Shabbat Balak

Written by Dr Moshe Lavee Thursday, 28 June 2007

Our Sidrah presents Balaam, a prophet who was not able to control his prophecy; a blinkered visionary who found that his words were not in his own hands, but rather in those of something or someone else. He realized he could not be rented for any cause or freelance prophecy services. He learned that his life and words were not fully in his control. Other forces also dictated his sayings.

About a decade ago, inspired by the style of the teachings (‘Torot’) of R. Nachman of Bratslav, as well as by some academic scholarship speaking about the writing practice of Tikune Zohar as ‘automatic writing’, I did some experiments writing in this manner. It is a frightening field to enter, having your pen (or clicking fingers) running faster than your thoughts, and exposing yourself to inner statements with which you are not necessarily ready to cope. I have attempted try to present here a translation of one of the products of these experiences. The tangled syntax is part of the genre, so please take a long breath before every sentence/paragraph.

Later on I was able to identify the political context of this text that I wrote. It was written in the mid ’90s in Israel. The text should be read as a polemic, coping with the voices in religious Zionism that were using the image of the donkey and rider to depict the relation between the Zionist secular project, and the religious Zionist movement, expecting the religious Zionists to become the new leaders of the Zionist state. According to this image, secular Zionism was perceived only as a tool, having no value within itself. Accordingly, a time will come in which the donkey will be left aside for the Messiah himself to come, the time in which Abraham tells his slave to wait there with the donkey, the moment from which religious Zionism will move on and will say to the secular Israelis: You should stay here, with the donkey.

Such ideas are rooted in a perception that did not see any essential value in the secular component of Israeli society and it was with such voices that I was in a debate a decade ago.

The text I wrote is built upon midrashic readings as well as contemporary biblical literary analysis. These readings identified the echoes and parallels between the journeys of Abraham and Balaam, as depicted in the Torah. This literary similarity is a call of the written word to its reader. It teaches us that an essential similarity exists between Abraham and Balaam. Yet, as sources for my own midrash, I also considered the titles given to the biblical figures by the rabbis as if they were ‘real’ entities. I wondered why is Abraham called ‘our father’ while Balaam is ‘the wicked’? In my midrash the very voice that called to Abraham from heaven, asking him to avoid the act, the voice that distracted him from sacrificing Isaac, is the voice of the donkey’s braying. This is the very voice to which Balaam was not attentive. Not being able to be attentive to the voice of the other is a product of self absorption, of a dangerous sense of security, which leads to identifying one’s way of life with the right and the good and lacks the ability of self criticism on the one hand and appreciation of other views on the other hand.

Earlier I pointed out the political context of my writing exercise. Yet, my choice was to express myself in a midrashic, Hasidic style, rather than in a political statement, and even not in a scholarly style of textual analysis of the Akedah and our parashah, which could lead to an open text, a text that can accept new voices. Last year, in the International Rabbinic Conference I was touched by the sermon given by student Rabbi Monique Mayer for our Parashah. In a picturesque sermon, she described a day in which she was stuck with her car in a narrow countryside road, trying to navigate her car through a gate, until the moment the car was scratched and she was beating the wheel angrily. Her story was connected to more meaningful decisions in life, and the need to be able to hear the voice of metaphorical donkeys calling us in our road. To choose a different path when it is needed, to be attentive to your surrounding. I felt that this sermon elevated the Torah story, to an existential one, to be perceived as a pattern that exists in the personal as well as political spheres, a pattern that can reveal itself in the everyday life of each of us, as well as in wider social, political and other contexts. Indeed, just a week ago we encountered this pattern again, when Moses hit the rock instead of speaking to it.

As I am teaching in my Midrash classes, the structure of a text is in cases even more important than its content, within which it embodies wider perceptions of the Torah and its relation to our life. Indeed, Monique’s sermon contained a pattern that I was glad to see also in other sermons of student rabbis when being consulted about them. In this contemporary genre of sermons, much more than in what I am familiar with from rabbinic and medieval sermons, there is a crucial place for the anecdotal story of the individual. The anecdotal tale is no longer dealing with great rabbis, but with us, with people confronting daily life issues. But this anecdotal story is also leading towards the words of the Torah, and finding its model, its comfort and its source for support in existential patterns offered by the text of the Torah. This model of sermons reflects the growing ability to listen to the donkey, to find its voice in the Torah, to recognize that it is also rooted in the divine wisdom.