Interwoven through the epopee of exploits that is the narrative fabric of the biblical book of Numbers appear several threads of structuring instructions - orders of marching, tribe by tribe; orders of camping, banner by banner, around the central tabernacle; orders of service, Levitical family by family, in the sanctuary; and even orders for packing up the sacred appurtenances to carry them from one camping-place to the next.
And then, this week, story and structure come together in a way that makes the whole enterprise of ordering the encampment into a revelation.
To set the scene: Israel's wanderings bring the people toward the territory of Balak ben Tzipor, King of Moab - who feels so threatened by the prospect that he engages the services of a famous seer, Bil'am (or Balaam) ben Beor, to come and bring down curses against the Israelites.
I will rush by the nighttime visitations in which the Almighty first instructs Bil'am not to accept the invitation, and then to go but to speak only as instructed. I will not dwell at length upon the comedic turn of the prophet-for-hire's donkey, suddenly granted the power of speech to make clear that its own perceptions of sacred phenomena exceed those of its master, the ostensible seer.
But I will pause to note that a Canaanite inscription from some eight hundred years before the Common Era - unearthed in Transjordan in 1967 - makes reference to a certain Bil'am ben Be'or, a man of visions, to whom the elahin and shaddayin, the gods, come in the night, with words "in accordance with El's utterance," causing the non-Israelite prophet to rise distraught in the morning, full of foreboding premonitions about estrangement from the heavens and apprehensions of impending perils.
So it seems that when our Torah tells its tale of Bil'am, it is engaging with a known figure in its world, in a narrative fitting the character.
On the one hand, the seer's own donkey making an ass of him is the kind of showing up one would expect if the point were merely to make fun of a prophetic pretender from a neighboring nation. On the other hand, our scriptures place some of their most powerful poetry in Bil'am's mouth, and he seems to savour it. The rabbinic sages, too, are ambivalent about Bil'am. On the one hand, he is ubiquitously called "Bil'am the Wicked" in their teachings. On the other hand, rabbinic interpretation has it that when our scriptures say, "There arose not another prophet in Israel like Moses," this is specifically to leave room for Bil'am, who was in some way comparable.
In Moab, Balak the king takes Bil'am the seer up to an overlook, a place named "The High Places of Ba'al." From there they see "the edge of the nation," presumably the foremost part of the Israelite encampment. Bil'am instructs the king to have altars and sacrifices prepared, and to wait while he, the prophet, wanders off to see "if perchance the Eternal One will come to me and show me something, which I will then tell you."
And indeed, God places words in Bil'am's mouth, which he repeats upon returning to Balak - and, to the king's considerable consternation, the words are an exquisite blessing of Israel.
The process repeats, with Balak (in what the king seemingly takes for a stroke of vision on his own part) bringing Bil'am to "another place, from which you will be able to see them, but you will only see a sliver of them, and all of them you shall not see - and you shall curse them for me from there."
Again, altars and sacrifices; again, Bil'am, the seer, wanders off in search of portents; and again, when he returns, a beautiful blessing.
'Let's try another view,' suggests the king, in dogged determination - and they do.
But by this point Bil'am is well and truly catching on -
And it appeared to Bil'am that it was good in the sight of God to bless Israel,
So he did not go off as previously in search of portents,
But he turned his face to the wilderness.
And Bil'am lifted up his eyes,
And he saw Israel, encamped according to its tribes,
And the spirit of God came upon him.
And he took up his discourse and he said,
The words of Bil'am, son of Beor, and the words of the man whose sight is clear,
The words of one who hears the speech of El, who sees visions of Shaddai,
Overwhelmed, and open-eyed:
How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel...
And if I went on, as Bil'am does, past those most widely known words of his most famous blessing, it would be to remark on how, looking out over the thirsty wasteland, the seer's words again and again are of flowing water - gardens by brooks, aloes and cedars planted upon rivers, and the word 'water' itself cascading from one verse into the next.
The point is that the mirage is Israel. The nation itself, arrayed and encamped according to the patterns prescribed throughout the story of its wanderings, is the vision, the revelation. Bil'am does not go off in search of portents at the third craggy outlook, because the sight of Israel is the sign.
Now, to bring that reading of the week home in this particular week, from my Canadian perspective, up here back in my Home and Native Land for a well-timed week's vacation. After all, as our biblical story suggests, sometimes a foreign person with a bird's eye view (Balak ben Tzippor and his hired prophetic hand, in our scriptures) can help a nation consider that what it is about is becoming a sacred vision.
A candidate for leadership may speak autocratically of law and order, of enforcing the nation's laws - but, ultimately, the law of the people wells up and flows from its own deepest source. And the people have the power to arrange themselves in such a way that anyone who beholds them is inspired by the revelation.
My U.S. friends, you can do it!