Shabbat Shelah 28 Sivan 5766, 24 June 2006

Efrat, Israel – The refusal of the Israelites to conquer the land of Israel as a result of the report of the Scouts is considered by the Sages of the Talmud to have been the worst transgression in the Bible.

And remember that those scouts, who were all princes of their respective tribes, had been part of a bedraggled, besmirched and beaten-down collection of slave laborers who stood up to the mighty empire of Egypt – and emerged victorious!  Those leaders of this newly formed and emergent nation had just seen with their eyes the Divine Might unleashed against the Egyptian totalitarian despot and his immoral, slavery-based society, from the Nile River having been turned into blood to the splitting of the Reed Sea resulting in the drowning of the entire Egyptian cavalry.  After such an unrivalled military success, how could they have concluded that it would now be impossible to conquer the land?

Furthermore, G-d Himself had told them – back when He had first promised to extricate them from Egypt – that “I shall bring you to the land which I lifted My hand in oath to give to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, and which I shall give to you as an everlasting inheritance for your descendants…” (Exodus 6:5).  At the very least, the Egyptian experience should have taught them that even the weakest of peoples derives unimaginable strength when its chief Commander is the Almighty Himself!  To be alone with G-d is always to be with a majority of one!

The Bibles’ unique usage of specific verb forms to create ideational connections provides what I believe to be the solution to our problem regarding the scouts of 4000 years ago, as well as to our national problem today.  The unique verb form used in this Biblical context for “to scout” is the Hebrew “tur”: “And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, ‘send forth for yourself men who will scout out the land of Canaan which I am giving to the children of Israel’ (Shelah …anashim vayaturu – Numbers 12:2).”  Generally, the Hebrew verb for reconnaissance or scouting out is hafer or even more often ragol (see for example Deut. 1:22,24 and Gen. 42:9,14,15).  Specifically in reference to this story of the Princes do we find the usage of “tur” – and no less than twelve times, paralleling the twelve tribal princes – scouts (see R. Elhanan Samet, Studies on the Weekly Biblical Portions, p.190).

Moreover, our Biblical reading of Shelah concludes with what appears to be a misplaced commandment of the ritual fringes (tzitzit), which seems to have no connection whatsoever to the sin of the scouts.  Nevertheless, the same usage of the verb form tur appears:  “You shall look at them (the ritual fringes)… and you shall not scout out (taturu, spy out, presumably sinful objects of lust) after (the stirrings of) your heart and your eyes which you whore after, in order that you shall remember and perform all of My commandments (Numbers 16:39,40).

Additionally, the verb form “u’r’eetem”, you (plural) shall see or look upon, appears three times in the Pentateuch, and two of those three are in our Biblical portion of Shelah: the first in the instructions Moses gives the scouts: “You shall see (or look upon) the land, as to which qualities it contains” (Numbers 13:18), and the second in the passage of the ritual fringes, “You shall see (look upon) the fringes and remember all the commandments of the Lord”  (Numbers 15:39). 

Once again, we see a fascinating linguistic parallel between the incident of the sin of the scouts and the commandment of ritual fringes.  Obviously these must be a connection between these two passages, but what is it?

Both passages are dealing with the sense perception of sight, and with the underlying question as to whether seeing is merely an ocular and therefore an objective exercise – as in “seeing is believing” – or whether one’s subjective attitudes and preferences color those objects or events which we perceive and significantly influence our perception of them.  A case in point is the nature of the inhabitants of Canaan whom the scouts observed, as the Bible records:
    “And all of the people whom we saw on it (the land) were people of great dimensions.
    We saw there the giants…
And so one individual (scout) said to the other, ‘Let us make a (new) leader and return to Egypt’ (Numbers 13:32, 14:4)

However only one generation later, when Joshua, Moses’ successor, does conquer the Land of Canaan with the Israelites, he also sends out scouts who were guarded and hidden by Rachab, and who saw the very same people:
“And she (Rachab) said to the men, ‘I know that the Lord is giving this land to you and that fear of you has fallen upon us; all of the inhabitants of the land are melting before you’” (Joshua 2:9).
We even declare in Moses’ song at the Reed Sea, “A trembling fear grasped the inhabitants of Philistine”.  Will the real nature of the inhabitants of Canaan express itself?

The truth is that just as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, that is, in the subjective sight of the individual, so is everything else.  Our Torah portion actually explains what lay behind the exaggerated report of the scouts concerning the physical prowess of the Canaanites: “We were like grasshoppers in our (own) eyes, so that was how we appeared in their eyes” (Numbers 13:33).  The real sin of the scouts actually is to be found in the verse; They lost their sense of Divine election, they stopped believing in themselves and in the vital significance of their mission.  Once they saw themselves as grasshoppers, that’s how the “giant” enemy saw them as well!

There is a well-known Mishnah in Avot (Ethics of the fathers) which says it all:
“Turn (the Bible) over and over again, for everything is in it. And with it shall you look…”
So did Rav Mendelovitz, the head-master of the Torah VeDaah Academy translate the passage:  one must look out at the world with Torah eye-glasses, and view every person and phenomenon with a Torah outlook.  It is incorrect to say that seeing is believing, it is more correct to say that believing is seeing, since our beliefs profoundly affect our visual perceptions.  Did the Reed Sea Split, or was the low tides of the “strong easterly wind” responsible for the safe crossing of the Israelites?  Was the Six Day War a Divinely wrought miracle or rather a function of the dismally poor military capacity of the Arab world?  Are we Israelis occupying someone else’s land by right of our strength or are we inhabiting areas which have been ours for the past 4000 years and were guaranteed in the Treaty of Versailles by the strength of our right?  It all depends upon how we view history, how we view ourselves, and how we view the Divine Covenant!

Shabbat Shalom
Shlomo Riskin
Chancellor Ohr Torah Stone
Chief Rabbi - Efrat Israel

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