The Donkey Saw the Angel. Today’s Moralists Still Don’t

This weekend, in synagogues around the world, Jews read Parashat Balak, one of the most extraordinary portions in the Torah. Most people remember it for two things: a talking donkey and the blessings that replaced a curse. But I think its deepest lesson is something else entirely.

It is a story about moral blindness.

By this point in the Torah, the Israelites have left Egypt, wandered through the desert, and are camped near the edge of the Promised Land. The neighboring kingdoms are terrified. One of them is ruled by Balak, king of Moab, who is so frightened by the Jewish people that he hires the famous sorcerer Bilaam to curse them.

But the curse never comes, every time Bilaam opens his mouth to curse Israel, a blessing comes out instead. One of those blessings, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob,” became one of Judaism’s best known prayers and is still recited in synagogues every day. It is another reminder that throughout Jewish history, those who sought to curse the Jewish people have often ended up strengthening the very story they hoped to erase.

The portion is studied endlessly for what it teaches about prophecy and Israel’s destiny. But this year I found myself captivated by something else, something sitting quietly in the middle of one of the Torah’s most famous stories.

Before the sorcerer ever attempts to curse Israel, God stops everything to defend a donkey.

On the road to curse the Israelites, Bilaam is riding his donkey when the animal sees what he cannot: an angel standing in the path with a drawn sword. To save his life, she turns aside three times, and three times Bilaam beats her for it. Then God does something that happens almost nowhere else in the Bible. He gives the donkey the power to speak:“What have I done to you, that you have beaten me these three times?” The angel then appears and rebukes Bilaam, not only for his mission against Israel, but for striking the very animal that had just saved his life.

That image has stayed with me. The God of Israel, before defending His people from a curse, first defends a helpless animal from cruelty.

And that is where I cannot ignore the irony of our own time.

Many of today’s loudest movements for justice pride themselves on expanding the circle of moral concern. Activists who campaign tirelessly against cruelty toward animals often reserve extraordinary hostility for the very people whose civilization first embedded compassion toward animals into law.

Long before any modern declaration of animal rights, the Torah legislated mercy for living creatures. You must let your work animals rest on the Sabbath, just as you rest yourself. You may not muzzle an ox while it threshes your grain, denying it a mouthful of the food it is working to produce. You may not take a mother bird together with her young. You may not harness an ox and a donkey to the same plow because the weaker animal will suffer trying to keep pace. From these commandments, the rabbis developed one of Judaism’s enduring legal principles, tza’ar ba’alei chayim, the prohibition against causing unnecessary suffering to any living creature.

Compassion for animals was not invented by modern progressivism. It has been woven into Jewish civilization for more than three thousand years. The first voice raised in Scripture against animal cruelty belongs to a donkey. And the first judge to hear her complaint is the God of the Jews.

We live in an age overflowing with people who speak the language of morality, justice, liberation, compassion, and human rights. They have slogans for every cause and empathy for every victim. Yet when the victims are Jews, when the target is Israel, and when hatred is repackaged as anti-Zionism, their moral vision suddenly fails.

Perhaps the donkey should speak again. Perhaps she would ask today’s self appointed prophets of justice the very same question she asked Bilaam: “What have I done to you?” Or perhaps she would ask a different question. What have the Jewish people done to you that you have made them the exception to every principle you claim to defend? What has Israel done to you that you deny the Jewish people the same right to history, security, and self determination that you demand for every other nation?

If today’s progressive movements could set aside their certainties long enough to open their eyes, they might discover what Bilaam never saw. The obstacle before them is not the Jew. It is not Israel. It is not Zionism: It is their own moral blindness. The tragedy of Bilaam was not that he hated Israel. It was that he was convinced he stood on the side of righteousness while failing to recognize the truth directly before him.

That may be the enduring warning of Parashat Balak. Hatred rarely presents itself as hatred. More often it disguises itself as virtue. It wraps itself in the language of justice, compassion, and progress while making one remarkable exception: Jews.