Balak 5784

By Helena Miller

Shabbat Balak – the power of words

I am not an animal lover. When our son Arieh was a child, he was desperate for a pet. He nagged for a dog. What he really wanted was a horse. But even 3 year old Arieh could see that our garden wasn’t big enough for a horse. We bought him a goldfish.

In this week’s sedra, which is actually about the power of words,  I find myself surprisingly intrigued by an animal – to be specific – a donkey. And not just any old donkey – this is a talking donkey, one of the only two animals in Torah with a speaking part. (The other is of course the serpent in Bereshit). The donkey belongs to Bilam, son of Beor, a non-Israelite pagan prophet. He is on the way, with his donkey, to carry out Balak’s command to curse the Israelites.

Balak is the king of the Moabites. He feels threatened by the numerically superior Israelites, depicted as “a horde that will lick clean all that is about us, as an ox licks the grass of the field” (Bamidbar 22:3) and as a people  who, like a plague of locusts, “hide the earth from view” (Bamidbar 22:5). He also knows that the Israelites have just defeated the Amorites. He is threatened, and he is afraid.

Balak believes that he needs something more than a strong army to defeat the Israelites. He tries to remove the perceived “threat” with something more powerful than force of arms: a sorcerer’s curse. He is a man who understands the power of words. So he goes to Bilam, who has a very high reputation, a man known far and wide throughout the nearby nations as a well known magician and expert curser, to put a curse on the Israelites.

From early rabbinic times onwards, interpreters have discussed Bilam. He doesn’t come out well. Ibn Ezra says he’s a deceptive schemer, because he never tells Balak that G-d won’t let him curse the Israelites. Nachmanides adds that Bilam has no scruples – he doesn’t care about misleading Balak.

Interestingly, Bilam refuses all the riches that Balak promises him. Eventually, G-d tells Bilam to agree to Balak’s terms, but only to do what G-d tells him to do. He must only use the power of the words that G-d tells him to speak.

So off he goes. On the way, Bilam’s donkey is stopped by an angel blocking his way on the road.  The donkey can see the angel, but Bilam cannot. The donkey refuses to move and Bilam is furious that she won’t respond to his instructions to move. He beats her 3 times.

Then the donkey speaks: “why are you beating me? Am I not the donkey you’ve been riding for many years?”  And Bilam replies  in the very next verse: “You have humiliated me; if I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now.”  (Bamidbar 22: 28-29).

Apart from the fact that the donkey talks, which we will come back to in a second, how astonishing it is that Bilam replies as if it is the most rational thing in the world that his donkey has spoken to him. You would think that we would be told that Bilam gasped loudly, or at least looked around to see who was there.

So why a talking donkey? Is it just to put some humour into the story? Or is it to show, as the rabbis tell us, that Bilam cannot manipulate G-d – rather, G-d, through his angel, is more powerful than Bilam. Maybe the donkey talks to get Bilam’s attention, so he will be receptive to the words of the angel. Maybe it needed something extraordinary to make Bilam do G-d’s will. Again, this incident shows us the power of words.

This episode certainly challenges our expectations of animals and prophets. Bilam goes against our first expectation, that a prophet described in the Torah is necessarily an Israelite. It goes against our second expectation, that a prophet should be holy, a good person. Earlier, I have described how Bilam is thought to be quite evil. Finally, we would expect a prophet to be more perceptive than a donkey, but in this story, Bilam the prophet is not.

The angel then appears to Bilam and tells him to only say what G-d tells him. Rabbi Eliezer states that the angel actually places the words of blessing in Bilam’s mouth. Rabbi Yochanan agrees and says the angel then has to extract the words with a hook, meaning that they are uttered against Bilam’s will. Bilam comes to realise that the G-d of Israel has the power with his words over what happens.  Martin Buber explains that in speaking G-d’s words, Bilam exercises no will of his own.

Bilam then blesses the Israelites instead of cursing them with three poems of blessing. These poems are, as Jonathan Sacks wrote, some of the most lyrical passages in Torah.

The first poem (Numbers 23:9) defines the Israelites as unique among the nations, protected when they fulfil their covenant with G-d.

The second poem (Numbers 23:21, 24) promises the Israelites that G-d is with them. They will triumph over those plotting Israel’s destruction. The Israelites will not rest until their enemies are crushed.

The third poem starts with the phrase that has become one of the most  familiar phrases in our liturgy: Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov – how good are your tents O Jacob. We begin every shabbat service singing that heartwarming phrase.

Nechama Leibowitz explains that in this and in the first two poems, Bilam admires the Israelites, who are trying to live harmoniously and peacefully. What we don’t sing in shul is the continuation of that third poem, which describes vividly how the Israelites shall deal with their enemy nations.

Sacks notes that all that G-d really needed Bilam to say – and Bilam did eventually say it – was the promise He gave to Abraham in the book of Bereshit: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse”. So why three lyrical poems? It all comes back to the power of words.

Through each of the three poems of Bilam’s blessings, there is a balance between peace and prosperity on the one hand and hostility and destruction on the other. Each poem tells a vivid story of good and bad. How true that is today. How contemporary are Bilam’s messages.

The process of writing this dvar torah has not made me like animals any more than I already did, but, I have shown how words are used in several different ways. Their power to surprise and even shock, as in the episode with the donkey, and the power to listen and use words for good instead of bad, as in the blessings that Bilam gives the Israelites.

This is a very strange episode in Torah. One of the things that it shows us is that     G -d’s presence often comes from the most unexpected places. Sometimes the vision of our life’s journey can become clouded and make us unsure of what path to take next. It is times like these when we might find our truth emerging from the most unexpected of places or people – or in this case G-d’s angel. Listening to others isn’t always easy, but by being open and willing to hear those whom we might choose to ignore, we could just hear exactly what we need to hear. We may change the impulse to speak badly, into something good.

Shabbat shalom.