TI Torah Study: Parashat Sh'lach I Spy with My Little Eye...The Promised Land?

Blessed are you Adonai, who makes us uniquely sacred in commanding us to busy ourselves with words of Torah.

Parashat Summary (further your study on Reform Judaism )

• Moses sends twelve spies to the Land of Israel to report on the inhabitants and the country. Despite the positive report of Joshua and Caleb, the people are frightened. (13:1–14:10)
• God threatens to wipe out the Children of Israel but relents when Moses intercedes on their behalf. To punish the people, God announces that all those who left Egypt would not enter the Land of Israel except for Joshua and Caleb. (14:11–45)
• Moses instructs the Israelites regarding setting aside challah, the observance of the Sabbath, how to treat strangers, and the laws of tzitzit. (15:1–41)

Mission Impossible?

BEST RECAP I'VE SEEN:

God instructs Moses to send men to scout the land, with each representing one tribe. Moses selects the scouts for the mission and gives them clear directions on their task. Reimagining the assignment as instructions to a group of students gives us a prompt that might look like this (adapted from Numbers 13:17-20):

Start going through the Negev and then into the hill country. When you get there, look around to see what kind of country it is. Answer the following questions:

1. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak?
2. Are the people who dwell in it few or many?
3. Is the country in which they dwell good or bad?
4. Is the soil rich or poor?
5. Is it wooded or not?

Extra Credit: Be sure to bring back some fruit from the land.

As an educator, I do have some concerns about questions that are all closed-ended and force the scouts into binary decisions, but it is clear that Moses is interested in getting very specific information about the land and the people who live there.

After 40 days, the scouts come back with their reports, which they present orally to Moses and Aaron - and the entire community:

• The land does flow with milk and honey (alternative answer to #3 and #4)
• And this is its fruit (bonus points)
• The people who inhabit the country are powerful (answering #1 and #2 together)
• And the cities are fortified (answer to #5; adapted from Number 13:27-29)

Caleb hushes the people and assures Moses that the Israelites will gain possession of the land and surely overcome its inhabitants. After this, 10 of the 12 scouts (all except Caleb and Joshua) depart from their factual reporting to negatively embellish the report:

• "The country we scouted devours its settlers" (Numbers 13:32)
• "All the people that we saw in it are men of great size" (Numbers 13:32)

And finally, moving completely away from an objective analysis, the scouts report "we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." (Numbers 13:33)

~Beth Ellen Young, Transforming Trauma

What Difficulties/Kushiyot arise from this text?

• Grammatical inconsistencies?
• Theological issues?
• inconsistent chronological order?
• Contradiction in story or text?
• other?

Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?

What Difficulties/Kushiyot arise from this text?

• Grammatical inconsistencies?
• Theological issues?
• inconsistent chronological order?
• Contradiction in story or text?
• other?

The spies, like Miriam, engage in the sin of slander. Instead of remembering Miriam's punishment for publicly criticizing Moses, the spies return from their journey and, immediately and publicly, speak slanderously about the Land of Israel. They tell the people: "It is a land that eats up its inhabitants," meaning that the land is difficult to farm, its soil is of poor quality, and its air is polluted, bringing ill health. For their deliberate slander of the land, they and the generation accepting their report are punished.

~Numbers Rabbah 16:2, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

The people have left Egypt with the promise of conquering the Land of Israel. This is their goal. The spies return and take advantage of the people's anticipation of their report to "discredit the entire enterprise." They conspire to convince the people that God is leading them not to a land of opportunity and plenty but to disaster. Reporting that the cities of the land are protected by high walls and guarded by powerful giants, they strike fear into the hearts of people. They destroy their dreams and willingness to go forward to conquer the land. Because the spies kill the hopes of their people, they and their generation are condemned to wander and die in the wilderness.

~Aaron Wildavsky, Moses as a Political Leader, pp. 114-118, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

The spies are pious and good and worry about the spiritual life of their people. However, they fear that the people will enter the Land of Israel and become so busy with materialistic concerns, with work, feeding their families, building their homes, creating entertainments for themselves, and caring for their communities that they will have "progressively less time and energy for the service of God." That is what they mean when they said "It is a land that eats up its inhabitants." Their sin is misleading the people and themselves with "their opinion... that spirituality flourishes best in seclusion and withdrawal." The spies "were wrong. The purpose of a life lived in Torah is not the elevation of the soul: it is the sanctification of the world... taking possession of the Land of Israel and making it a holy land."

~Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

Why did the spies, these leaders of their people, engage in such subversion? They were pleased with the status quo of the desert. They opposed change. Everything was provided: food, water, shelter. Life was good enough for them. They did not want to take on the burden of conquering the Promised Land nor the risk of losing the power and security they already possessed. That was their sin. They wanted to pull down the blinds on all the pain and sorrow of the world and live in the security of their own safe desert. They chose to subvert the dream of achieving the Promised Land, where justice, freedom, and peace would prevail for all.

~Rabbi Morris Adler (The Voice Still Speaks, pp. 301-305, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

When the scouts return to the Israelite camp, our translation reads, "They went straight to Moses" (13:26). But literally, the text says, "They went and they came to Moses."

Why, our Sages ask, does the Torah use these two verbs? We already know scouts "went" into the Land, so why does the text use this verb again?

The answer, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai teaches, is that there must be some kind of equivalence between the scouts' "going" and "coming." "If they came back with evil counsel, they must have gone with evil counsel too," he says (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 35a).

In other words, the ten wicked scouts must have left on their mission predisposed to the notion that the Land was inhospitable — and everything they saw there only confirmed that bias. Joshua and Caleb, on the other hand, were able to see the Land for what it was and what it could be — a land flowing with milk and honey, ripe for the taking.

Science, it turns out, isn't all that different from exploring a new land. It's about, as Goodyear says, "struggling to stay both radically open to insights and ruthlessly skeptical about them" (ibid., "The Stress Test," The New Yorker). Our lives aren't all that different either. In our relationships, our families, our professions, so often we see what we want to see and miss contrary evidence staring us right in the face. The message of our Torah portion is that a land of milk and honey awaits us only if we relinquish our preconceptions.

Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot

In other words, their sin wasn't simply that they lost faith or that the scouts had misrepresented what they had seen. Indeed, in another comment on the same verse, the Kotzker Rebbe is clear that the scouts had actually "spoken the truth" in their report (Amud Ha-Emet, s.v. Sh'lach L'cha). Their failure wasn't even that they had low self-esteem, that they saw themselves as grasshoppers. For this they could be forgiven. Rather it was their preoccupation with how others saw them that was their sin...

How often we see ourselves through the eyes of others. How easy it is for us to define ourselves in relation to the other. We wonder what s/he will think. We worry about how we look, as if somehow our appearance in the eyes of someone else is all that matters. But it is nothing more than another form of slavery, this preoccupation not with who we are but with how we think we are perceived.

Perhaps then the Israelites not being permitted to enter the Land was less a punishment and more "You're not yet ready" to merit the privilege of dwelling in that sacred space? ... the right to leave the wilderness and enter the Land is reserved only for those who have shed the shackles of slavery, especially the bonds we impose upon ourselves? Perhaps the faith our ancestors needed was the ability to believe in themselves? Perhaps this is what it really means to be free?

Rabbi Steven Kushner