Before we moved home, the way back from the synagogue lead through the local park which was open all the time. Our previous dog Safi loved this part of the walk. But one pitch dark night he lay down at the entrance and flatly refused to move. ‘You sense something wrong,’ I thought and, although for myself I could see nothing amiss, I took his advice and chose a different route.

In tomorrow’s Torah reading, Balaam’s donkey sees what he, the famous seer who commands a high fee to foresee the future, cannot. Three times the donkey ‘sees’ and three times Balaam punishes her, for what proves to be his own blindness.

What in life do we notice; what do we fail to perceive?

In A Passage to India two of E M Forster’s very British characters ask themselves, bewildered by a culture they cannot fathom:

Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness?

Not everything possible enters our awareness and, like Balaam, we often punish those who inconvenience us with their deeper, or more challenging, perceptions.

God eventually makes Balaam’s donkey speak, a miracle, say the rabbis (who were generally suspicious of such supernatural interventions) prepared since the six days of creation. Balaam seems not the least surprised and enters unperturbed into a domestic quarrel with his ass.

One wonders what else the poor animal in her long experience of humility and humiliation might have known but never expressed. Perhaps, in an analogous manner, those wiser around us refrain from telling us what they understand all too well, realising that we will only react in defensive anger to the futile attempt to make us understand. Why should they suffer the snub of our insensitivity?

In the end God performs a second opening, this time of Balaam’s eyes. The seer finally sees. For most of us, the challenge of deepening our faculties of perception not just in our eyes but in our hearts, takes far longer. It belongs to the essence of our life’s journey.

Interestingly, neither of Hebrew’s two words for ‘open’ is used here, neither petach, often employed to describe the opening of the heart, nor pekach, the unveiling of the eyes in deeper discernment.

Rather, God ‘revealed’ to Balaam his own eyes. He finally notices what stands right before him, the angel blocking his path which his donkey had long noted – and taken those evasive steps to avoid which had so irritated her owner.

‘Reveal’ is a powerful term to use for so basic a perception. But revelation often lies in the simplest things. ‘I saw it, but didn’t really see; I looked, but never noticed’: we could all apply such sentences to ourselves, many times over.

There’s wonder in such moments of perception, like the friend who was told by the previous gardener: ‘After three months working here you’ll see kingfishers’, and, literally on the day he completed his third month, he saw them, and not because there’d been no kingfishers there before.

There’s compassion in such deeper comprehension, as when we begin to see into life in a manner we hadn’t before, like Moses, whose existence was turned inside out when he ‘saw into’ the sufferings of the slaves who’d been labouring next to the palace all the time. Or like the man who told me that when he was supporting his wife through her illness whole worlds opened up before them, offers of help, addresses to turn to, commiseration, encouragement. Then, he said, he saw into the lives of others with a gentler and kinder perception which, he confessed, he hadn’t found in himself before.

Open my heart, reveal my eyes, to see and feel the world with wonder and compassion

Food is wonderful; but it takes a lot to beat a really good loaf of bread. Nothing quite equals a hunk of challah on Shabbat or a good thick slice of granary on a weekday. Even the dog always wants to share.

The Torah had much to say about dough, long before Masterchef made cooking cool, or The Great British Bake-Off turned the kitchen into a theatre for brilliance and bravado:

When you eat the bread of the land, raise a gift up to God (Numbers 15:19)

That gift is the original challah, which in the Biblical context means the portion of dough given to the priests. Like the first wool from the sheep, it was a tax for the civil service, as the priests effectively were while the Temple still stood.

I fondly remember studying the relevant tractate of the Mishnah with Libbi for her Bat mitzvah. Appropriately titled ‘Challah’, it discusses what grains are used for bread, what percentage of dough is taken, and, our favourite passage, how, if shepherds bake specially and solely for their dogs, no challah is given; whereas if they share the bread with their much-deserving hounds the gift for the priests must be taken.

Nowadays, only a residual of the rite remains: a blessing for ‘separating challah from the dough’ before a small portion is put aside in the oven to burn.

But bread remains essential, and we should still ‘raise up a gift’ when we eat it.

In Biblical times, the corners of the fields, fallen ears and forgotten sheaves were all left for the poor, refugees and the indigent old. The Mishnah tells how they would wait patiently for the harvest, so that they could glean.

I wish we too left corners in our fields, not because the hungry in today’s world are going to go there and wait, but for the meadow birds, for the animals vanishing for want of long grass, wild flowers and grain. The world would be desolate without bees or birdsong, in substance and in soul.

I wish every supermarket, bakery, restaurant and coffee shop, where most of us regularly buy more than plenty, had a clear sign on every counter which said: ‘It’s an ancient and just practice to give a small percentage of what you spend on yourself for those who have no food’. Most of us would give, at least some of the time.

I wish I said the blessing ‘hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz – who brings forth bread from the earth’ more sincerely more often. Blessing is recognition. When we bless one another, we notice and encourage the good within us; when we bless God for bread, we acknowledge that it’s not ours solely by right, but as a gift. ‘The earth is God’s’, teaches the Talmud; blessing is the expression of gratitude which makes us fit to enjoy it.

I’m glad so many in our communities cook for destitute asylum seekers, for friends, and strangers, who are ill, grieving, or under stress; and that we have our ‘challah project’ in which whole teams bake challot every week and take them to people’s homes before Shabbat, to say ‘we’re thinking of you’, in special moments of sadness or joy.

I’ll never forget how years ago, when I walked north along the Rhine carrying the flame from my grandfather’s former synagogue in Frankfurt with which to light the Eternal Lamp in our new building, my blood sugar ran low. Being diabetic, I urgently had to find the nearest source of food. The only place within miles was a castle with an exclusive restaurant. Seeing me, mud-covered, with a backpack and a dog, the waiter simply turned and disappeared. I couldn’t blame him and was about to leave, when he came back with a basket filled with many kinds of bread and fruit. ‘No’, he said as I made to pay, ‘It’s for your pilgrimage’.

Beha’alotecha – the opening word of this week’s Torah reading – matters to me, troubles me and moves me.

‘When you kindle the lamps’ doesn’t quite capture the subtlety of the Hebrew. A precise translation is ‘When you cause the lamps to ascend’. The reference is to the daily task of replenishing and lighting of the seven branched Menorah in the holy precincts of the Tabernacle.

But a pithy Midrash extends the meaning to the entire expanse of life: ‘Neri beyadecha, venerecha beyadi: My lamp is in your hands; your lamp is in mine’. The speaker is God and the lamp referred to here is every soul and spirit, the Temple of each life. It burns with the sacred vitality of everything which breaths; it illumines to our heart and conscience the path we are to walk.

‘My lamp is in your hands’ speaks of the responsibility we have, first and foremost, to what is most precious in our own self. Etti Hilesum understood this intuitively. After receiving the dreaded deportation order which forced her to leave her beloved Amsterdam, she wrote in her diary:

[T]hat is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. (July 1942)

But the lamp in our hands is also God’s sacred presence in the life of others. That light often, maybe all too often, rests in the cusp of our trust, – in our partner, children, friends, the animals, even the breathing trees. The destiny of this entire living, breathing world has fallen within our power and become our constant responsibility. It lies within our capability to kill, maim, belittle, degrade, uproot, destroy; to love, nurture, respect, inspire and plant. If God is present in all that lives, then, too, a part of God lies within the circumference of our capacity to hurt.

That is why beha’alotecha, causing the flame on the lamp to ascend is so critically important. Our task is not to extinguish or diminish its light, but to enable the flame of life to burn more purely and more truly. Every deed of kindness, the most ordinary, in-the-street, any-time-of-day-or-night goodness, is a curling of the hands around the light of a friend, child, frightened animal, bird with a wounded wing. Every act of wanton cruelty spits on the flame of another being’s soul.

It is the challenge of living by this knowledge, this reality, which is captured in the Hebrew word for faith, emunah. It does not refer to a set of mental convictions, but to a way of life, an approach to every interaction deriving from a heartfelt respect for the vulnerability of all beings, from a daily humility before the simple task of honouring all life, its tenderness, wounds and dreams.

From where does the inspiration come even to try to live in this manner? ‘Your lamp is in my hands’, says God. One feels this – in quiet moments among the trees, in the silence of listening, the quiet of meditative prayer, in noticing a kindness. In the music of such moments our own inner flame is restored:

For the quiet joy of breathing and of living,
Tell me, to whom have I to give my thanks?
(Osip Mandestam: Stone, 8, trans. R. H. Morrison)

 That’s what existence is for: to cause the flame of the lamp, in ourselves, those we love, life itself, to ascend.