The Design of a Curse

 A curse is meant to succeed, not like the glib, meaningless curses tossed around today. A curse was once upon a time meant to function, to not only bespeak one's disdain for the party being cursed, but also, cause the person who has been cursed to suffer, become susceptible and the recipient of a worse fate. 

Why then did God intervene in the case of Bilaam? Hashem gave Bilaam the power to curse, only to override the very functionality given to him. 

It would seem, like the Haftorah states, that God's majesty is seen in His willingness to overrule the very rules he created, were they be in contravention of the betterment of the Jewish people. For what's the point of a world where one could use its implements to hurt the party most beloved by God Himself? 

Though I'm not 100% sure the two are connected, it would seem that the idea behind the ben sorer umoreh is similar. A wayward son, who steals from his parents to guzzle wine and feast on meat, as bad as he is, is still his parents' son; Chazal teach that there was never such an incident because of the sheer complexity of finding a son culpable given the endless legalistic stipulations. It would seem that a reality where a parent was forced to kill his own son would be contrary to God's design. The Gaon of Vilna discusses the reality where there is a disconnect between the literal denotation and connotation of the Torah's words, comparing it to a seal, noting that for the text to come out right, the seal needs to be the mirror image of the text produced. On the topic of the wayward son a picture is thus presented of the gravity of the son's deed; in reality, a son was never put to death - and I'd want to argue because it itself would be against God's design, the same way an "eye for an eye", or a "tooth for a tooth," flies in the face of God's belief in true justice; whereas one's deed might deserve exact reciprocity, in reality, the message is one of morality, rather than actual implementation. And in the same vein, though a curse could be effectuated in theory, Bilaam's curse is translated into praise, the mirror image having a far deeper grasp in reality, despite the fact that the power to curse is ever too real.    

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