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Who Sees the Truth, and Who Speaks It?
Jun 26, 2026 By Loraine Enlow | Commentary | Balak | Hukkat
Long-time New York subway riders are familiar with the slogan, “See something, say something.” Balaam’s story in this week’s parashah is closer to: “Say something, because you didn’t see something.” After all, “See something, say something” assumes that the hard part is speaking up, but Parashat Balak suggests the hardest part may be noticing at all, especially when Balaam, the professional seer, can’t see the angel in the road that his donkey does. This reversal of who notices (and who misses what’s right in front of them) is what draws me into this passage. As a scholar working primarily on medieval Jewish and Christian biblical commentaries, I’m especially interested in noticing how texts travel, how communities guard them, and how outsiders can sometimes help shed light on a tradition. Biblical interpretation is itself, in a sense, the discipline of noticing ‘angels in the road,’ learning to see what is already present right in front of you in the text.
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Are We Just Speaking, or Truly Communicating?
May 17, 2024 By Loraine Enlow | Commentary | Emor
Perhaps the breaking of the formula for our parashah’s irregular emor is about more than just words. Using its characteristic wordplay, the Midrash connects the parashah’s emor here to omer in Psalm 19:3 (spelled the same way, but as a poetic noun): “day to day utters speech (omer), and night to night reveals knowledge.” It explains that the day and the night are negotiating the giving and borrowing of time from each other to create the cycles of the year between the equinoxes. Reading the next verse in the psalm, we see “there is no speech (omer) . . .” Or as the Midrash puts it, “they pay each other back harmoniously, without a contract.”
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