Balak: Forget the Donkey!
There is a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the idealistic Perchik tells Tevye, “Money is the world’s curse!” Tevye replies by pointing to the heavens: “Then may the Lord smite me with it and may I never recover!”
I was once talking to someone who was going through a tough financial spot. He was unburdening himself by telling me the stress it was causing him. Late in the conversation, we observed that everyone knows there is no relationship between money and happiness, wealthier people are not happier or less stressed than poorer people. However, he told me, it can be very difficult to relate to that fact, in the moment, when you feel that the source of all your problems stem from just one cause, a lack of money. This principle applies to most hardship: when we are in it, we tend to feel that if we could just find a way to solve this one problem we would live happily ever after.
In Balak, Bilaam ventures on a mission to curse the Jewish people. His donkey leads him astray on the way, the verses tell the story best,
“The donkey saw the angel on the road with his sword drawn; so she turned aside into a field. Bilaam beat the donkey to get it back onto the road. Then, the angel stood in a path of the vineyards, with a wall on both sides. The donkey saw the angel, and she pressed against the wall (to squeeze past the angel), crushing Bilaam’s leg, and he beat her again. Then the angel stood in a narrow place, where there was no room to turn right or left. The donkey saw the angel, and it crouched down under Bilaam.”
Eventually, the gig is up, Bilaam is shown the angel as well and understands why the donkey was leading him off path. On reading this passage this year I couldn’t help but juxtapose the story of Bilaam and the donkey to what so many go through when they are struggling with a difficult life-curveball thrown at them.
In the moment, Bilaam was certain that the issue he had to reckon with was his recalcitrant donkey. He immediately attempted to solve the problem. He beat his donkey over and over again. The donkey was making things worse and worse. I am certain, Bilaam felt if he could just get that donkey back on the road, his problems would be entirely solved. What he soon understood was that the donkey was avoiding something scarier, the angel with a sword. The donkey was acting exactly as he should have, he was saving him. When the big picture is made clear, Bilaam realized he was expending all his energy fixing the donkey, when the donkey had nothing to do with his problem!
Although it might seem that the solution to our misery is simple; that all we need to do is to solve the problem that we know is causing us so much misery, the story of Bilaam illustrates how easily someone can exhaust himself trying to solve something that never needed fixing in the first place. We need to make sure we are not exhausting ourselves by investing our energy, and worrying about beating the wrong donkey!
