Prophecy and Poetry
If you have been reading these essay letters for a while, you know that I often include lines from poetry to awaken insights into Torah and life. Occasionally these poets are Jewish, many times they are not, but rarely are they from the Torah itself. This week however, the non-Israelite prophet Balaam blesses Israel (to the chagrin of King Balak of Moav, who hired Balaam to curse the Israelites). And Balaam’s blessing to us is that his words take the form of poetry.
His most famous lines (Bamidbar 24:5) find their way into a prayer that Jews say in the morning shacharit service and, according to tradition, whenever one enters into a synagogue or sacred space.
Mah tovu ohalecha, Ya’akov[ ] mishkenotecha, Yisra’el!
How good are your tents, Jacob[ ] your dwelling-places, Israel!
Balaam goes on to describe these structures as:
Like palm-groves that stretch out,
Like gardens beside a river,
Like aloes planted by God,
Like cedars beside the water;Their boughs drip with moisture,
Their roots have abundant water…
What a wonderful image of a sheltering home that nourishes lively growth. But what exactly makes these structures so good (ma tovu)?
Rashi (11th-century France), picking up a Talmudic theme, suggests that their tent entrances didn’t face each other, and that Balaam is highlighting the people’s modesty and humility. Basic respect for each other’s dignity does make for a strong communal foundation.
Some, like Sforno (16th-century Italy), assume that “tent” is a reference to a place of Torah learning, and that Balaam centered the people’s study of moral and spiritual guidance, or perhaps simply a shared story, as the key to their collective blessing.
Others, like Or HaChayyim (18th-century Morocco), suggest that “tents” and “dwelling-places” aren’t just synonyms for the same thing, but point to a distinction: perhaps to those who study occasionally and those who study all the time, or to different historical stages - first in the wilderness wandering with the portable tent and then later in the holy land with the full Temple structure. You can imagine that at every stage of history, Jews constructed and reconstructed sacred structures to give meaning and shape to their communities.
Poetry itself is a form of structure. It is no coincidence that each section of a poem is called a stanza, coming from the Italian word for “room”, or in Hebrew a bayit, a “house”. What if we read Balaam, a prophet and poet, as praising the power of the ultimate Jewish home - our poetic sacred scripture?
Two of the 20th century’s most prophetic teachers, themselves students of the biblical prophets, link prophecy with poetry, and poetry with generative imagination.
The great Jewish thinker and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote inThe Prophets:
Like a poet, [the prophet] is endowed with sensibility, enthusiasm, and tenderness, and above all, with a way of thinking imaginatively. Prophecy is the product of poetic imagination.Prophecy is poetry, and in poetry everything is possible, [such as] for the trees to celebrate a birthday, and for God to speak to [humans].
And the great Christian scholar Walter Brueggemann taught us in The Prophetic Imagination:
The people we later recognize as prophets, are also poets. They reframe what is at stake in chaotic times… It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king [i.e. an authoritarian leader] wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
(I can think of few Christian thinkers who have been as appreciated in rabbinical seminaries as Walter Brueggemann. He died just a month ago, on June 5, 2025. If you’re curious to learn from him, I cannot recommend enoughthis interview he gave with Krista Tippett, in which he goes deeper on the role of poetry, prophecy, and issues of justice.)
So what Balaam names as “good” about the Jewish structures of poetry is the capacity to imagine, to stay open and insistent that better futures are possible.
One particular feature of the Jewish bayit, the stanza-house, is parallelism. Almost every poetic line is doubled in some way, creating an emphasis of meaning. The fundamental unit of biblical poetry, much like the archetypal unit of Jewish learning, is chavruta, the study pair. Two Jews, three opinions, two lines, abundant imagination…
But most of the time, the parallel isn’t perfect, and the slight differences reward careful reading and open up possibilities of interpretation that a single line would have lacked. Our verse is called an incomplete parallel:
Mah tovu ohalecha, Ya’akov[ ] mishkenotecha, Yisra’el!
How good are your tents, Jacob[ ] your dwelling-places, Israel!
“How good” is only said once, while every other term has a partner. Tents correspond to dwelling-places, and both of ancestor Jacob’s names are used to designate his descendants. We are supposed to infer that both the tents and the dwelling places are in fact good.
But perhaps here the wording allows for an incomplete blessing. A blank space where our minds and hearts and hands are needed to fill in and make explicit the possibility that our homes, our country, our world, are in fact worthy of being declared “good!”
The prophecy needs us first to unfurl our imaginations through close attention, and then to make real the blessing it envisions.
Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Jay LeVine
