Session 27: Parashat Balak

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962

Parashat Balak inserts a talking animal into the plot of the Torah for the first and only time apart from the serpent’s appearance in the Garden of Eden, drawing attention to the porous boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world. This porous boundary, and the effects of human activity on the rest of the natural world, contributed to the birth of the American environmental movement in the middle of the 20th century, and are the thematic subjects of Rachel Carson’s foundational environmentalist text, Silent Spring.

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