THE LAND THAT WE TRAVERSED AND SCOUTED IS AN

EXCEEDINGLY GOOD LAND.

(Bamidbar 14:7)

Onkelos, however, translates, "Is

it rich or is it poor" – for there are countries whose inhabitants are

wealthy because their produce is inexpensive, and they are successful in their

dealings and in commerce with their neighbors; and there are countries which

are dependent upon their neighbors, and their own inhabitants are incompetent –

even though the land itself is good and not poor.

(RaMBaN on Bamidbar 13:19)

"Where there are no men – try to be a man"

Send for yourself men – This is the meaning of

that which is written The stout-hearted were despoiled; they were in a

stupor; the bravest of men could not lift a hand (Psalms 76;6) –

The stout-hearted were

despoiled – these

are Moses and Aaron, who sent spies who returned and spoke slanderously of the

land, and they [the Children of Israel] knew not what to do, and even Moses and

Aaron's hands were impotent. Immediately Caleb rose up and silenced the crowd,

as is written, Now Caleb hushed the people

before Moses – he stood on a bench and stilled them, saying 'Quiet! Quiet!'

– and they were quiet in order to hear him. "Good

is that land, exceedingly, exceedingly!" Said The Holy One, Blessed Be

He, to Moses: "I am greatly indebted to Caleb, as is written, Only

Caleb son of Yefunne" (Devarim 1:36). What is meant by "only"? He gave me more than 60 times as much as

you did. You could not find your hands, you were negligent. Therefore it says, The stout-hearted were despoiled. And why did

all this happen? Because the messengers were fools. It

is with regard to them that Shelomo said: He who

lawlessness (Proverbs 26:6).

(Tanhuma, Shelah 2)

This issue is dedicated to the

memory of Hillel David Rosner,

HaYaD, who fell in battle for the

sanctification of the Divine Name,

 the homeland, and by

human stupidity.

In our eyes – In their eyes?

Raphael Rosner

In his book, Sheva Shanim shel Sihot

al Parashat Ha'Shavu'a (pg. 918), Prof. Yeshaiyahu Leibowitz writes the following about Moses' mission:

The mission of the leader, the "man of God", failed, and this

was not merely the greatest failure in the history of Judaism, but according to

the Torah's conception it was also the greatest failure of humanity as a whole.

In the beginning of his commentary on Pirkei Avot (Sefer Derekh Hayyim 1:1), the MaHaRaL raises one of the possible

reasons for Moses' failure as a leader: "Moses received the Torah from

Sinai" – "Because the receiver receives in proportion to his ability."

That is to say, the Holy One blessed be He transmitted the whole Torah , but Moses found it difficult to receive it in its

entirety. The MaHaRaL uncovers the complexity of the

connection between God and man. This complexity was already expressed by the

verse, No man can set a value upon it; it cannot be found in the land of the

living (Job 28:13). Due to his human

limitations, man is incapable of knowing God's will in its entirety. This

failure of communication affects every form of human communication. In his

book, Sa'arat Ha'Nefesh

(pg. 377), Yoram

Yovel writes that, "We see what we want to see."

Is this really true? It appears that we see what we are capable of seeing, and

not what we want to see. Great efforts are called for to improve our sensory

ability.

The episode of the spies uniquely exemplifies the difficulties man has

communicating with himself, with the other, and with the Creator. In what

follows, we shall see that the spies' failure was conditioned in an organic way

by Moses' failure to understand God's will.

Upon their return from the survey of the land, the spies claim that, we

were like grasshoppers in our eyes, and so we were in their eyes (Bamidbar 13:33). Masekhet

Sotah (35a)

comments on this verse: "Rav Mesharshyah

said: The spies were liars." The Sages do not criticize the spies' low

self-esteem. After all, the Israelites had only recently left Egypt; they had

not yet come to grips with their new status as free men. Miracles and wonders

are no replacement for an emotional process that can only proceed at its own

pace – the process would take forty years. Don Yitzhak Abarbanel

commented on the verse: It is well known that the lesser man is more despicable

in the eyes of the honorable man than he is in his own eyes." If that is

true, why did Rav Mesharshyah

call the spies liars? The gemara

in Sotah asks how the spies knew that they were

grasshoppers in the eyes of the local inhabitants. Their interpretation was

false, because they had not asked the inhabitants of Canaan. It seems that Rav Mesharshyah does not view the

spies' reaction as involving projection of their own low self-esteem. As for

themselves, the spies were sure that they were like grasshoppers; there was no

doubt about it, no need to ask anyone else. In the eyes of the entire world,

they, the children of Israel, were lowly slaves who had just left Egypt. So

where is the lie? According to the Even Shoshan

dictionary, one of the definitions of sheker

(lie) is: "Words that do not correlate with reality." The lie was

that the spies were not acquainted with the giant's reality. They merely

imagined the other's reality. There was no contact between the spies and the

giants. The word sheker contains the

same letters as the word kesher (connection). The

sheker is a distortion of kesher,

based upon sheer fantasy. A person who speaks in the name of the other does not

metaksher (communicate),

he is alienated and disengaged from the other's reality. Such was the situation

of the spies vis-a-vis the giants. In

the wilderness, the children of Israel lived in an ahistorical

framework, in a reality shot through with miracles and wonders, protected by

the clouds of glory which accompanied them. The spies' mission to Canaan was

their first encounter with historical reality. It overwhelmed them because they

were unprepared for it.

The spies' lack of preparation cannot be understood unless Moses is

brought into the picture. The Creator says to Moses: Send yourself men to

scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Children of Israel (Bamidbar 13:2). The midrash, the Talmud, and Rashi

all point out that this mission was in no way obligatory: Send yourself

– [if it is] to your mind." The Creator notes that if a delegation is sent to the land of Canaan, anashim [men]

should be sent – there is no instruction to send spies. It is only Moses who

thinks of them as spies. In Devarim, he reminds the

children of Israel that, they made for the hill country, came to the wadi Eshkol, and spied it out

(Devarim

1:24). These were not

military men, as was they case with the spies sent to Jericho. Rather, it was a

delegation of dignitaries, All prominent

men, the leaders of the Children of Israel. They went to scout out the land

– to tour it; not to infiltrate it as spies. Moses understands God's words

differently. In his briefing of the "emissaries," Moses says, And

towns they live in open or fortified? These are instructions appropriate

for military men. That is to say, Moses is planning a military conquest, while

God had specifically spoken of the land of Canaan, which I give to the

Children of Israel. He was talking about giving. God makes no mention

of a war. The children of Israel had already been told in Shemot

that, the Lord will battle for you; you hold your peace! (14:14). Comprehension of the divine message depends upon

man. The Sages offer many proof texts of the human role in the understanding of

the divine message. Hillel HaZaken

is quoted in Sukkah 53a as saying, "My feet take

me to the place I love." That is to say, a person chooses his own path

upon the earth. Hassidic literature formulated the idea succinctly: "The

righteous man decrees, and the Holy One blessed be He executes (Shabbat 49b). God's will is disconnected from the

interpretation offered by the prophet or righteous man. Many biblical events

give witness to this: Adam did not internalize the prohibition to eat of the

tree of knowledge; Moses hit the stone. I shall only use the story of the binding

of Isaac to illustrate the point. God asks Abraham to offer him up there as

a burnt offering (Bereishit 22:2). Rashi explains (in a vein that does not sit

well with the plain meaning of the text, but is well supported by the midrashic literature): "Offer him up – He did

not tell him to slaughter him, because the Holy One blessed be He was not

interested in having him slaughtered, but rather to merely take him up the

mountain." Both Abraham and Isaac understood the Divine command as a

request for physical sacrifice, and of that the midrash states: "Love breaks the rules" (Bereishit Rabbah 55:8). Abraham's love of the Creator was so great that it blinded him and he

did not understand what it was that God wanted from him.

The spies/emissaries did not understand the nature of their mission. Moses

instructed them as if they were military men but they were not military men. The

"emissaries" saw only what they were able to see in their tour of the

land. They mention three times that they saw giants: and there are Ahiman, Sheishi, and Talmai, children of the giants (Bamidbar 13:22), and we also saw

the children of giants there (13:28), and

Nefilim (13:33). Were

there not any other people living in Canaan? What were these Nefilim? Genuinely gigantic

people? Or were they perhaps people who were once great but fell [naflu], as Rashi describes

them: "The Nefilim – so called because

they fell [naflu] and brought down the world,

and in the Hebrew language they are called Anakim

who had lost their status. There is something ironic about calling the Nefilim giants. Due to their own low self esteem and

the confusion surrounding the goal of their mission, the "emissaries"

let their imaginations go wild and fall into despair. Despair is destructive;

perhaps it is the sin of the spies. R. Nahman of Bratzlav said:

And even if someone is, God forbid, at the very lowest rung, even if he

is in the depths of Sheol, God forbid, even so, he

should not allow himself to despair, and he should fulfill [the verse] I

cried out from the belly Sheol (Yonah 2), and he should hold

himself together as best he can. (Likutei MoHaRaN Batra 78)

One who despairs and develops fears and anxieties will certainly be

lost. The spies described Canaan as a land flowing with milk and honey (Bamidbar 13:27), that is to say, a

land that is good to live in, but which despair can make into a threatening and

merciless land, a land that consumes its inhabitants (13:32).

And what of our days? Is there not a failure of communication between

of Canaan as "giants"?

Raphael Rosner is a Semioanalyst and director

of "Semalim" – the Center for Semioanalysis, Direction and Personal Counseling.

Thirty Days Since the

Passing of Prof. Joseph (Yossel) Walk

Love truth and

peace (Zechariah

8:19)

While truth is cruel and painful, peace is conciliatory and

healing. It is very difficult to obey the call of a prophet to love them both

and to combine the demand for truth with the pursuit of peace. Yet, that

combination was taken for a prime duty by the dear man whom we mourn. He very proudly

viewed it as the legacy of the Breslau community in which he was born in 1914. In

contrast to Germany's other large communities, where the ultra-orthodox set up "separate

communities" where they could cleave to the pristine truth of their faith

while denying the Jewish legitimacy of all others, Breslau remained a united

community. The Orthodox, Traditional, and Reform lived together peaceably

within its framework, and the various types of rabbis even displayed their friendships

publicly.

A man such as our comrade Yossel

can stick to his truth with all of his strength while remaining prepared to

make compromises for the sake of peace only if he is sure of himself; of his

ability to distinguish the important from the less important and that he has

the strength to set up limits for himself beyond which he cannot be moved. He

must also know in his heart that his pursuit of peace is in fact principally

motivated by his "good inclination" (love of fellow creatures and the

pursuit of justice), rather than by his "evil inclination" (love of

comfort and the pursuit of languor). Indeed, these positive traits typified

Joseph Walk's path in the worship of God and fear of heaven, but also in the

three areas of his blessed activity: education, research, and politics.

He was a gifted teacher. Having received his professional

training in the Jewish teacher's seminary in Cologne, he was full of

educational optimism. This optimism was based upon his faith both in the

fundamental goodness hidden in every child, as well as in his faith in the

ability of a loving, understanding, yet demanding educator to cure and repair

the psychological and moral deformities inflicted by the evil and discriminatory

Nazi Germany. With his aliyah to the Land in 1936, Yossel naturally became a pioneer-educator. He served

mostly as a youth counselor, elementary school teacher, and regional inspector

in Sdei Ya'akov, in the Jezriel Valley.

Upon reaching the age of forty, he mustered up all of his

strength and began a seventeen year course of study at the Hebrew University. While

working towards the completion of his BA (1956), MA (1964), and PhD (1971), he

served as the principal of the Talpiyot women's teacher

seminary in Tel-Aviv, and of the Efrata seminary in

Jerusalem. Later, he became a lecturer and eventually a professor of education

and Jewish history at the Bar Ilan University. Both

of the disciplines he mastered served him in his main field of research: Jewish

education in Nazi Germany. The evil regime legislated

no less than a thousand laws and decrees concerning Jewish education in order

to lend a façade of legality to discrimination, persecution, and

repression. Joseph Walk collected, published, and analyzed this judicial farce.

Scientific documentation of both the ultimate evil and of Jewish education as

spiritual resistance was his way of taking part in the performance of the

commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek in every

generation.

As the National Religious Party moved to the right of the

political map, Yossel could no longer find his

political home within it. As a response to the creation of Gush Emunim, and following the Yom Kippur War, in 1973 he joined

together with a group of friends to form the Religious Zionist peace movement,

Oz Ve'Shalom. For many long years he modestly served

as its chairman, dealing efficiently and devotedly with its financial,

personnel, and organizational affairs, leaving others free to concentrate on

public activism. In one of his personal articles he wrote that in the course of

those many years he learned to reconcile himself to the fate of belonging to a

small minority group. Indeed, just as his Holocaust research did not bring him

to question his faith in the God of Israel and in humanity, neither did his

political isolation weaken his religious and moral faith that in the long run,

Israel's internal and external security can only be

founded upon social and political justice.

Uriel

Simon

If you enjoy Shabbat Shalom,

please consider contributing towards its publication and distribution.

• Hebrew

  edition distributed in Israel $700

• English

  edition distributed via email $ 100

Issues may be dedicated in honor

of an event, person, simcha, etc. Requests must be

made 3-4 weeks in advance to appear in the Hebrew, 10 days in advance to appear

in the English email.

In Israel, checks made out

to Oz VeShalom may be sent to Oz VeShalom-P.O.B.

4433, Jerusalem 91043. Unfortunately there is no Israeli tax-exemption for

local donations.

US and British tax exempt contributions to Oz VeShalom may be made through:

New Israel Fund, POB 91588,

Washington, DC 20090-1588, USA

New Israel Fund of Great Britain, 26 Enford

Street, London W1H 2DD, Great Britain

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE NEW ISRAEL

FUND IS NO LONGER ACCEPTING DONATIONS UNDER $100.

PEF will also channel donations and provide a tax-exemption. Donations

should be sent to P.E.F. Israel Endowment Funds, Inc., 317 Madison

Ave., Suite 607, New York, New York 10017 USA

All contributions should be

marked as donor-advised to OzVeShalom, the Shabbat

Shalom project.

About us

Oz Veshalom-Netivot

Shalom is a movement dedicated to the advancement of a civil society in Israel.

It is committed to promoting the ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and justice,

concepts which have always been central to Jewish tradition and law.

Oz Veshalom-Netivot

Shalom shares a deep attachment to the land of Israel and it no less views

peace as a central religious value. It believes that Jews have both the

religious and the national obligation to support the pursuit of peace. It

maintains that Jewish law clearly requires us to create a fair and just

society, and that co-existence between Jews and Arabs is not an option but an

imperative.

Oz Veshalom-Netivot

Shalom's programs include both educational and

protest activities. Seminars, lectures, workshops, conferences and weekend

programs are held for students, educators and families, as well as joint

seminars for Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Protest activities focus on

issues of human rights, co-existence between Jews and Arabs, and responses to

issues of particular religious relevance.

5,000 copies of a 4 page peace

oriented commentary on the weekly Torah reading are written and published by Oz

VeShalom/Netivot Shalom and they are distributed to

over 350 synagogues in Israel and are sent overseas via email. Our web site is www.netivot-shalom.org.il

Oz Veshalom-Netivot

Shalom's educational forums draw people of different

backgrounds, secular and religious, who are keen to deepen their Jewish

knowledge and to hear an alternative religious standpoint on the subjects of

peace and social issues.

Oz Veshalom-Netivot

Shalom fills an ideological vacuum in Israel's society. Committed both to

Jewish tradition and observance, and to the furthering of peace and

coexistence, the movement is in a unique position to engage in dialogue with

the secular left and the religious right, with Israeli Arabs and with

Palestinians.