Parshat Balak

Abigail D - July 11, 2025

Parshat Balak is another fraught story about the Israelites' wandering after their escape from Egypt.

Are they refugees? Are they settlers? Both? Who had the power—the exiled Israelites or the peoples whose land they often violently pass through.

The local king in this portion, Balak describes the Israelite “hoard” as being so big that it totally obscures the earth beneath it. You can't see the ground through all the people standing on it.

Again, the Torah invites us to confront Zionism and grapple with the parts of institutional Judaism that are actually quite aligned with it.

I was struck by how the non-Jewish characters in this parsha—including a sorcerer and a king—were beholden to G-d as Adonai. A funny moment of secular naiveté that it never occurred to me that sacred texts don't tend towards heterodoxy or religious relativism.

The central parable in this story is the conflict between a sorcerer Balaam, called upon to curse the Israelites by Balak who fears they will violently seize his land, and his donkey. An angel of G-d reveals himself to the donkey, but G-d makes it impossible for Balaam to see it. Why? Why is this a convention of the Torah—for God to contrive near-lethal misunderstanding and violence.

And it is near-lethal for the Donkey. Balaam beats her and beats her for stopping in the road. Why doesn't Balaam trust her instincts? Why does he assume she is being obstinate? Finally, G-d makes it possible for the Donkey to speak and for Balaam to see the messenger. The Donkey asks Balaam why he didn't trust her when she was never failed him before. And the angel delivers his message which is a convoluted way of ensuring Balaam doesn't actually curse the Israelites.

I brought up the Jewish Currents commentary on this portion (by Avigayil Halpern) which reads the Donkey as a metaphor for the representation of minority identity in the Torah and a challenge to how we think about representation and identity formation. I asked—is this a generative reading or is it kind of messed up to compare oppressed groups of human beings to a donkey?

We had a lively discussion about this and also about the other challenging proto-nationalist aspects of this part of the Torah. We concluded with the idea that I always come back to when Jewish liturgy frustrates/disappoints/enrages me—to be Jewish literally means to wrestle with the divine.