What Balaam Saw

We’ve been in Orange County for two weeks. We came for the memorial service for Modi’s grandfather — about two weeks ago — and we’re staying through his cousin’s wedding this weekend. A death and a celebration, the same trip, the same family, a handful of days apart. Our dog and the cat came with us. They’re staying here with family when we leave, while we sort out the logistics of getting them across an ocean and settled in.

Every morning I’ve been davening shacharit — morning prayers — in our bedroom before the rest of the house wakes up. The siddur I packed. The same words I say whether I’m home or not. This week I got to Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mishkenotecha Yisrael — How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel — and stopped. Not because the words were unfamiliar, but because I’d said them enough times that for a moment they went transparent. And I thought about who actually said them first — which was definitely fitting for this week.

Balaam wrote it. Or rather — Balaam couldn’t stop himself from saying it.

Parashat Chukat-Balak covers a lot of ground.

There’s the red heifer: the ultimate chok — divine law without a given reason — a ritual that purifies the impure and makes the pure impure in the process, a paradox the Torah does not bother to untangle for us.

The deaths of Miriam and Aaron, two of the three great leaders of the wilderness generation, gone within the same short stretch of text.

Moses striking the rock at Mei Merivah, the single act that will cost him the land.

The bronze serpent raised on a pole in the wilderness — look at it and live — a strange and counterintuitive medicine for a people dying of snakebite. Israel singing over a well in the desert.

The armies of Sihon and Og falling.

A full parsha and a half, dense with drama and death and improbable grace.

And then it ends with a man on a hill who cannot say what he was hired to say.

Balak, king of Moab, is watching Israel approach. He has seen what they did to the Amorites. He is not planning to fight them directly — he has done that calculation and does not like the answer.

His response was to find a prophet with a reputation, hire him, get the curse delivered, and let the supernatural do the work.

He sends for Balaam. The offer is explicit.

Come curse these people. I will pay you well.

Balaam travels. Stands on the hill above the camp. Opens his mouth.

What comes out is a blessing.

Balak moves him to a different hill. Same thing. A third hill. Same thing again.

Three attempts, three locations, three blessings.

The king’s exasperation, after each failed oracle, is almost comic: What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemies and you have blessed them instead.

And Balaam’s answer, each time, is the same: I cannot say anything the ETERNAL does not put in my mouth.

Just before the words we say every morning, the text gives us one precise detail. Balaam lifted his eyes and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, and the spirit of GOD came upon him.

The text doesn’t tell us he saw a threat, or a formation, or an obstacle. He saw a camp. An encampment by tribe. A people arranged in their ordinary lives.

מַה־טֹּ֥בוּ אֹהָלֶ֖יךָ יַעֲקֹ֑ב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶ֖יךָ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel!

— Bamidbar 24:5

What Balaam saw was the tents. The dwellings. The arrangements people make when they intend to go on living.

He saw it because he was outside.

Balak hired him for his ability to see past surfaces, to perceive what ordinary eyes miss. And what Balaam perceives, standing on that hill with every incentive to find danger, is the camp arrayed below him.

The word the Torah uses, tov, means something closer to good — the same word from the first chapter of Bereshit, Genesis, when GOD surveys creation and calls it good. Fitting. Right.

The convert perspective enters my life in odd moments, and this is one of them.

Before I converted, I walked into Jewish spaces the way Balaam walked onto that hill — from outside, seeing things that prolonged familiarity erases. A Shabbat table set on Friday afternoon. A community singing a melody I didn’t know. The warmth in a room of people greeting each other at kiddush.

I saw these things with a clarity that fades once you’re inside them, once the furniture of your own house becomes invisible because you see it every day.

Two weeks in someone else’s house gives a flicker of that back. The rhythm of who wakes up when. The way their kitchen smells in the morning. The dog settling into a new routine, the cat finding his corner. I’m a guest here — not inside it the way family is inside it — and some mornings, davening at early light, the outside clarity returns. Briefly. Sideways.

I was Balaam on the hill, in a sense — arriving without the familiarity that erases things, and finding what I found. What I found was: this is good. These people have arranged something good.

What Balaam could not do, in the end, was keep the words to himself. He opened his mouth and out came the blessing, three times, and on the third attempt he gave us the one that opens our morning prayers three thousand years later.

Whatever Balak was trying to accomplish, it failed so completely that its failure became liturgy. The words outlasted Balaam. They outlasted Balak.

The community Balaam looked down at from the hill is still gathering, still arranging its tents, still living in a way that apparently looks, from outside, like something worth noticing.

This Shabbat — two weeks into a trip that started at a funeral and ends at a wedding, in the middle of a parsha full of harder things, death and failure and the cost of a single wrong act in the wilderness — there is also a man on a hill who saw what was there to see.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham