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 sends a message by a dullard will wear out his legs and must put up with 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 see... are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? ...Are the 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 there we saw the Nefilim, sons of a giant from among the 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 [giants]." The Nefilim were lowly people 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 the Jewish People and the Creator? Do we really know what the Holy One blessed be He wants from the Jewish People? Is not our conception of the "other" similar to how the spies saw the residents 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

 

 

 

 

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