Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Balak, famously features a talking donkey who stops in her path as her rider, the sorcerer Bilaam, is on his way to attempt to curse the Israelites. This is by no means the only donkey in the classical Jewish canon; in fact, the Torah and Talmud are full of stories that mention the animal—we just rarely notice them. But as Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder of the queer yeshiva SVARA, teaches, if a donkey were to learn Torah and Talmud, “every time they’d see a donkey, they’d go ‘There’s me! There I am again!’” Rabbi Lappe uses this as a metaphor for the experience of marginalized people seeking out moments when we are reflected in Jewish texts. And indeed, if we were donkeys, Balak would undoubtedly be an all-time favorite parshah: For once, a donkey is not a side figure, but a main, speaking character!
The events of Parshat Balak take place outside the standard narrative of the Israelites’ travels through the desert in the book of Bamidbar. We find the biblical “camera” suddenly focused elsewhere: on the Moabite king Balak. Fearful of the Jewish people and their power, Balak hires the prophet and magician Bilaam to curse the Israelites. Despite his initial resistance, Bilaam consults with God, who allows him to take on the task on the condition that he only says what God tells him. But en route to perform his curse, Bilaam is stopped by his donkey, who sees a sword-bearing divine angel that is invisible to the sorcerer. After seeing the angel, the donkey refuses to continue along the road: She first veers off the path into a field, then presses herself against a wall, and then lies down. Following each of these acts, Bilaam beats her with his stick, increasingly angered by her obstinacy. But then, as the Torah explains, God “opened the mouth of the ass,” and she speaks to Bilaam, asking him if he has ever known her to act unreasonably. When Bilaam admits that he has not, God “uncovered Balaam’s eyes” and he sees “the messenger of God standing in the way, his drawn sword in his hand.”
If we read this story, in an overly-literal take on Lappe’s teaching, as a tale about appearances of the marginalized in our sacred texts, we notice that it is the donkey herself who has the power to see the sacred, the invisible angel heeded first by the unnoticed beast. We can see this as an illustration of the insight that’s only possible from the periphery. But if this reading risks fixing and idealizing disempowered identities, we might complicate it by understanding the angel less as an embodiment of the divine than as an intermediary. The story then seems to hinge on a kind of strange solidarity, one with unexpected outcomes: The lowly donkey is able to open her eyes to another unseen messenger. It is a moment of connection between two “supporting characters” in this main drama of God and men. Notably, the donkey both embraces and challenges her identity in the moment she confronts Bilaam. She speaks, but when she does so, she emphasizes her donkey-ness—identifying herself as “the ass that you have been riding all along” even as she moves away from her donkey-ness through the very act of speech. She is caught in the double-bind of highlighting the knowledge she has gained through her own experience, while simultaneously troubling the very terms of that identity in order to connect beyond herself.
In a recent exploration of identity politics, the political theorist Tessy Schlosser writes, “No identity is ever fully ours, and yet none is fully foreign. Naming ourselves in ways that others can grasp is part of what politics requires. And yet there is no fully legible person, and there is no complete recognition. There are only moments of contact.” In the moment on the road, the donkey, the angel (who has a divine message to communicate), and Bilaam (who seems to genuinely want to know God’s will) are all striving for recognition and to be recognized. But total legibility fails; they are left only with the contact they can make in that moment. As leftist communities debate the utility of identity politics—given how this framework, created by Black lesbians to struggle collectively against interlocking systems of oppression, has been co-opted in service of liberal individualism—Parshat Balak offers a surprising glimpse of the potency of encounters across difference, grounded in the messy indeterminacies of identity. There is not a single margin or a single center; it is by embracing this multiplicity and seeking recognition amongst ourselves on the margins that we can begin to see the world anew.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
