One of the stranger teachings in the later Kabbalah concerns gilgul — the transmigration of souls. The Nishmat Chaim of Rabbi Menashe ben Israel, published in Amsterdam in 1651, preserves the older tradition that souls do not only move from one human body to another. For certain sins, they pass into animals, plants, even stones.
The later Kabbalists taught that the kind of impurity a soul carried determined where it would go. A soul stained with one variety of uncleanness might transmigrate into an unclean animal — a donkey, a camel, a mule. Another might enter a bat, a rabbit, or a hare. A soul destined for eventual correction through conversion might pass first into the body of a Gentile who would one day become a proselyte. The whole system was understood not as punishment but as a path — each life another chance for the soul to repair what the previous life had broken.
Against this backdrop the Kabbalists told a striking story about Ishmael, the elder son of Abraham. They taught that Ishmael's soul, for its own corrections, first transmigrated into the speaking she-donkey of Balaam — the one who, in Numbers 22, saw the angel of the Lord before her master did and refused to carry him forward into his curse. The donkey that spoke was a soul learning, slowly, how to tell the truth.
And then, the Kabbalists added, that same soul traveled forward again, this time into the donkey of Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair — the sage whose donkey, the Talmud (Chullin 7a) teaches, refused to eat untithed grain. One donkey that refused to lie. One donkey that refused to eat stolen food. The soul of Ishmael, the Kabbalists suggest, was being taught the same lesson twice: the law is not a burden. It is the structure by which a soul becomes honest.
The teaching, preserved in the 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature, sits inside a broader Kabbalistic vision. Every life, for the mystics, is in the middle of a sentence it cannot yet read. What looks like a donkey in the road may be centuries of work almost finished.