Don't Ask If I Believe in Talking Donkeys

A dogwalk dispatch on "rational Judaism."

Count me as amused by the various “rational Judaism” Substack posts I’ve been seeing of late, debating stuff like the reality of the Biblical Flood—or “the mabul” as those in the know call it. Did it really rain for forty days and forty nights so that the entire earth was covered in water, destroying all animal life that was not aboard the Ark?¹

Grown men who want to rescue Judaism from what feels like a children’s story, debate as to whether the Mabul was just a really big Mediterranean flood, whether there is fossil evidence that such a big regional flood occurred, whether it’s literally true that all the Earth was covered with water, or whether it’s just a story, a metaphor.

I don’t know why the Flood keeps coming up.² But I can think of a better place to start the discussion.

I think I might start with the talking donkey.

It just so happens that this week’s “parsha”—the weekly portion of the Bible that Jews across the world read simultaneously—contains one of my all-time favorite Bible stories: Balaam and his donkey. And it’s a story so wonderful and bizarre that, to my mind, it’s the perfect subject for “rational Judaism,” a thing I’m not sure exists.

Here’s how it goes: The Moabites are concerned about the coming of the Jews, the powerful people who have recently escaped Egypt and done a number on the Amorites. So they enlist the aid of the prophet Balaam to curse the Jews. Balaam first checks out the plan with God, who says, “No, don’t do it.” But Balaam asks again, and God, sounding like many a dad, says something like, “No, but if you really want to, go ahead.”

So Balaam saddles up his donkey and takes off to curse the Jews, but along the way, his donkey starts acting strange. She won’t stay on the path. She keeps stopping. She cowers against a wall and crushes Balaam’s leg. Each time, he gives her a whack with his donkey-whacking stick. What Balaam doesn’t realize is that the donkey is shying away from a terrifying sword-wielding angel.

After the third whack, God decides enough is enough and “opens the mouth” of the donkey, who basically says, “Jeez, Balaam, I’ve been a good donkey to you my whole life, and you keep hitting me; don’t you think maybe I’m stoping for a reason?” and Balaam rather than say, “Whoa my donkey is talking!” is like “Yeah, well, if I had a sword instead of this donkey-whacking stick I’d run you through,” at which point the Angel who’s had just about enough of all this reveals himself and says,

³² Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me:

³³ And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.³

Okay, my rationalist friends. Explain that one to me.

I suppose Maimonides would say it was a dream or vision. But Balaam seems pretty wide awake to me. The verse says, “He rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass,” and nowhere does it state or suggest that he awoke and realized his ass was dreaming.

The whole thing feels very literal and very impossible by any common standards of secular rationalism. Sam Harris would not approve.

And let’s be honest, the Bible is full of crazy stories like this, including talking snakes, pairs of animals spontaenously lining up to climb aboard an ark. . . . and no amount of mental gymnastics is going to make such stories palatable to a person who is committed to a left-brain⁴ empirical approach to the world. And if your Judaism depends upon rational explanations like the Flood was just a tsunami localized to the Mediterranean or something like that, I don’t think that you’re standing on very firm ground.

Of course, I may not be either. Who am I to talk? But I’m trying to at least be honest about it. I stand with Ze’ev Maghen, who claims emphatically, “Judaism is nonsense.”⁵ And yet I consider myself a practicing, observant, and believing Jew.

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Just this morning, I reread CS Lewis’s brief essay “Is Theology Poetry,” and was reminded of my own evolution on this topic.⁶ I was once convinced by my great hero, Matthew Arnold, to think of the Bible as poetry, and I found this a comforting idea that, for a time, preserved the importance of scripture—with the added effect that it elevated Literature to holy writ. And it wasn’t just me, as I have explained elsewhere, for nearly a century, English professors and University presidents bought into this idea.

But the idea that the Bible was Literature and Literature was Scripture only worked so long as we considered writers to be prophets with a direct line to God. Once we started seeing writers as just like everyone else, then it all became a matter of taste and politics. You may find Homer’s The Odyssey meaningful, but I think it’s proto-fascist; you may see William Wordsworth’s The Prelude as a deep spiritual inquiry, but I see it as patriarchal, privileged solipsism.

And, if we treat the Bible merely as a beautifully written poem, and nothing more than that, some people will recognize it as such and draw some comfort from it, and others will simply say I don’t relate to it, or it’s a big, mean, racist, genocidal fairytale. We might all agree that it’s “great literature,”—which means professors think it’s important—but we will have strong disagreements about its universality and value in a practical way.

So, the Bible-as-Literature approach doesn’t work long-term for most people. We need to believe it’s not just beautiful, but true, if it’s going to function religiously.

So what do we “rational” people do?

We could take the existing Orthodox “fundamentalist” approach and just declare the whole thing literally true. There really was a worldwide flood. The Red Sea parted exactly as described,⁷ and yes, that donkey did speak.

That route works for some people in isolated communities that maintain rigid barriers from the secular world, but even within those communities, as evidenced by the gnashing of teeth by Lakewood heretics on Substack, rational thought and secular influences can nonetheless creep in and completely demolish that worldview.

And then there is this “rational” route many desire, that the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides seems to model, which is to come up with plausible explanations, for what seem like impossible situations: yes, something literally happened but not in exactly the way it seems to have been depicted—or, the Wizard of Oz trick, it was all actually a crazy, but metaphorically truthful, dream experienced by a prophet. And that satisfies some people who are willing not to push the rational inquiry too far.

For my part, such approaches are useful in granting me and others provisional “permission to believe,” but in the long run, are not satisfying and are inherently unstable. The argument, for example, that carbon dating may not be as consistent as scientists have led us to believe was one that, for a time, allowed me to consider the world might not really be billions of years old. And yet, if I sit too hard with such apologetics, I’m probably still going to side with the scientists. I need another way.

So what do I believe in? How do I believe it?

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Here’s where I’m holding at the moment.

I see the Bible as a sacred Poem. But this is not the same thing that Matthew Arnold was suggesting because, for me, it’s not just another poem in the line of Homer and Virgil and Dante. It’s a Poem written by God for me—and for everyone else who is drawn to it.

You see, a poet, according to Wordsworth, was “a man speaking to other men,” and that’s all fine and good,⁸ but that’s secular poetry, that’s profane poetry, that’s regular, every-day, written-by-human-beings poetry.

The Bible-Poet, for lack of a better term, is, as I see it, God speaking to humans, and that makes all the difference. It’s not some fine fellow in a billowy white shirt and waistcoat sitting under a lime tree bower with a feather pen. It’s the Prime Mover of the Universe communicating through His chosen prophets. And that brings it to a whole ‘nother level than, say, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. It’s poetry I can truly live by, as opposed to poetry that I tried to live by and found wanting (I’m looking at you, William Blake).

And, yet, at the same time, it is poetry, which means it’s full of contradictions, and wild and wacky turns, unexpected leaps of logic. There are metaphors and figuratively language. There are character arcs. There are strange reversals. There are what Aristotle called “consistent inconsistencies,” which are the mark of excellent writing. There is a mixture of literal and artistic truths

Which parts of God’s poem “actually happened,” and which parts are made up? In truth, I don’t much care.

It’s like asking of a fiction writer’s work, which parts are true, and which parts are made up? Here’s the real answer. They’re all true, and they’re all made up.

A writer can’t write anything that is not about him or herself, and yet, at the same time, the act of writing is transformative, and even the most seemingly literal transmigration of autobiography into fiction is transformed into something other than fact. And honestly, I would say the same thing is true about CNF, but I don’t want to get into an argument with my friend Sarah Einstein.

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I think I’ve told the story before⁹ about my first self-hosted Passover Seder, which included myself and two friends, one a “Reconstructionist” Jew and the other an Episcopalian. This was at a time when I was curious about Judaism, but still Christian-identifying.

My Jewish friend was reading from a Reconstructionist Haggadah,¹⁰ which basically said something to the effect of, “We all know that the splitting of the Red Sea didn’t actually happen, but it’s a compelling cultural myth that binds us all together.”

Me and my Christian friend looked at each other and were like, That’s not what we believe at all. We believe it literally happened.

I guess looking back, what I would say is not that I believed it literally happened, but that I believe God wants me to act as though it literally happened, which is why he wrote it into His Poem, and whether or not the Red Sea opened into one great path or twelve paths, whether this was a natural occurrence caused by some kind of crazy Santa Anna wind, or whether this was an exaggerated tale of some less dramatic escape through a more modest body of water, or whether the whole thing is just a fiction, is of little consequence. It’s a central plot point in God’s great poem, and that’s all I need to know.

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What about “Biblical Criticism,” the argument that the Bible was not dictated to Moshe on Mount Sinai but is, in fact, a compilation of a number of other documents assembled across time?

Whatever. . . .

If God can write the Bible through one person at one time and place, He can write it through twenty people and across as many centuries.

How do I know the Bible was written by God?

I don’t. I was gonna say it’s a matter of faith or something like that, but in truth, it just comes down to I feel like it is, it feels like it is to me, and that’s enough for me for now. I don’t know if it will be enough ten years from now, but it’s been enough for a while.

Events in my life, messages I’ve gotten from the universe, call them synchronicity, call them pattern recognition, have suggested to me that God wrote this Book and wants me to believe in it as a Poem of His Authorship. And whether or not a donkey ever actually opened his mouth and spoke in the language of men is no more important to me than whether or not the great hound Huan spoke to Beren in the year 466 of the First Age of Middle-earth.¹¹

My friend

Sarah Einstein

once wrote a column for me called, Don’t Ask Me If I Believe in God. Likewise, I say, don’t ask me if I believe in talking donkeys. It’s beside the point. I believe in the Poetry of God.

1. Including fish, BTW, according to some midrashic accounts, which claim the water was boiling.

2. Which probably speaks more to my ignorance of longstanding theological debates than anything else.

3. King James version, natch.

4. See Lain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary.

5. And then goes on to say why that doesn’t matter. See John Lennon and the Jews.

6. C.S. Lewis is amazing, and even if you’re Jewish, you should read him.

7. Actually, even more fantastically than described, since the Red Sea split into twelve paths, one for each tribe, and refreshing treats sprouted from the watery walls as you passed through—according to Rashi or whoever.

8. If you excuse the implicit sexism, which I do.

9. Yes, this tendency to retell stories is a common sign of aging. Yet, I deny it, nonetheless, even though just yesterday I was told yet again, “you’re old.”

10. A haggadah is the instruction manual for Passover celebrations.

11. Don’t get me wrong, though I think he is a godlike creator, I’m not comparing Tolkien to God. The Silmarillion is a beautiful poem/novel written by an incredibly talented man and has brought great joy to my life, but it has its limits. The Bible, on the other hand, is, in my view, a poem written by God, and so its importance in my life is qualitatively different than that my best-loved novels and poems.