Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

Bilam and violet hour

Now that it’s winter in Sydney, I love to go walking as the sun is setting along the coast. Some of you may have done the same. The sun has just gone down but there is still the remnant of the sun’s afterglow casting just enough light to see. Everything has changed colour a little bit, the moon is out and it’s beautiful. It’s more than beautiful, it is mysterious and dreamy. This hour, called twilight, is what the Rabbis in our tradition called Bein Hashmashot, the “hour of in-betweens”.

This week’s parsha is a double portion, Chukkat-Balak. In Balak we read the somewhat crazy story of Bilam, the prophet, who is hired by a Moabite king to curse the Jews. God is not happy about Bilam going off to curse God’s beloved people and so as Bilam trundles on his way, on his donkey, God dispatches an angel with a revolving sword to stop Bilam in his tracks. There’s one catch. Bilam is unable to see the angel. Only his donkey can. While they are on the path, the donkey halts in a bid to protect her master, knowing if she goes just one step further, her master will be killed by an invisible angel waving an invisible sword.

Bilam is enraged. We can picture him, foaming at the mouth, ready to curse, and now his transport won’t move. It’s even more frustrating than backed up traffic on Old South Head Road! Bilam beats his donkey, urging her to keep going, once, twice, three times he beats her until finally the donkey has had enough and does what no donkey has ever done before. She opens her mouth and speaks, “What have I done to you that you beat me these three times? Have I not always been your devoted loyal, donkey?”. Now, we may have become accustomed to the supernatural in the Torah, angels flit in and out of stories almost as commonly as swooping magpies in Sydney parks. But a talking donkey? What is this?

The Rabbis of our tradition are aware that this talking donkey was a little out of the ordinary. I mean, Shrek may have perfected the talking Donkey, but Bilam’s donkey was the first to babble. In Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers, the Rabbis suggest that after the six days of creation, where perfect order was created in the natural world – light and dark, sky and earth, vegetation, fish, birds, mammals and humans – something disorderly and miraculous crept in. At the twilight hour, bein hashmashot, just as the sixth day was ending and creation was closing, God created Bilam’s talking donkey and nine other miraculous things mentioned in the Torah: the mouth of the earth that swallowed Korach’s rebels last week, the mouth of Miriam’s well that accompanied us in the desert, boba tea (just kidding) and the rainbow from the flood are some of the wonders on this fascinating list.

What does it mean that as the order of the natural world was being established and defined, at that very twilight hour of ‘not day and not night,’ God brought in wonders that transcend the natural and the rational? Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi, social activist and mystic warned that in our highly scientised and sometimes overly rational world today, we are in danger of losing the capacity for “radical amazement”. If we only focus on the things that we can see and touch and know, we lose the wonder and magic of life, the awe of a rainbow, the delight of a child blowing bubbles, the twilight walk from Bondi to Bronte, the moment when the music camp students came back with light shining on their faces. As we head off on holiday this week, no doubt we can anticipate lots of Netflix, lots of Cha-time, sushi and some surfing. Perhaps, Bilam’s talking donkey can invite all of us to look for moments that are bein hashmashot, moments where Otherness and mystery creep in and we are able to touch for an imperceptible and fleeting moment, the wonder and amazement of this world.

Shabbat Shalom שבת שלום and Nesiot Tovot  נסיעות טובות (good travels) to everyone.

With thanks to my teacher Rabbi Erin Leib-Smokler, for first writing about this idea and being the source for this piece.