What does God want?

Balaam and the Ass, by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1626

What does God want from us?

Spoiler alert: I don’t know. Sacred Jewish texts have grappled with this question for millenia, and they’ve offered answers ranging from God doesn’t want anything to God wants total submission. This week’s Torah portion, Balak, is not usually one of the texts that people center in this conversation. But it offers a unique perspective that has been widely overlooked.

Here’s a rough summary of this week’s Torah portion: A Moabite king, Balak (after whom the Torah portion is named), sets out to hire a non-Israelite prophet named Balaam (yes, the names are confusingly similar so we’ll call Balak “the King,” and Balaam “the Prophet”) to curse the Israelites. The King sends messengers to recruit the Prophet for his mission. God tells the Prophet not to participate, and he listens. When the King’s messengers return a second time, after being rebuffed the first, the Prophet again consults with God. This time, God tells the Prophet to go with the messengers, but to stay tuned for God’s orders.

The next morning, the Prophet sets out on his donkey to meet with the King. Right away, God gets angry at the Prophet and sends an angel to stop him in his tracks. When the Prophet’s donkey sees the angel, it begins to veer off course. The Prophet gets angry and beats the donkey.

At this point, things get really strange. The donkey talks — yes, talks — and asks the Prophet why he’s being so cruel. Eventually, the Prophet realizes that the donkey was just trying to help by protecting him from God’s angel. Again God tells the Prophet to continue on his journey to the King, but to only say whatever God instructs him to.

After meeting, the King takes the Prophet to a location overlooking the Israelite encampment so that he can curse them. The Prophet instructs him to make sacrifices. The King complies. But then the Prophet proceeds to bless, rather than curse, the Israelites. The King tries the same thing in another location, but the process repeats itself. The same pattern repeats in a third location. Eventually the King gives up, and that’s where the main part of the story ends.

So, you’re probably wondering, what does any of this wild story have to do with what God wants from us?

This biblical story, like all biblical stories, contains life lessons. But unlike theological treatises or philosophical prose, it shows rather than tells. And one of the best ways to figure out the story’s lesson is to unpack what’s most surprising about it.

You might think then that we should focus on the talking donkey because, well, that’s pretty strange. And yes, it is weird. But already in the first book of the bible, Genesis, we encounter a snake that talks to Eve in the Garden of Eden. So a talking donkey is a contender, but not necessarily the most surprising thing about our story.

What’s much stranger than the talking donkey is that God gets mad at the Prophet when he sets off to meet the King. God getting mad? That’s not strange at all! Doesn’t that happen basically every other verse in the bible?

Yes, God gets mad often. But it’s almost always after humans disobey God. Here, however, God tells the Prophet to go meet with the King (Numbers 22:20), the Prophet begins to follow God’s instruction by setting off to meet with the King (Numbers 22:21), and then God gets angry at him for doing exactly what he was just told (Numbers 22:22). That is incredibly strange.

This has bothered bible commentators throughout the centuries and, while their specific interpretations have varied, they share a common theme: the Prophet was more enthusiastic to take on the King’s mission than God wanted. The basic idea is that God told the Prophet to meet with the King, but the Prophet disobeyed by doing so with extra, uncalled for excitement.

There are two big problems with this line of thought. The first is that it reads into the text a level of enthusiasm that simply isn’t there. But more importantly, this analysis doesn’t make sense in the context of the story. Again and again, the Prophet consults with God. And every single time, he does exactly what God tells him. It takes a pretty strained reading to suggest that the Prophet, who is always obedient, disobeys by having the wrong level of excitement to do exactly what he’s told.

Luckily, the Torah gives us a clue as to what is actually going on here. When the Prophet gets angry at his donkey, it uses the same exact Hebrew construction as when God gets angry at the Prophet: ויחר אף. This construction shows up only 15 times in the entire Pentateuch, and four of them are in this week’s Torah portion. The text is telling us that the Prophet’s anger towards his donkey and God’s anger towards the Prophet are related.

So let’s look at the Prophet’s anger at his donkey. The donkey — an animal that symbolizes stubbornness — sees a danger (God’s angel blocking the path) that the Prophet does not and tries to protect itself and the Prophet by veering off course. Because the Prophet doesn’t see the danger, he gets angry at the donkey for disobeying him. His anger is triggered by non-obedience.

Once the Prophet realizes that the donkey actually saved him because it saw something he didn’t, he ends up recognizing that his anger was misplaced. He realizes that obedience is not always desirable — that sometimes resistance is far more helpful than submission. 

If this is starting to sound theological, that’s because it is. As highlighted earlier, the Prophet is actually the epitome of submission and obedience. He literally does everything God tells him to do. His donkey was supposed to teach him that such obedience isn’t always best. He learns that lesson vis-a-vis the donkey and even with respect to people: he refuses to follow the King’s instruction to curse the Israelites, which causes the King to become angry at him — the third time the Hebrew construction of ויחר אף shows up in the Torah portion. But, and this is a critical but, he doesn’t consider that the same should be true of his relationship with God.

Hold on: Is the suggestion here that God actually wants disobedience?

This shouldn’t be surprising to close readers of the bible or Jewish tradition more broadly. Abraham argues with God and tries to prevent the destruction of Sodom. Moses pushes back and persuades God not to destroy the Israelites. An almost 2,000 year-old rabbinic midrash goes so far as to say that it was precisely because of Abraham’s talkback that God chose to converse with him and not anyone else in the ten generations before him (Genesis Rabbah 49). It is this dynamic relationship with the divine that is at the source of the name Israel, which finds its roots in the biblical story of Jacob “wrestling with God.”

But this week’s Torah portion takes things a step farther. If all we had were Abraham and Moses as archetypal biblical stories, we might have thought that it’s good to talk back to God when you feel like something is unjust. But obedience is a totally appropriate response too. 

God’s anger at the Prophet Balaam takes things a step farther. Talking back to God when a request is unjust is not simply nice — it’s necessary. God gets angry when we see things that God doesn’t and we are silent. We often imagine God being like the Prophet when he got mad at his donkey for disobedience, but the message here is that God is more similar to the Prophet after his conversation with his donkey, once he realizes that disobedience actually saved everyone.

Strikingly, in rabbinic imagination, the Prophet, who obeyed God’s every word and ended up blessing the Israelites, is usually portrayed as a villain, while the King, who repeatedly tried to get the Prophet to curse the Israelites, despite being rebuffed repeatedly, is considered a hero. The Talmud goes so far as to say that the King merits being the forefather of Ruth, the progenitor of Kings David and Solomon, and, eventually, the Messiah (Sotah 47a).

What about the King could possibly explain this?

According to the same passage in the Talmud, the King is an archetype of someone who does the right thing for the wrong reasons, but eventually comes to do them for the right ones. The right thing the King does, according to the Talmud, is bringing sacrifices, which is a paradigmatic example of trying to get God to do something different. If the Prophet is an archetype of blind obedience, the King is one of strong defiance.

The Talmud doesn’t suggest that defiance is an inherent good. Defiance for the purpose of cursing the Israelites is an example of doing the right thing (opposition to God’s preferences) for the wrong reason (selfishness). But, the Talmud suggests, the King eventually comes to a place of defiance for the right reasons, which seem to be the ideal. 

Nothing in the Torah portion explicitly says that the King eventually had an internal change of heart, as the Talmud suggests. But if we pay close attention to the biblical text, there is an allusion that is hard to read otherwise. After his failed attempt to get the Prophet to curse the Israelites, the King exits the story with the words that he “went on his way” (Numbers 24:25). In Hebrew, the phrase is הלך לדרכו.

The only other time this construction appears in the Pentateuch is in reference to Jacob (Genesis 32:2). And, as if the literary allusion couldn’t be any more potent, it’s right before he wrestles with God’s angel and gets the name Israel, which means “one who wrestles with the divine.” 

Of course, the Torah portion is not teaching us that disobedience is an inherent good. Sometimes the donkey should go exactly where it is being led. The point is that there are times when it shouldn’t. And, at those times, defiance is at the core of what God wants.