The table below presents an aligned extract of verses or verselets in Nu24-13, Nu22-18. Both verses/verselets discuss Bilam's refual to violate God's orders. The alignment justifies the Rashi comment that: Note the contrast indicated by the underlined phrases. Initially Bilam thought of himself as the person who connects to God and spoke about my God. After Bilam tried to curse the Jews he realized he misued his spiritual powers and that God was no longer my God. He realized he sinned and had fallen into disfavor. Hence when he quotes himself he leaves out the phrase, My God.

Verse	Text of Verse	Rashi comment
Nu22-18	... If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I would not go beyond the word of the Lord my God, to do less or more.	Note the contrast indicated by the underlined phrases. Initially Bilam thought of himself as the person who connects to God and spoke about my God. After Bilam tried to curse the Jews he realized he misued his spiritual powers and that God was no longer my God. He realized he sinned and had fallen into disfavor. Hence when he quotes himself he leaves out the phrase, My God.
Nu24-13	If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I would not go beyond the command of the Lord, to do either good or bad of my own mind; but what the Lord said, that will I speak?

Advanced Rashi: Some alignments are more explicit. For example the Decalogue speaks about the prohibition of making vs. having idols thus explicitly indicating two prohibitions: manufacture and possession of idols. By contrast some alignments are more discrete indicating their messages with omissions rather than with explicit contrasts.

I am indebted to Dr. Aviva Zornberg's new book, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections of the Biblical Unconscious, for inspiring the understanding of this Rashi. I was at the launching of this book at Pardes in June a few weeks ago. There professor David Shulman used Indian philosophy to describe Aviva's book as studying silence. The book describes several types of silences and the communications implicit in them. Aviva picked up this theme in her own talk on her book. Using Kabbalistic terminology she distinguished between voice and words Frequently the Biblical text will give voice without words and it is important to understand the implied content. You can google the book title to find reviews or purchase it.

Using these concepts we can see the omission of my God by Bilam as a silence indicating guilt and a sense of failure in his relationship with God. Note that there are emotional overtones to this awareness. Many people prefer to hint at failure - say through silences - rather than admit them outright. So the Biblical communication of this awareness of Bilam through silence is better than say a communication through explicit words. Indeed, the Bible's goal is not to make explicit everything it wishes to communicate. It is important to God to communicate emotions and feelings as well as facts. In this passage God is telling us the very interesting fact that even a wicked person like Bilam felt embarassed and ashamed by his failure; he therefore hinted at his failure through a contrastive silence of omission rather than through explicit statements.

Using the above analysis we can distinguish between the alignments presented in this newsletter and further commentary. The alignment rule points to a contrast indicated by an omission. That is the sole goal of the alignment rule; to uncover such nuances embedded in contrasts. The alignment is the objective component of the Biblical comment. Each commentary and person then uses the uncovered aligned nuances to extract important emotional and moral points that the Bible is trying to communicate.