Chukat Balak. What it takes to listen- and what it costs not to

This drasha is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of Otto Moïse ben Ava, who passed away a few days ago at the age of two.

לעילוי נשמת אוטו משה בן אווה

My heart was broken twice this week.

The first time was on Sunday, when I learned of Ghislain's death.

Ghislain was Clara's partner. Clara has been my half-sister Jeanne's best friend since childhood.

He had just proposed to her.

For some time, he had been complaining of stomach pain. He went to see a doctor. He was told, "Maybe you should change your diet." He did. The pain persisted, but he bore it patiently. Long story short, he went back to the doctor, and suddenly he was hospitalized. He was admitted on Wednesday. He died on Shabbat. Two days before, he had still been able to marry Clara in the hospital.

He had listened to his intuition.

The doctors had not.

Then yesterday, Thursday, I learned of Otto Moïse's death.

Otto was two years old. He was Manon's son, and the playmate of Emeth, the son of my friend Morane.

Morane told me what had happened. Manon had recently separated from her partner and had initiated emergency court proceedings to request that her ex, whom she believed was dangerously negligent with the children, not be left alone with them.

The court's decision was expected within the next few days. Manon had a terrible feeling about it. The father had insisted on taking the children for a few days.

Otto drowned in the swimming pool.

Baruch Dayan HaEmet.

ברוך דיין האמת

Blessed Be the Judge of Truth. What is left to say?

I wish I could stop here.

But I am not the one in mourning, so I feel compelled to speak.

Manon had felt it.

The justice system did not hear her soon enough.

And perhaps my only consolation today is that this week's Torah portion reminds us of the importance of listening.

Real listening.

I am not talking about listening to words. That, at least in principle, anyone can do.

I am talking about inner listening.

What we call intuition.

The prophet who couldn't hear

The prophet Balaam failed to listen, too.

That is why the angel was angry with him.

And yet, as a prophet, Balaam seemed devoted to listening to his "God"—the Source of Life.

When Balak, the king of Moab, came to recruit him to curse Israel—a pastime that has found its modern equivalent among pro–Global Jihad activists on Western campuses today—Balaam replied, remarkably faithful to the God of Israel, whom he claimed as his God despite not belonging to the people of Israel, that he would do nothing except what God instructed him to do.

Twice he waits through the night for God to speak to him.

The first time, God tells him not to go with the messengers.

The second time, when they return and insist, Balaam hears these words in a dream:

"If the men have come to call you, rise and go with them. But only the thing that I tell you—you shall do."

Numbers 22:20

אִם־לִקְרֹא לְךָ בָּאוּ הָאֲנָשִׁים קוּם לֵךְ אִתָּם וְאַךְ אֶת־הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר אֲדַבֵּר אֵלֶיךָ אֹתוֹ תַעֲשֶׂה׃

So the prophet sets out, determined to follow only God's instructions, only the Divine word.

But then, suddenly, in the middle of the road, his she-donkey stops.

She refuses to move.

Like any rider whose horse suddenly comes to a halt, like any of us when the car stalls, you press a little harder. If it keeps happening, you become impatient.

Balaam strikes her once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then suddenly the Angel, who had been blocking his path all along, appears before the prophet, opens his eyes, and rebukes him:

"Why have you struck your she-donkey these three times?"

The rebuke seems unfair.

If Balaam could not see the angel, how could he be blamed for losing patience when his mount had suddenly, for no apparent reason, refused to move?

Resistance as Guidance

The Kedushat Levi's interpretation moves me deeply.

ומי שעושה רצון קונו כשיראה איזה דבר תימה מתבונן שבזה מצוה לו השם יתברך איך יעשה.

"One who seeks to fulfill the will of his Creator, when something unusual happens, contemplates it and understands that through it God is instructing him how to act."

According to Rabbi Yitzhak Levi of Berditchev, Balaam's mistake was that he failed to listen to reality.

It was not normal for his she-donkey suddenly, for no apparent reason, to refuse to move forward.

The strangeness of the event should have awakened him.

He should have recognized it as a sign—a message from the Divine.

The road is suddenly blocked for no apparent reason?

My credit card is declined three times even though my account has sufficient funds and my security codes are correct?

Something in reality resists?

That is the moment to say to myself: perhaps Life is trying to tell me something, here and now.

For anyone who seeks to live by allowing themselves to be guided by the Source of Life, the first task is to listen.

Sometimes the sign is positive and effortless: doors open, serendipities unfold one after another—what in Hebrew we call hashgacha—and we sense that we are walking the right path.

But at other times, and perhaps more often, God guides us through negation, by closing doors, forcing us to change direction. The message comes in a subtler, more indirect way, almost like a photographic negative.

Something that should have been simple suddenly resists.

A door stubbornly refuses to open.

A process comes to a standstill.

At that moment I have a choice.

I can keep pushing, trying to force reality, risking crashing into the same wall over and over again, hurting myself, hurting others, and often both.

When we resist reality, everyone bleeds.

Or I can choose to stop for a moment.

To reflect—or rather, to contemplate.

Hitbonenut: Contemplation as Listening

In Hebrew, the reflexive verb for "to contemplate" is lehitbonen (להתבונן).

It is not an intellectual exercise.

The deepest questions of our lives are not solved by the mind alone.

They are met through listening—that is, through receptivity.

Hitbonenut, contemplation as meditation upon reality, takes many forms. The one that concerns us here invites us to "listen" to the voice of the Divine—a voice that is, almost by definition, inaudible.

Just as the voices at Sinai were seen, not heard, the deepest form of listening does not necessarily happen through the ears, or through any of our senses. It happens through what we commonly call intuition.

But intuition is not necessarily about foreseeing the future.

It begins with something much simpler: becoming receptive.

Receptive to the signs, as the Kedushat Levi reminds us.

It is by learning to read the signs woven into reality that we learn to let ourselves be guided by Life.

That is precisely where the prophet Balaam failed in the biblical narrative.

And it is there, too, that doctors and judges failed in these past weeks, nearly three thousand years later, at the beginning of a summer in 2026 already heavy with shadows.

What did they have in common?

Power can sometimes make us deaf.

It can make us forget our obligation to remain humble, to remain listening.

Because the voice of Life is so subtle, it is easy to ignore.

And yet failing to listen to it can have fatal consequences.

The imperative to truly listen is not romanticism.

Sometimes, it is a matter of life and death.

Perhaps that is why, by a kind of narrative inversion, this week's first Torah portion begins not with life, but with what comes after death.

Parashat Chukat opens with the ritual of the Red Heifer, a rite of purification meant to reconnect us with life after contact with death.

And yet there would never have been enough red heifers to mourn Moses.

There would never have been enough living water to weep with the widow, with the orphaned children, with the little girl who lost her brother, with the grieving mother.

All that remains is for us to sit beside them.

And now that it is too late, to listen.

To their words, and to their silence.

All that remains is to allow the primordial mikveh—our tears, as the Piaseczno Rebbe teaches—to purify us.