The Donkey of Bilaam

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

Perhaps the strangest story in the Bible is about Bilaam’s donkey. Bilaam rode his donkey to curse the Jews on behalf of Balak, the King of Moab, when Israel was about to enter Canaan. The donkey refused to walk normally, and ended up crushing Bilaam’s leg against a stone wall. Bilaam beat the donkey in rage at this, and the donkey then spoke and said, “Why are you hitting me? Don’t you see that there is an angel with a sword blocking the road?”

Bilaam tried to curse the Jews, but G‑d forced him to bless the Jews, which he did. The most beautiful passages about Jewish redemption are his words.

The two miracles of the donkey’s speaking and Bilaam’s blessings in place of curses, mark this story as one of the most unusual in the Torah. When we reflect that this is the story that produced the central passages about Redemption and the Future World, we realize that the process of the Future Redemption is one where slowly, the sun will rise, until the “donkeys” will rebuke the wicked, and the wicked will be forced to concede that Israel and the Torah are right.

When I grew up all intellectual people believed firmly that the universe was an accident and that people were evolutionary products. Today, the senior secular physicists propound the Anthropic Theorem, that the universe was designed for people. Sounds like Creation, and it is, but the donkey has not spoken the full sentence at this time. But it will.

In recent times, anti-Semitism, which once was the general idealism, has fallen into disrepute, at least in public, in almost all of the world. Jews have crawled out of their caves in the ghettos and now are recognized with respect in their own land. A hundred years ago Jews in Russia were regularly killed and beaten. A generation ago, when the War of Attrition in Egypt with Israel was going strong, five Soviets jets attacked the Israelis and were shot down. No Israel jets were injured.

Communism and Western anti-Semitic religions have largely collapsed. The sun is rising, even if it seems to be covered by the clouds at times. The process is there.

Noahides and gentiles cannot help but being inspired by the obvious beginning of the End. Here, too, the light is going on, as the mighty powers of religions to insist that Jews are damned weaken, until they, too, must protest anti-Semitism, at least, officially.

Sinai, says the Talmud, means “hate.” The nations hated Israel for its special mission, for its status as the clerics of the human race. In fact, the higher and more cultured the nation, the greater was its hate of Jews. The task of the Jews, and the Noahide movement, is to assure sensitive and cultured gentiles of their important place at the Table of G‑d. All of us await the day when, “And G-d will be the King of all of the earth. On that day G-d will be One and His Name One.”

The International Noahide movement must provide the tools for searching gentiles to find G‑d. Indeed, even lost Jews are inspired by gentiles who are Noahides. How fast the sun goes up, and how clearly the donkey speaks, and how many blessings emanate from those who hate, depends greatly on the few struggling leaders of the Noahide world.

The Torah was given in Seventy Languages, and it was written in Seventy Languages on stones for the gentiles of Canaan. It is time for us to reprint these stones and get people to read them. It is time for us to have faith in the process of the End, and to hasten it with our efforts at organizing, teaching, and inspiring. The highest heavens and farthest reaches of the universe await the attempts of Noahides to shine light in the darkness.