Only For A Moment

The Secret of Divine Anger in Balak

My message was to bless: When God blesses, I cannot reverse it. (Numbers 23:20)

How long does God’s anger last? A moment. And how long is a moment? One fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eighth of an hour, that is a moment. And no creature can determine that moment except for Balaam the wicked, about whom it is written: “He who knows the knowledge of the Most High” (Numbers 24:16)… this teaches that Balaam was able to precisely determine the hour that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is angry. (Brachot 7a)

This week, in parashat Balak, we read about the Midianite prophet Balaam’s transformation from mercenary accuser of Israel to poetic defender. Balaam discovers that the prophet is an instrument of the divine, not the other way around. (Some forms of) Religion may look like they’re about influencing God, but, in the end, God can only be influenced if God wants to be. Any other view, held too strongly, would make God an “output” of human behavior, a function of human control. Religion would be no more than “theurgy as a service,” an ancient view still commonly held.

Talmudic tradition has it that Balaam’s “gift” was his ability to know the precise moment each day when God gets angry. Such bold anthropomorphism is foreign to the abstract and iconoclastic view of God that we’ve inherited from Maimonides. But going with a literary, metaphoric, and allegorical interpretation of divine anger, the Talmud’s claim makes for a rich portrait of the Torah’s Mosaic foil, Judaism’s anti-prophet. What does it mean that Balaam can calculate the moment of God’s anger?

First, it seems, that God’s anger is a minuscule part of God’s day. Balaam has an antenna for a certain aspect of God, but one that is not God’s dominant expression. Outside of the moment of God’s anger, Balaam has no portal to the transcendent. Balaam, as it were, has access to God’s “dark side.”

Second, it seems that God’s anger occurs like “clock-work,” making it less a reaction to specific events and more of a constitutive emotion that God needs to express. Divine anger doesn’t exist because of anything we do, but rather looks for things to be angry about. In this, it may resemble human anger. Anger, the Talmud suggests, is a form of catharsis. The trigger is hardly relevant. Balaam knows how to calculate, but this makes him more of a bot, as it were, than a genuine interlocutor. Balaam can manipulate the rules of the universe. There are rules, as it were, by which even God is bound. Knowing them may make one clever, but not necessarily noble.

In depicting Balaam as one who knows the secret, passing moment of divine anger, the Talmud offers us an image of someone who knows how to focus on the negative, to find fault, to stir discontent. Balaam is a great critic. He is, as it were, the externalized voice of God the judge, God the destroyer. He is persuasive because he doesn’t need to lie. Israel gives him plenty of good material.

The miracle, then, in the story—as presented by the rabbis—is that a person who seeks to curse must bless, in spite of himself. The deeper message is that the curser and the blesser do not behold two different realities; rather, they see the same one. What makes their perspectives different is the attitude each brings to it. Israel hasn’t changed. It’s the same stubborn, rebellious people that’s been kvetching in the desert. They’re the same people that cries out against Moses and that God offers in the previous parashah to destroy. Balaam’s point of view isn’t wrong. Rather, in transforming Balaam into a blesser, the Torah teaches that one can have a correct view of things and still miss the point. One can be a great, true critic and still be distorted, over-representing the bad and minimizing the good, and doing so for ulterior reasons.

That God’s anger also occurs in a hidden flash suggests that God generally seeks to conceal God’s anger, and that anyone who knows it knows something “forbidden.” There are perhaps some truths which it is better not to reveal. Balaam—as presented by the sages—lacks discretion. Not all insights ought to be revealed. To glimpse God’s anger is akin to reveal God’s nakedness. God is entitled to God’s own interiority. Balaam pries.

Are the rabbis just apologists, turning Balaam into an anti-hero when the Torah itself gives a more mixed, perhaps even positive view?

In my view, the Talmud’s Balaam is a deeply modern one, as it implies that context matters. Balaam sees something wrong with us, because he’s looking to find fault, to weaken us. But we should examine our own flaws and see what Balaam sees, provided that we do so with love. The Talmud may exaggerate Balaam, but the sentiment seems both truthful to the text and psychologically and culturally resonant.

To put the blessing in the mouth of the one who curses is to make a statement that criticism of the people is only valuable if it comes from a place of love. There are plenty of places in the Torah where God also curses Israel. But God’s curses are motivated, as it were, by a desire to see us do the right thing. Balaam’s curses are not coming from such a place. In modern terms, Balak—the Moabite king who employs Balaam—is antisemite. It therefore does not matter if the “reasons” for his antisemitism are persuasive or even the kinds of things that the Jews might say about themselves in closed company. God alone has the right to be angry at the Jewish people. Yet, Balak is also a distraction. Just because the antisemites are wrong in their motive, doesn’t mean we should let the fact of antisemitism become an excuse for self-improvement, as if we are flawless. The malice of my enemies doesn’t exempt me from introspection and divine accountability

We have every right to be angry about any given state of affairs—but none of us can or should claim to speak on behalf of God’s anger, which is to be kept under lock and key. To the extent that we are endowed with a rare epistemological talent for discerning divine anger, even this does not authorize us to air it. The God who makes donkeys talk, who makes cursers bless, also turns God’s own anger into mercy. OK, so you don’t believe in talking donkeys. But maybe that’s just a radical way of saying that we should be as awe-struck with disbelief in the the fact that God forgives, that God overcomes God’s angry side. Forgiveness—that God does not destroy the world—is supernatural in its way, even as we don’t see it or consider it on a regular basis.

Many have drawn parallels between Jonah and Balaam. Both are reluctant prophets who initially do the opposite of what they’re summoned to. Both involve supernatural events involving animals. Jonah is a Jewish prophet who ministers to the Gentiles. Balaam is a Gentile prophet who ministers to the Jews, two exceptional characters. The deeper parallel, it seems to me, is that both have a problem with divine mercy; both seek to appeal to a God of judgment. Jonah does not think the people of Nineveh deserve to be saved. And Balaam seeks to destroy Israel. In both, the lesson may be that both civilizations deserve to be saved for reasons other than pure merit.

The anti-lessons we draw from Balaam are

• We must put our capacity to criticize in its right context.

• Not all truths are worth sharing. A correct view of things is not enough if it is not accompanied by a good motive, a good heart. It is not enough to be a talented prophet; one must be a caring prophet.

• Moses has “skin in the game,” but Balaam is a hired-gun. Moses therefore earns the right to be harsh where Balaam does not. Mercenary criticism is generally wrong even when it’s right.

• “Prophet” isn’t a career. While Balak thinks that being a prophet means serving the king, the story suggests that prophecy is a vocation.

• The prophet should generally stand for divine mercy even when God is angry and the people are wrong. The prophet is appointed to be the people’s defense attorney, not their accuser. Even when they play the role of accuser it must done from an ultimate desire to defend.

In all of this is story is the tension between conditional and unconditional love. Balaam operates in a universe in which God’s love for Israel is conditional. His efficacy departs when we consider God’s love is unconditional. Yet unconditional love is not the same as having no standards, no preferences, no hopes, no disappointments, and no judgments. Balaam’s story is sandwiched between episodes in which God punishes the people for wrongdoing. The people can do wrong—but we must not forget that God cares about their errors because God loves them. The relationship itself is not in question. Balaam is the stress-test by which the covenant is reaffirmed. Even when Israel is guilty of the worst, and even when God is angry, God’s anger only lasts a moment.

If God’s anger, as it were, only last’s a moment, how much the more so should we aim to cultivate lives in which ours, too, can pass?

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh

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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.

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