A Disney Movie in the Book of Numbers
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Balak 5782
What does it mean when a Disney movie breaks out in the middle of the Torah?
Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers, begins with Torah portions that narrate various rebellions against the authority of the leaders of the people of Israel, Moses and Aaron. These rebellions won’t end until the Israelites finally arrive at the very entrance to the Holy Land, Erets Yisrael, and I know this will shock you, but they continue even when we get to the Promised Land and take up residence there. We are a fractious people, prone to arguments about everything, and according to Bamidbar we always were like that. This whole book has mostly been a list of troubles we created for ourselves.
But then, suddenly, this week in the sedrah of Balak, in the midst of this litany of self-generated tzoris, we have a text so unusual the rabbis call it Sefer Bilam, “the Book of Balaam” as though it were a separate entity unrelated to the rest of Numbers, an extra book inserted into the middle of the Torah. The Book of Balaam tells a very different sort of narrative, the tale of a pagan prophet hired by an enemy king who is supposed to curse the people of Israel but instead ends up blessing them on three separate occasions.
The Book of Balaam is the kind of magical fable that Walt Disney would love. It includes a jealous king, a brilliant pagan sorcerer, a talking donkey, gold treasure, reversals of fate, and three separate songs not yet composed for the animated screen by Alan Menken, or even by Lin Manuel Miranda. All that’s missing is a pretty teenage girl heroine in need of rescue and you would have Frozen in the Middle East, or an early Canaanite version of Aladdin. We could call it Maleficent in Moab or The Sorcerer’s Apostasy or even Encurso. I can hear the earworm now: “We don’t talk about Balaam, no no no…”
Or, if you upgraded the rating of this portion of Balak to PG-17 and included the scenes of sexual license and extreme violence with the Midianite sacred prostitutes (priestesses) at the end of the parshah, you’d have a good episode of Game of Thrones or The Last Kingdom. Just what is this crazy story doing in the Torah?
To recap, the actual tale we tell is that King Balak of Moab is terrified of the rising power of the invading Children of Israel. He tries to hire the pagan prophet Balaam to curse the people of Israel, to cast an evil Voldermort-style spell on them to block their impending conquest of Moab. Balaam agrees to do this for a very high price, more even than Max Scherzer is making with the Mets this year, accounting for inflation, but Balaam inserts a codicil in the contract: he insists he will only use the words God gives him. Balak’s minions OK the deal, and Balaam sets out.
On the way to his new gig cursing the Israelites, Balaam’s own she-ass, his donkey, sees an angel with a flaming sword blocking the path, and forces Balaam to see it, too, by squashing his foot against a wall. Balaam beats the donkey, which very unexpectedly objects out loud and begins speaking to him. In keeping with cartoon standards, the donkey ends up sounding like a Jewish mother: “Haven’t I always carried you everywhere? When have I ever, ever failed to be there for you? Is one Nobel Prize too much to ask after all I’ve done for you?” And so on. Actually, the donkey doesn’t really say that last line, but you get the idea: the donkey can see the angel with the flaming sword, while Balaam cannot. The prophet, the great seer, is blind to a reality his own ass can easily recognize. In effect, any old ass can see what the great visionary can’t.
Now, about this talking donkey: as far as I can recall, the last animal in the Bible who spoke actual words to a human being was the serpent in the Garden of Eden who chatted up Eve. If you recall, that didn’t end at all well, so Balaam now decides he’d better pay attention and behave, especially when the angel with the flaming sword tells him not to do or say anything God doesn’t specifically command. It’s all very Disney, dramatic and slightly ridiculous, and at the end the angel, of course, disappears, poof.
When Balaam arrives in Moab and meets the King—can’t you just picture the catchy little song as he arrives in the camp? “Be our guest, be our guest, come please curse those Jewish pests”— and Balaam is led by Balak to his job cursing the Israelites, and taken to a high place to look down at their spreading population. Balaam reaches down into his bag of sorcery tricks, pulls out his oracle bones and casts lots and does his mumbo-jumbo routine, and then to his own surprise finds that he is unable to curse Israel, and can only bless them. He tries hard to do his worst but delivers instead a positive poem of praise to the Israelites. Balaam is clearly under the kind of spell worthy of any magical fable, and the words that come out of his mouth are not hatred and curses, but blessings and generosity.
King Balak, his employer, is furious, and he tries to get Balaam to change his perspective on the matter. The king moves this sorcerer around to different vantage points, but Balaam can only spout more and more fulsome blessings for Israel. It’s an animated musical for sure by this time: Not one, not two, but three separate tunes about how great Israel is come pouring out of his eloquent mouth. The third time is really the charm. His final poem begins Ma Tovu Ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael, “How good are your tents Jacob, your dwellings Israel!” and that becomes the beginning of our morning services and the phrase we are supposed to say every time we enter a synagogue. And it is created by a pagan sorcerer trying to summon up a curse.
And so, Balaam ends up blessing the people of Israel in triplicate, seeing them—us—in all the Israelites’ beauty and integrity and talent and success, understanding that God has blessed them and will continue to bless them, appreciating the holiness of their covenant with God.
After this climactic, theatrical moment the narrative follows a predictable path. Soon after this cursing debacle Balak goes to war against the Israelites anyway, and is badly defeated by them. Balaam goes back home, riding the same donkey off into the sunset, and everyone, or at least the Israelites, lives happily ever after in the Promised Land. And then, having experienced this happy fairy tale, we can all sing one of those diabetically sugary infectious Disney tunes on the way out of the theater… “The Israelites, they are truly grand, the Israelites have a Promised Land, the sky’s blue and sunny, there is milk, there is honey, it’s a Jewish, Jewish land.” You get the idea.
We have all been enjoying the wonderful world of Balaam, if you will.
Only that’s not how this story finishes. After all, the world is not actually a Disney movie, and happily-ever-afters are fairly scarce in Jewish history. Mind you, this is still the same people of Israel who constantly failed to follow God and practice Judaism, who consistently rebelled against Moses and Aaron. Nearly every week in Numbers they will continue to walk a tightrope bordering on complete disaster, bouncing chaotically from crisis to crisis, from kvetching to slander to rebellion to full-on revolution to pagan apostasy to sex scandals. The people of Israel, the Wandering Jews of Numbers, are more like a bad reality TV show than a powerful, growing nation coming into its own. They are trouble, a grease fire just waiting to spread, the Kardashians in Canaan.
Yet while Moses and Aaron have been pedaling full speed just to keep this group traveling in the same general direction, Balaam has been singing Israel’s praises in operatic hyperbole. In spite of the political and social reality on the inside, to an outsider these Jews look spectacular. There is a lesson here, and it is one that we Jews need to be reminded of today: our self-perception is often not in harmony with the way others see us. Although we are used to viewing ourselves as the disputatious, argumentative, stiff-necked people we know that we truly are on the inside, the outside world sees us quite differently.
We are now at a point where our public PR in the US is still just about the best it has ever been. The contemporary perception of the Jewish community of America among non-Jews these days is that we are amazingly together, affluent, coordinated. Our influence over the federal government, the so-called Israel Lobby, is considered overwhelming. Other groups try to copy our successes. Non-Jews want to marry our children. We consistently are rated at the top of most admired religions in America.
Even the Anti-Semites, and they have been coming out of the sewers in far greater profusion in recent years than in quite a long time, are influenced by some weird sorcery, a kind of perverse alchemy. They genuinely believe we Jews are so powerful that we control the economy and the press and social media and the government and Hollywood—well, OK, we do control Hollywood; still, their websites and conspiracy theories are a kind of updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And yet we ourselves spend so much time on infighting, and on agonizing over how we are supposedly disappearing, failing, how Israel is endangered. To the outsiders we look great. To ourselves? We still look like, well, shlemiels.
The truth is that we Jews, and our Jewish communities, have incredible strengths and remarkable resources. We are truly blessed—in Balaam’s words, how good are our homes, how beautiful our dwellings. But we often have trouble seeing it, like the prophet whose donkey has better vision than he does.
All that’s really required of us American Jews today, is commitment to our religion and our practice, and some hope and optimism—or perhaps it’s just realism. If we can have the courage of our accomplishments, our synagogue and our Jewish community will expand and grow and flourish, as Balaam predicted all those centuries ago. We don’t need to agonize about our place in American society as loyal citizens. We just need to be proud of our Jewish identities, and active as religious, committed, liberal Jews.
On this Shabbat of Balaam’s praise of Israel may we come to appreciate all we have, all we already are, and all that our amazing tradition offers us. And may we then come to embrace our own Judaism and our community, and live fully, proudly, and cooperatively, as Jews.