THEY WENT UP AND SCOUTED THE LAND, FROM THE WILDERNESS OF ZIN TO REHOV, AT LEVO-HAMAT... AT THE END OF FORTY DAYS THEY RETURNED FROM SCOUTING THE LAND.

(Bamidbar 13: 21, 25)

 

They went up and scouted the land - How did they do this? When they entered a town, its dignitaries would be struck down by plague, and the townspeople would be busy with their burial, so they [the scouts] could enter without anyone noticing them. That is why they said the land we passed through to scout out is a land that consumes its inhabitants - they used the miracles that the Holy One blessed be He performed for their sake [as a pretext] to defame the land.

(Yalkut Shimoni 743)

 

It appears that all of this [the sending of the scouts and the forty-year delay in the wilderness] was planned by God, as the RaMBaM wrote (Guide of the Perplexed 2:32). He says that God's wisdom arranged for them to wander around the desert until they became courageous, since it is known that travel through the desert and the reduction of bodily pleasures such as bathing give rise to courage. Also, [during those forty years] people were born unaccustomed to humiliation and enslavement.

But I say that it was not God's intention that they gain courage, for they would not inherit the land by their sword, and their strength did not bring them victory. Rather, He arranged for them to tarry in the wilderness so that they could study with Moses for many days. If Moses had brought them to the land [directly], each of them would have dispersed to his own estate and Moses would not have been able to teach them knowledge. They also would not have been fed in a miraculous fashion, so that faith in Moses' Torah would not have been set in their hearts for all the generations as it was by their staying in the wilderness for forty years while Moses led and fed them with signs and wonders and taught them the Lord's ways. This education, which was unique in all the world - two million souls sitting by their teacher for forty years, unbothered by the search for sustenance - this instilled faith in the hearts of the Israelites, so that even while all of the inhabitants of the land erred after false gods, Moses' pupils remained a unified and singular people in the land, preserving the pure faith, which spread out from them for the good of all humanity, and the earth shall become full with knowledge of the Lord.

(ShaDaL on Bamidbar 13:2)

 

The Exodus, Service of God, and Human Freedom

Jonathan Chipman

At the end of Parshat Shelah Lekha we find the section concerning the wearing of tzitzit (fringes), recited twice daily within the framework of Keriat Shema. The final verse of this section (and of Keriat Shema as a whole) reads: "I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt to be your God... " (Num 15:41). It is interesting that, according to a number of halakhic authorities, this verse enjoys a special status, its recitation fulfilling a separate mitzvah to remember the Exodus from Egypt, based on the verse "that you might remember the day you went out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life" (Deut 16:3; and compare its use by R. Eleazar b. Azariah in Mishnah Berakhot 1.5). Thus, for example, the Sha'agat Aryeh, an important 19^th century Talmudic commentator, devotes an extensive discussion to this issue (§§8-13).

The Exodus from Egypt is mentioned with similar wording in several places throughout the Torah, with variations, as a justification for observing the mitzvot or as theological statement: "for I am the Lord who takes you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God; and you shall be holy, for I am holy... " (Lev 11:45); "I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt; so you shall observe all my statutes and all my laws and do them, I am the Lord" (Lev 19:36-37); "I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt from being their servants, and broke the bar of their yoke, and led you upright" (Lev 26:13; and cf. Lev 20: 24-26; 25:38; ibid, 55; and elsewhere).

The centrality of the Exodus from Egypt underlies the significance of Passover as the first of the festivals of the year, from which, in a certain sense, all the other festivals and holy days derive. There is an interesting Talmudic discussion regarding the question as to whether the axial events of history occurred during the month of Tishrei or Nissan:

Tanya (a teaching of our Rabbis). Rabbi Eliezer said: In Tishrei the world was created; in Tishrei the patriarchs were born; in Tishrei the patriarchs died; on Passover Yitzhak was born; on Rosh Hashanah Sarah, Rachel and Hannah were visited [i.e., told that they would bear child]; on Rosh Hashanah Yosef was freed from prison; on Rosh Hashanah our forefather's servitude in Egypt was nullified; in Nissan they were redeemed, in Tishrei they shall be redeemed in the future.

Rabbi Yehoshua said: In Nissan the world was created; in Nissan the patriarchs were born; in Nissan the patriarchs died; on Passover Yitzhak was born; on Rosh Hashanah Sarah, Rahel and Hannah were visited [i.e., told that they would bear child]; on Rosh Hashanah Yosef was freed from prison; on Rosh Hashanah our forefather's servitude in Egypt was nullified; in Nissan they were redeemed, in Nissan they shall be redeemed in the future. (Rosh Hashanah 10b-11a)

What was the issue that really concerned these two tannaim? A friend of ours suggested the following simple yet profound interpretation: in Tishrei God is in the center, while in Nissan it is man. In Tishrei we crown God as King; we engage in profound introspection and soul-searching, focusing on the often tortuous process of repentance, trying to bring or actions in line with the Torah, that represents the transcendent realm. In Nissan, by contrast, we tell the story of the liberation of a group of human beings, oppressed slaves, our remote forebears, who gained freedom in their own land and thereby became a nation. While this may be history seen through theological lenses, it is human history nevertheless. Thus, in this month, according to Kabbalistic tradition, the Divine name is "straight," because Nissan symbolizes the ideal state in which there is no domination of one man over his fellow.

What is the connection, in terms of ideas, between the Exodus and accepting the yoke of Heaven and serving the Creator? The underlying assumption is simply this: that man cannot truly serve God unless He is free. A person who is a slave, who is under the thumb - literal or metaphorical - of another person, does not have the responsibility for his own self that is a prerequisite of the moral and religious life. Rambam devotes three entire chapters in the Laws of Repentance to the subject of human free will (behirah hofshit or reshut), which he describes as "a great principle and one of the pillars of the Torah and the commandments" (Hilkhot Teshuvah 5.3; and see Chapters 5-7 of this work as a whole). Thus a slave, whose capacity for exercising free will and making his own decisions, has been denied him, his own will being subjugated to that of others, cannot engage in moral choice and thus cannot serve God.

Moreover: domination of one man by another is an affront, an insult to the Divine image within man. But not only is the slave unable to serve God truly, but the slave master is himself degraded by his domination of another person, which of necessity means treating the Other as an object for his own use and pleasure, rather than seeing him as a fellow human being, a focus of consciousness in his own right, created in the Divine image. By denying the divine image in the other, he loses his own sensitivity to the holy.

There is a surprising statement in the book of Jeremiah. It states there (34:13-14): "I made a covenant with your ancestors on the day I took them out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage, saying: at the end of seven years you shall send away your Hebrew brother... and send him free from you." The mitzvah itself is a familiar one: it appears in Exodus 21:1-6, at the beginning of a series of laws that appears immediately after the Sinai revelation. But why does the prophet speak of it here as a covenantal act? Evidently, he wished to give it the status of one of the fundaments of the Torah. The implication seems to be that the permanent enslavement of one human being by another is antithetical to the covenant; that it is somehow a distortion of the natural order of the universe (or at least of the ideal vision of how things ought to be), in which all are equal and all people are free.

And, thus it seems to me, just as the enslavement of one individual by another blunts the master's religious sensitivity, so too is the case among nations. Domination of one nation or people by another - however well-intentioned and seemingly justified by worthwhile considerations, such as the physical security of the majority - ultimately acts as a poison in the body politic, subtly destroying human dignity and freedom (and it is important to remember these things, specifically in times of distress and even of violent death). Abraham Lincoln's famous epigram, "no nation can long endure half slave and half free," is as true today as it was then.

We are living in an age of subtle but nevertheless crushing forms of enslavement, often masked by high-sounding phrases, but which nevertheless entail the subjugation of the "little man." Globalization, privatization, "neo-liberalism," are all elaborate masks for a system in which economic and property rights are given priority over the basic rights of the less fortunate to a decent life, to health and education and an unpolluted environment. Some social thinkers speak today of an era of "useless people," of a culture based on less than full employment, in which those unable to acquire the sophisticated skills and education needed by a society based on information technology will increasingly find themselves marginal and unnecessary - or exploited in brutal and dehumanizing ways.

Thus, "going out from enslavement to freedom" is as vital and concrete an idea today as it was then, three millennia ago.

Rabbi Jonathan Chipman is a professional translator, who specializes in Jewish studies. He writes an English-language publication called "Jonathan's Arrows." Those interested in subscribing or receiving a sample copy may write to yonarand@internet-zahav.net

 

And if Moses had Sent Women to Scout the Land?

He specifically mentioned [that] men [would be sent to scout the Land] because the Sages said (Yalkut Shimoni Pinhas 5773: 27) that the men hated the Land and [this is evident since the men] said let us make a leader and return to Egypt (Bamidbar 14:4), while the women loved the Land and said, give us a holding (27:4). And so, God said: To my mind, I see from future events that it would be better to send women who love the Land, for they would not speak badly of it. But [God told Moses]: [Send ] yourself [men] - that is, in accordance with your own opinion, for you think that they are fit and that they love the Land. [Go ahead!] Send men! That is why [it says] yourself, i.e., according to your opinion, but in My opinion, it would be better to send women.

 (Keli Yakar Bamidbar 13:2)

 

The Finger of God and Man's Responsibility for his own Decisions

The entire community lifted up and let out their voice, and the people wept on that night - Rabba said in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: That night was the ninth of Av. The Holy One, Blessed be He said to them: You cried for no good reason - I shall give you reason to weep for generations to come.

(Ta'anit 79a)

 

It is almost impossible to fully exhaust the significance of the fact that the people which merited that which no generation before and no generation thereafter merited - for the giving of the Torah was a one-time, never to re-occur event - that this generation in particular should fail totally, bringing about the nullification of the divine plan which included the promise to bring the nation to the promised land.

From this we derive that man, through his actions, can ruin the world, even notwithstanding the divine plan. The entire story of the generation which exited Egypt is replete with signs, omens, and revelation, yet all of these were unable to change man's nature, unable to bring him to faith, and certainly not to the reform of the entire nation. One incapable of recognizing his status before God and its ensuing commitments from within himself will never achieve this awareness through any external agent. This conclusion is valid not only with regard to the distant past, but also to the present and future; Divine supervision and all that is humanly perceived to be "the finger of God" cannot bring men to find their way even in political, national or social matters ... the correct path in management of the world, the state and society or the determination of historical courses of events. All these flow from human understanding, the reaching of conclusions and the making of decisions. Paths of action are never given man as a free-gift, through the medium of wondrous revelation, by supernatural means.

We do not belong to the generation of the desert which merited divine revelation; we belong to the generation of the wilderness which has no divine revelation. We do not know - we cannot know - what event or act has elements of "the finger of God" in the sense of divine intervention in historical processes. We cannot know which of these phenomena belong in the category of Olam k'minhago noheg - "the world acts in its usual way." We must beware the great and terrible danger of dependence upon that which seems to be "the finger of God", a dependence with potential for casting off responsibility from the shoulders of man and nation - the responsibility of determining their way according to their understanding and their accountability.

(Y. Leibowitz: Seven Years of the Discussion on the Weekly Parasha, pp. 665-666)

 

And they shall make fringes - Completion of the Garment as a Metaphor for Man's Partnership with God in Perfection of the World.

...it is as if Creation cloaks the Creator; an ignorant person who knows not, a wicked person, is liable to think that there is no God. Therefore creation in general is called begged - a garment. As pointed out in our introduction, that creation was not complete, and the Creator, Be He Blessed, left it for his chosen one to complete and perfect... and therefore the Creator commanded us to observe the commandment of tzitzit, to teach us that reality is but a garment which has - at both ends - strands which have not as yet been woven, and is therefore in need of tassels and locks. This teaches that even when man freely chooses life and goodness and to walk in God's path, in these, too, God's assistance from above will sustain him... And you, son of man, if you weave creation, you will become partner to God in the act of Creation, as, in the words of the Sages, "Every judge who dispenses true justice is considered as though he is the partner of God in Creation" (Sanhedrin 99). And this is the meaning of "Whoever engages in Torah for its own sake is considered as though he built a palace above and a palace below, as is written, to plant the heavens and to establish earth, and perhaps the phrase va-asitem otam [and you shall make them] can be read va-asitem atem- [and you yourselves shall make them] - as though he made them for himself.

(Meshekh Hokhma, Bamidbar 15:40)

 

 

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