spark, spiritually-speaking, and frees it to complete its ascent.
The thing about sacrifices is that they impact all four levels of Creation, the Mineral World (salt), the Vegetation World (wood), the Animal World (sacrifice), and the Human World (sacrificer). Forty-two sacrifices meant that Balak elevated a lot of sparks that day, something that God obviously arranged through Bilaam and Balak, which is why God let them do it. They just didn’t realize, until too late, how their drive to sin fulfilled God’s plan for rectification.
In fact, it was part of the purification process of the spark that was the soul of Moshiach Ben Dovid. That spark had been from Sdom, brought out through Lot and his daughters, and the sin they had committed to do it. It could not be fully elevated until…Balak offered his forty-two sacrifices. How do we know? Because, the Gemora says, Rus was the eventual result of all of them…just as getting back our ancestral homeland in 1948, as prophesied thousands of years ago, was the result of 6,000,000 elevated sparks from 1942-45. And that’s just the beginning of the discussion.