Modify collection inside a Spark RDD foreach

It becomes clearer when running on a Spark cluster (not a single machine). The RDD is now spread over several machines. When you call foreach, you tell each machine what to do with the piece of the RDD that it has. If you refer to any local variables (like myMap), they get serialized and sent to the machines, so they can use it. But nothing comes back. So your original copy of myMap is unaffected.

I think this answers your question, but obviously you are trying to accomplish something and you will not be able to get there this way. Feel free to explain here or in a separate question what you are trying to do, and I will try to help.