As a lifelong advocate of animal rights, I’ve often found myself thinking about what I would have done had God commanded me to build an ark and load it with a pair of beasts from each species. How would I choose which zebras are worthy of survival? How would I determine the world’s last remaining elephants? The Bible says little about Noah’s methodology, but it hardly needs to elaborate. We know just how Noah, most likely, picked his critters: If he’s anything like us, he selected the most adorable ones and left the rest to the deluge.

And if Noah hadn’t, I certainly did. Eight years ago, my wife and I boarded the train to one of Brooklyn’s most struggling neighborhoods to visit one of the city’s most struggling animal shelters. With little by way of staff or budget, the Center for Animal Care and Control takes in nearly 41,000 cats and dogs each year; more than 30,000 of them, Lisa and I knew, would be put to death. Which made the two of us mini-Noahs: Pacing the linoleum floors, looking at the sad eyes peering from behind the metal bars of plastic cages, we had come to carry one animal to safety and leave the rest to die.

But which one? Originally, we were interested in Jimmy, a beautiful and wild shepherd mix, a young adult dog with a lovely temperament and mercurial energy. We took him for a walk in the center’s parking lot. He jumped around, and we were worried that his size and disposition would make life in our small apartment a bad fit for humans and dog alike. Holding back the tears, we returned Jimmy to the center’s volunteer, who proceeded to ask if we were interested in seeing the puppies.

The puppies! Few words can lift up a dog lover’s spirit faster. We were led to a small room, where three tiny animals were kept in three tiny crates. We ignored the Chihuahua. We found him funny-looking. We asked to see a furball named Jerry—some Akita in him, maybe—and an unnamed female with a short snout and big, floppy ears. Both animals, no older than three months, were taken to the Getting Acquainted Room, a fluorescent-lit joint with an institutional feel and floors streaked with urine and grime. We watched as the puppies played, Jerry wildly and the female, shy, with much reluctance. And all we could think about was which one to choose.

Call it the Noah Conundrum. With little way of knowing the animal’s true nature, all we had to go on was looks, which leads to a sort of evolutionary twist: the survival of the cutest. We picked the female—she was sweeter—and walked out with a new dog and a lingering sense of guilt. By rescuing our puppy—we named her Molly Dog Leibovitz—we were leaving behind Jimmy, Jerry, and all the others whose ears were not quite so floppy, whose tails were not bushy, whose fur was slightly ratty. We were leaving behind animals equally in need of rescue and equally capable of love, and the only criteria we really applied was the same shallow judgment we would abhor if applied to evaluating human beings. And yet, we told ourselves in an effort to stave off the heartbreak, we did everything we could have done.

And someone, we were thrilled to learn later, had the others in mind, the animals unchosen and abandoned. Shortly after we adopted Molly, a private-public partnership—the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals—was formed, bringing together more than 160 animal-rescue groups and shelters to work on behalf of the city’s homeless animals. The story of Noah wasn’t lost on these folks: Through the Wheels of Hope program, the alliance operates a modern-day ark, a white van emblazoned with a paw print that collects animals from shelters, where they’re likely to be put to death unless adopted rapidly, and drives them to other, more accommodating surroundings.

The program and others like it have made a tremendous difference in the lives of tens of thousands of animals. In 2001, 74 percent of all homeless animals captured in New York City were killed; by 2009, the number dropped to 33 percent. The alliance also works to make the lives of shelter animals more comfortable, encouraging people to donate towels, pillows, and anything else that might make life in a cage more bearable.

To donate to these wonderful people, click here, or visit Petfinder to find an animal in need of a home. It makes the Noah conundrum an easier problem to handle.

Why didn’t we eat at home the way her Hebrew School teachers had told her Jews should eat? And what did Jewish law have to do with her adolescent concern for the welfare of animals? The grandchild remembers what the son never learned, says a Yiddish proverb. “I wasn’t raised that way,” I told my daughter. “I don’t have a good answer. But here’s something that might help.” We sat down together to read Michael Wyschogrod’s essay “The Revenge of the Animals.”

That was before I met Michael in 2007 and well before I had the honor to edit his contributions to the monthly journal First Things. Lord Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, told me that Wyschogrod had produced “the closest thing we have to a systematic theology.” Born in Berlin in 1928 to Hungarian-Jewish parents, Wyschogrod and his family escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing to New York, where he attended an Orthodox yeshiva, Torah Vodaath. He studied Talmud with the great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, while writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard and Heidegger at Columbia University. He is one of the last of the great European-Jewish scholars who mastered both the Jewish religious sources and the corpus of Western philosophy. What mattered to me at the moment, though, was his little midrash on Genesis.

Kashrut is a stumbling block for modern Jews. Rational defenses of the dietary laws ring hollow—for example Maimonides’ claim that kashrut promotes health (“Anyone who thinks that kosher food is healthy has never had Shabbat dinner at my mother’s house,” said Harlan Wechsler, the rabbi at Congregation Or Zarua in Manhattan). I was too modern to observe mitzvot simply because the Torah said so—like the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, about whom I had published several essays, my attitude toward much of observance was, “Not yet.”

Rational argument about kashrut falls short, but I was ready to hear a biblical argument, especially now that my daughter had called me on the carpet. And so we read Wyschogrod’s commentary together. Christians saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as Satan, he began, but that never occurred to the rabbis of antiquity. The snake was only the cleverest animal of the many God made to try to keep man company, for, as it says in Genesis 2, “it is not good for man to be alone.” But “for Adam no fitting helper was found.” And then God made Eve. “Only woman is the proper companion of man,” Wyschogrod argued, but “animals are also companions although less than fully satisfactory ones.”

“What does that have to do with eating animals?” my daughter interrupted. That was where Wyschogrod was heading. Genesis tells us that even if the animals are not as close to God as are we, neither are they so far from him. The Torah is the first document in history to evince concern for the welfare as well as the sentiments of animals; domestic animals must rest on the Sabbath, and an ox must be allowed to eat the grain that it threshes. To kill and eat them is a grave matter; we have no rational calculus by which to weigh the human requirement for nutrition against the trace of the divine in animal life. That is why Jews may consume meat only with supernatural sanction, under restrictions imposed by God himself. God, Wyschogrod offers as an afterthought, probably would prefer us to be vegetarians.

My daughter and I agreed that we would consume no more non-kosher meat, and we would separate it from dairy. Some months passed before it dawned on me that I had migrated to the inside of Judaism, rather than pressing my nose against the window and looking in. I did not take the leap of faith across the chasm toward Jewish observance, to be sure: I was pushed by a stern-faced 14-year-old. Still, the world felt different afterward: I ate meat less frequently, and with a sense of awe at the God who rules over life and death. First one does, then one understands. The hard part is to understand enough to start doing.

Judaism is a religion of the body, Wyschogrod teaches. God chose Abraham and his descendants in the flesh, and it is in the sanctification of the body of Israel that God finds a home on earth, he wrote in his masterwork The Body of Faith. In his most controversial argument, he draws a parallel between our belief that God’s indwelling (Shekhinah) resides in the flesh-and-blood people of Israel, and the Christian idea of incarnation—the belief in “the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that indwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of Jesus as a whole.” This raised eyebrows in some parts of the Orthodox Jewish world, for the idea that something like incarnation is found in Judaism is an uncomfortable thought.

By the late 1980s, Wyschogrod had become an important figure in Jewish-Christian relations. Against the prevailing sentiment in the Orthodox world, he argued forcefully for a theological dialogue with Christians, not only because he respected his Christian counterparts—above all the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth—but also because he believed that understanding the Christian belief in incarnation cast a clarifying light on the sanctity of the physical, bodily Jewish people. He became something of a cult figure among young Christian theologians, but he remained somewhat remote from the Orthodox Jewish mainstream. He is now appreciated as one of Orthodoxy’s most important and original thinkers.

By uncovering this parallel between Judaism and Christianity, Wyschogrod drew the line of division all the more brightly. Christians believe that God was present in the flesh of a single Jew; Jews sanctify their flesh through the mitzvot. It is the act of sanctification, not the belief, that defines our practice. As Franz Rosenzweig said, Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but they cannot know it for sure; but the existence of the people of Israel is a physical fact.

Jews who undertake a return to Jewish observance begin with a spiritual hunger and—if they succeed—arrive at the practice of Judaism. We do not return to Judaism from nowhere, but rather from the ambient Christian culture in which we live. The centrality of belief and the sovereignty of conscience are the hallmarks of this culture, and Jews who grew up at a distance from Judaism inevitably look at Judaism through a Christian lens.

Wo es sich christelt, da judelt es sich auch, in Heinrich Heine’s word-play: It says more or less, “Where Christians do something, Jews do the same,” but with the onomatopoetic sense in German of “tinkling” (christeln) versus “doodling” (judeln). A rationalized rather than a lived Judaism comes down to doodling. Judaism that emphasizes “ethical monotheism” against “ritual observance,” and rejects or qualifies the chosenness of Israel, really is mainline Protestantism with a tallis.

Judaism without commandments never made sense to me. If you observe the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” because it comes from God, why not also observe the commandment in the next verse not to wear cloth woven of two kinds of material? And if these don’t come from God, where do they come from? No surviving school of philosophy claims to derive any system of ethics—let alone “love thy neighbor”—from reason. Even if we think that ethics can be deduced from reason, why do we need the Torah? Or if we believe that altruism is an evolutionary adaptation, why should ethics have anything to do with Judaism? If “love thy neighbor” is not a divine commandment, and if it is not a logical deduction, then what is it? For semi-affiliated Jews, it’s the residue of a faith to which formerly observant Jews of an older generation have a sentimental attachment.

There is a great gulf fixed between “ethical monotheism” and traditional Jewish observance, which demands that we accept God’s will rather than our own criteria of judgment. As Wyschogrod notes, just that was the sin of Eve and Adam, who ate the forbidden fruit in order to acquire autonomous knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge is what the philosophers promised from Plato to Kant, but failed to deliver; philosophy walked out on ethics in the 19th century and never looked back.

The trouble is that Jews who grew up surrounded by Christian culture do not know any way to act except according to their own autonomous criteria of judgment, yet the exercise of autonomous choice undermines the spirit of Jewish observance. How do we get there from here? One answer is Chabad-style outreach: Just perform one mitzvah, then another. We won’t harangue you; little by little, you’ll get to like it. I respect this approach, but it would not have reached me.

Wyschogrod reaches out in a different way.

Conscience, he explains, is not historically a Jewish concept. Conscience can tell us to do precisely what we shouldn’t. Christians place great emphasis on conscience, but that can lead to perverse results; he cites the dictate of St. Thomas Aquinas that if a man believes that “to omit fornication is a mortal sin, when he chooses not to fornicate, he sins mortally.” The secular reading of conscience is even more troubling. Heidegger tells us that conscience has nothing to do with ethics in the first place; it is our inner voice telling us to be authentic (which might explain why Heidegger’s Nazi party membership never troubled his conscience).

Judaism asks us to follow not our own conscience, but rather God’s commandments. What makes us accept these commandments? In the past, Jews may have kept the commandments to conform to community standards, but this no longer can be the case when only a minority of Jews keep the mitzvot: “It is much more probable than ever before that a Jew who remains faithful to the covenant in this day and age is acting out of conscience instead of social conformity,” Wyschogrod writes. “The Judaism of our day can no longer dispense with conscience as part of our theological arsenal.”

The solution, Wyschogrod maintains, is to acquire a biblical conscience—and here he draws on Karl Barth, who taught direct engagement with revelation. Jews can bridge the chasm between autonomous choice and divine command “by exposing conscience to those events and documents which constitute the record of Israel’s relation with God.” We cannot separate the Torah from our national life of the past 4,000 years and the lasting belief that God loved us and made us his inheritance. We answered that love by accepting the means God gave us to sanctify the quotidian, bodily life of Israel. The Jewish conscience, he argues, is “developed by the tradition of revelation to which the people of Israel are witness and without which Jewish conscience is impoverished and isolated, cut off from its source of historic sustenance.”

And that is why the little essay “The Revenge of the Animals” gobsmacked me: It impressed upon me that the “narrative” and the “legislative” parts of the Bible, the “ethical” and the ritual,” the ineffable mystery of life and death and the rules of the kosher kitchen, all are woven into one seamless fabric. We stand in fear and trembling before the terrible mystery of death; our fate, said Solomon, is the same as the beasts’, for all is vanity. In such matters, philosophical rationalizing leads to nonsense or madness—in the extreme case, to Peter Singer’s infamous claim that a healthy pig has more right to life than a crippled human infant. Judaism instead provides a supernatural answer to the mystery: God gives us means to sanctify our physical life on earth and therewith the promise of eternal life.

Eating is more important than prayer, remarked Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. There is no direct instruction to pray in the Pentateuch, which tells us plainly, “You shall eat before the Lord.” It takes work to learn to daven, but it was harder for me to learn how to eat—to live like a Jew rather than just sound like one.

Sometime later, I worked up the courage to invite Michael to dinner. He chose kosher vegetarian.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things magazine and the “Spengler” columnist for Asia Times Online.

זי איז שיין, זי איז קלוג, און אַ ביסעלע מעוברת. וואָס איז אַזוי שלעכט, פֿאָקס?

Transliteration: Zi iz sheyn, zi iz klug, un a bisele meuveres. Vos iz azoy shlekht, Fox?

Meaning: She is beautiful, she is smart, and she is a little pregnant. What’s the problem, Fox?

זיי טרינקען, רייכערן, ברענען זיך — אַ מלאכה! פֿאַר געלט באַקוּמט מען אַלץ אַָבער ניט קיין שכל.

Transliteration: Zey trinken, reykhern, brenen zikh–a melokhe! Far gelt bakumt men alts ober nit keyn seykhl.

Meaning: They drink, smoke, and tan–what a job! For money you get anything, except for brains.

קענט איר אויסזען ווי איך? ניין, זאָגט ער. קענט איר שמעקן ווי איך? יאָ, זאָגט ער. אָבער, מיר פֿרעגן אייַך: ווער וויל טאַקע שמעקן ווי אַלטע געווירצן?

Transliteration: Kent ir oyszen vi ikh? Neyn, zogt er. Kent ir shmekn vi ikh? Yo, zogt er. Ober, mir fregn aykh: ver vil take shmekn vi alte gevirtsn?

Meaning: Can you look like me? No. Can you smell like me? Yes. But we ask you: Who wants to smell like old spices?

סוף-כל-סוף, אַ פֿייַנע משפּחהלע! ליוואַי, געדענק אַז דייַן באַוווּסטע שוויגער האַלט אַ ביקס אין האַנט.

Transliteration: Sof-kol-sof, a fayne mishpokhele! Levi, gedenk az dayn bavuste shviger halt a biks in hant.

Meaning: Finally, a nice little family! Levi, remember your famous mother-in-law has a shotgun.

אין סכּנה… אָבער אַז מען לעבט דערלעבט מען! געטראָפֿן דעם שלאַנקן-פּיצעלע-לאָריס. קוּקט אויף זייַנע אויגן: ער וווּנדערט זיך מער אויף אוּנדז.

Transliteration: In sakone…ober az men lebt derlebt men! Getrofn dem shlankn-pitsele-loris. Kukt af zayne oygn: er vundert zikh mer oif undz.

Meaning: Endangered…but eventually one sees it all. We found the slender, little Loris. Look at his eyes: he’s more surprised than we are.

Lesson:

Two basic verbs that will come in handy when we learn past tense next week: to have האָבן and to be זייַן.

With the Jersey Shore girls in mind:

I have clothes — איך האָב קליידער
You have cigarettes – דוּ האסָט פּאַפּיראָסן
She has jewelry – זי האָט צירוּנג
We dislike them – מיר האָבן זיי פֿייַנט
You love them – איר האָט זיי ליב
They have made fools of themselves – זיי האָבן זיך באַנאַרעשט

And the verb “to be”? As Mr. Old Spice may put it:

I am handsome – איך בין שיין
You are jealous – דוּ ביסט מיר מקנא
He is half-naked – ער איז האַלב-נאַקעט
We are taken – מיר זייַנען פֿאַרכאַפּט
You are not modest – איר זייַט ניט באַשיידן
They sell Old Spice and they’re happy – זיי פֿאַרקויפֿן אָלד ספּייַס אוּן זייַנען צוּפֿרידן

Want a bit of homework? Look for Yiddish words borrowed from Hebrew; they’re pronounced a bit differently, but you can easily find them…

This week, Fox Studios are releasing the third installment in the popular “Ice Age” franchise, this one titled Dawn of the Dinosaurs. So desperate were the besuited dudes at Fox to squeeze a few more sizable piles of cash out of the adventures of a woolly mammoth, a saber-toothed tiger and a ground sloth, that they happily hatched a plot to introduce a clan of subterranean dinosaurs for the otherwise glacial gang to befriend, throwing in at least two or three additional funky, furry sidekicks for good measure.

Never ones to be out-cuted by the competition, Walt Disney Studios will introduce their own anthropomorphic adventure later this month. Entitled G-Force, the film follows a team of highly trained, fully armed guinea pigs serving as secret agents of the United States government. Their leader is named Darwin. I’m not making any of this stuff up.

But studio executives, always on the lookout for inspiration (how else to explain the fact that two of the summer’s biggest movies are based on children’s toys from the 1980s?), would do well to crack open their Bibles. This week, the Good Book gives us the mother of all animated animals, a talking she-donkey who’s got mad spiritual skills.

The asinine heroine, it should be noted, is the second of only two talking animals in the Bible. If the previous chatty beast—a highly convincing serpent with a penchant for apples—is any example, when the scripture puts words in the mouths of the usually speechless, we better listen.

The she-donkey, to be sure, doesn’t deliver anything nearly as dramatic and disastrous as her slithering predecessor. But her message is one that we all, not just harried studio execs, would be wise to heed.

As the eventful parasha unfurls, the Israelites, every day getting closer to the Promised Land, meet with resistance from the local peoples whose territories they must traverse en route to redemption. God, of course, delivers, and pretty soon both the Amorites and the Bashanites are felled. Which, as you may imagine, makes the Moabites, the next in line on the Chosen People’s warpath, a tad nervous. Realizing that he could not best God’s people, Balak, their shrewd king, decides to fight holy with holy, and sends emissaries to summon Balaam, a prophet of sorts, to cast his spells in Moab’s aide.

At first, Balaam refuses to go with Balak’s men. He can only do, he says, as the Lord commands him. But the Lord, in a sporting mood, pops up in a dream and tells Balaam to go with the emissaries. Balaam sets out to do just that, but God, for some inexplicable reason, changes his mind and sends an angel to prevent Balaam from reaching his destination. Just to make things more interesting, God makes sure His cherub is invisible.

And so, riding his favorite she-donkey—the one, we’re told, he’s had his entire life—Balaam trots up the road to meet Balak. But the donkey, being the only one who sees the menacing angel, refuses to proceed and runs off to a nearby field. Her master, impatient, beats her up, forcing her back on the path. But the angel is still there, and the beast is still spooked, so she bucks and presses her master’s leg against a nearby fence. Balaam, annoyed, thrashes her again, and again drags her back to the road. But the donkey, as is the way of her species, does not relent; she lodges herself in a narrow nook, making Balaam so furious that he beats her vigorously, this time with a stick. And then, for the second and last time in the Bible, the Lord bestows on an animal the gift of speech.

And what a speech the poor donkey delivers! It’s doubtful that most of Hollywood’s contemporary screenwriters could come up with such touching lines for a human actor, let alone one with long ears and a rough coat.

“What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times?” she asks.  “Am I not your she-donkey on which you have ridden since you first started until now? Have I been accustomed to do this to you?”

Balaam, ashamed, concedes the point. And, just then, God opens the Moabite prophet’s eyes, and the newly visible angel speaks to Balaam angrily.

“When the she-donkey saw me,” says the seraph, “it turned aside these three times. Had she not turned aside before me, now also I would also have killed you and spared her.”

The story, like most summer movies and Biblical tales involving God’s will, has a happy ending: Balaam confronts Balak, and instead of cursing the Israelites he blesses them. But it’s in the words of the talking donkey that contemporary readers might find some fascinating morsels of meaning.

Unlike Hollywood’s animals, who are constantly given permission to speak but who rarely deliver more than shtick and schlock, Balaam’s donkey’s plea is touching and timeless. As soon as she can talk, she doesn’t say, “Hey, quit yer’ beating!” or “Look out! There’s an angry angel about to kill you!” She speaks softly. She is hurt. She wants to know why her master, to whom she’d been nothing but faithful, is being so cruel.

Those of us who have pets will have no trouble recognizing this plaintive tone. We detect it in the eyes of our dogs and cats, often for committing far less grievous transgressions against them such as failing to share our hamburger with Fluffy or leaving Whiskers home alone for many long hours.

Even if, unlike me, you stir clear clear of that primal Hollywoodian sin of assigning to animals human qualities they probably do not possess—as much as I’d like to believe otherwise, my floppy-eared mutt, Molly, probably doesn’t spend her days contemplating malicious little retributions and thinking up new, inventive ways to be bad—Balaam’s donkey nonetheless provides a very convincing argument for animal consciousness. Animal magic, even: the donkey sees God’s angel when her owner remains blind.

If we seek to learn anything from animals, then, let us ignore the belligerent guinea pigs and hilarious sloths and listen to this biblical donkey instead. Let us believe that animals, like us, are God’s creatures, and that, like us, they are not without their spiritual stirrings. And let us do whatever we can to speak on their behalf. Myself, I support several animal rights organizations, including Safe Haven For Donkeys in the Holy Land—which saves battered brayers, a particularly brutalized animal in Israel and the Palestinian Territories—and the ASPCA. You, of course, could choose other organizations. But I hope that this weekend, instead of simply relaxing at the multiplex, you listen to the beasts, look heavenward, and see the angel.