Imagine two sets of parents whose children are critically ill. Both are told they need the last orange available to save their child. Most people see a zero-sum conflict: if one family gets the orange, the other does not. But when the parents ask why each child needs it, they discover that one needs the juice while the other needs the peel. It turns out not to be a conflict at all.
This famous exercise illustrates a central insight of principled negotiation, popularized in Getting to Yes by Fisher, Ury, and Patton: ask not what the other side wants, but why they want it.
Balak, the king of Moab after whom this week’s Torah portion is named, certainly did not see the world this way.
Israel had just defeated two powerful kings, Sichon and Og, and Balak feared his people would be next.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that Balak sees his struggle with Israel as a zero-sum game. The Torah’s language, that Moab “felt disgust at the children of Israel,” echoes the Torah’s description of Pharaoh’s fear of Israel at the beginning of Exodus. Balak, in other words, is repeating Pharaoh’s mistake: he sees Israel as an existential threat rather than pausing to ask what Israel actually wants or needs.
That fear-driven thinking leads Balak directly into a costly trap. Instead of asking Moses whether Israel intended any harm, Balak hires the prophet Bilam to curse the nation. He offers Bilam great rewards, but despite Bilam’s repeated attempts, he fails, as God turns his curses into blessings.
But none of this was necessary. Israel had no interest in taking his land or fighting his people. Had Balak simply asked, had he treated Israel as a negotiating partner rather than an enemy, the answer would almost certainly have been: we just want to pass through. Everyone could have won.
The orange story and the Balak narrative teach the same lesson. Both are about the cost of assuming the worst, of treating every encounter as a battle to be won rather than a problem to be solved together. The parents discover that the conflict never truly existed. Balak, who never thinks to ask, spends everything he has, and loses anyway.
As Rabbi Sacks notes, the Torah was teaching this lesson thousands of years before modern negotiation theory: before assuming the worst, ask what the other side actually wants.
