The Donkey and the Blessing

The donkey has been hit three times and now she can speak. Notice what she does not say. She does not say stop, and she does not call him names. She asks him a question: what did I do to you? She is asking him to think for a moment instead of hitting again.

The odd thing here is what nobody does. Nobody screams. Nobody says a donkey is talking. Bilam simply answers her back, and the story carries on, which tells you the Torah is not showing off a miracle - it is showing you who is being out-argued by whom. Rashi hears something sharp in her last two words. Shalosh regalim means three times, but it is also the phrase for the three pilgrimage festivals, so the donkey is asking: you want to uproot a nation that keeps three festivals a year?

The verb vayiftach sets up the whole account: Hashem opens a mouth in 22:28 and uncovers eyes in 22:31, and between them a man is undone. The Mishnah in Avot 5:6 lists pi ha’aton, the mouth of the donkey, among the ten things created at twilight on the eve of the first Shabbat - a way of saying the miracle was built into the order of creation rather than tearing a hole in it. Rashi, following Tanchuma on Balak, reads zeh shalosh regalim as a deliberate hint: you seek to uproot a nation that celebrates three regalim a year. The pun works because regalim first means simply occurrences - Shemot 23:14, shalosh regalim tachog li bashanah, means three times a year you shall celebrate - and only from there did shalosh regalim become the name of the three festivals themselves. On whether the donkey literally spoke, the commentators divide sharply. Rambam in the Guide II:42 holds that the whole episode, donkey and angel together, took place within a prophetic vision, since the same account has an angel speaking to Bilam. Ibn Ezra takes the opposite line - the plain sense is that the donkey spoke - and answers the philosophers who objected that miracles occur only to authenticate a prophet, pointing to Chananyah, Mishael and Azaryah, who were rescued and were not prophets at all.

Bilam is furious, and he says something without hearing himself. If only I had a sword, he shouts, I would kill you. He came all this way to destroy a whole nation just by talking - and he cannot even manage one donkey without asking for a weapon.

Rashi points out who is listening. The princes of Moav are riding beside him, and they have just heard the expert they hired wish out loud for a sword to use on his own animal. The man was bought for a mouth that kills; the first time he loses control he reaches for a blade. Ask it about yourself: when the thing you are actually good at stops working, what do you grab instead?

Onkelos renders hit’alalt as an expression of scorn, and Rashi follows him - a term of insult and contempt. The root ayin-lamed-lamed carries exactly that sense in Shemot 10:2, asher hit’alalti b’Mitzrayim, where Hashem is the one making sport of Egypt; here Bilam accuses his donkey of doing to him what Hashem did to Pharaoh. Rashi’s comment on the second half is the sharpest sentence in the chapter: this was a great disgrace for him in the eyes of the princes - this man is going to kill an entire nation with his mouth, and for this donkey he needs a weapon. And then the text answers his wish with the cruellest possible precision. He says cherev b’yadi, a sword in my hand; two verses later the angel is standing there with charbo shlufah b’yado, his drawn sword in his hand. The sword existed the whole time, and it was not pointed where he thought.

The donkey answers him with facts. I am your donkey. You have ridden me since you were young. Have I ever done this before? And Bilam has to say one word, and the word is no. The animal has won the argument, and he knows it.

This is the only completely honest thing Bilam says in the whole account. Everything else is boasting, or bargaining with kings, or bargaining with Hashem. Here he says lo, no, because there is nothing else available. And look at the shape of her argument: she asks him to weigh a whole lifetime of behaviour against three strange moments. That is exactly the calculation he refused to make before he picked up the stick - and it is the calculation people refuse to make about each other all the time.

Hahasken hiskanti is an infinitive absolute followed by a perfect - the emphatic construction, roughly have I ever been in the habit. Rashi renders it with Onkelos and brings the parallel from Iyov 22:2, hal’El yiskan gaver, along with a derashah in Avodah Zarah 4b in which the princes of Moav ask Bilam why he is not riding a horse. Notice the legal shape of the donkey’s case. She establishes a chazakah - a settled, documented pattern of conduct, me’odcha ad hayom hazeh, from your beginning until this day - and asks that three anomalous moments be judged against it rather than the other way round. It is a better argument than anything her rider produces in three chapters, and his one-word answer, lo, is the only unguarded sentence he speaks. Note too anochi, the emphatic I, the pronoun of the opening of the Ten Commandments, here in the mouth of a beast asserting that she is a known quantity.

Now Hashem lets Bilam see what the donkey has been seeing the whole time: an angel standing in the road holding a sword. She was not being stubborn. She was turning away to keep him alive. Bilam bows all the way down, face to the ground, in the middle of the road.

Here is the sting. He wanted a sword. There was one there the entire time, drawn, aimed at him - and his donkey had been steering him away from it while he beat her for it. Ramban notices something quiet in the wording that changes how you read the whole man: a real prophet does not need his eyes opened. The Torah uses that phrase for Hagar in the desert and for Elisha’s frightened servant, never for a prophet mid-prophecy. So the famous seer, at this moment, is the least sighted creature on the road.

Ramban states it plainly: from this verse we learn that Bilam was not a prophet, for had he been one, why would he require gilui einayim in order to see the angel - and he lists the places Scripture does use that language, Hagar in Bereshit 21:19 and the servant of Elisha in Melachim II 6:17, neither of them prophets. Ramban adds that what Bilam did receive here was granted for the honour of Israel, and that Yehoshua 13:22 buries him under the title hakosem, the diviner. The verb vayigal, from the root gimel-lamed-heh, to uncover, is the deliberate counterpart to vayiftach in verse 28. Hashem opens a mouth that has no business speaking and uncovers eyes that had no business being shut. Between those two verbs the professional seer is stripped of the only thing he was hired for. The closing pair, vayikod vayishtachu, is the language used of Avraham’s servant when his mission succeeds in Bereshit 24:26 - the man paid to make a nation bow finds himself face down in the road.

Two chapters later Bilam is standing high above the desert, looking down at all the tents of Israel spread out below him. He opens his mouth to curse them, and what comes out is: how good are your tents, Yaakov. These are the words many people say as they walk in through the door of a synagogue.

The Talmud in Sanhedrin 105b reads this line backwards. From the blessing that came out, it says, you can work out what he had meant to say: he wanted them to have no synagogues and no houses of study, and what left his mouth was how good are your tents. Which leaves you with a real problem. Is a blessing still a blessing when the man saying it wanted the opposite? The siddur has already answered - it puts his line at the entrance. Perhaps because what he saw was true regardless of what he planned to do with it.

Rashi gives two readings and they pull in different directions. The first is about what Bilam actually observed from the ridge: he saw that the entrances of their tents were not aligned facing one another. The Gemara he is drawing on, Bava Batra 60a, gives the conclusion he drew - these are fit for the Shechinah to rest upon them - and derives from that observation the halachah that you may not open a doorway or a window directly opposite your neighbour’s. The praise is for restraint: a camp arranged so that nobody can see into a neighbour’s home. Rashi’s second reading takes ohalecha as the Sanctuary at Shiloh and the Temple - good while they stand, because atonement was offered in them - and mishkenotecha as those same places even in ruin, because they are a mashkon, a pledge held against Israel, their destruction itself serving as atonement. Rashi is playing on the word, since mishkan and mashkon share the letters shin-kaf-nun. Sanhedrin 105b refuses to let Bilam off: from the blessing of that wicked man you learn what was in his heart - he sought to say that they should have no synagogues and study houses. And Berachot 12b reports that the sages wanted to fix the whole portion of Balak into the recitation of Shema and declined only because of tircha d’tzibura, the burden on the congregation. His sentence, carried inside that portion, came within one ruling of being obligatory twice a day. It settled for the doorway instead.