Parashat
Shelah 5768/ June 21, 2008
Lectures on
the weekly Torah reading by the faculty of
Between
Human Endeavor and Religious Faith
Meir
Roth
Doctoral student in the Department of Hermeneutics
The story of the spies is comprised of several individual episodes, each of which raises its own difficulties. We want to present a comprehensive explanation that will tie the sequence of events together into a coherent picture both in terms of the underlying principles and the psychological insights. We will attempt to portray a story with its own internal logic.
One of the difficulties in this week’s portion is the
question of Moses’ leadership. Though it
seems to the reader that Moses was acting at the Lord’s behest-- “Send men to
scout the
Then all of you came to me and said, “Let us send men ahead to reconnoiter the land for us and bring back word on the route we shall follow and the cities we shall come to.” I approved of the plan, and so I selected twelve of your men, one from each tribe.
Combining these two accounts yields an enigmatic story that begs to be filled in. According to the account of Deuteronomy, the initiative for sending the spies came from the people, who were eager to hasten their entry into the land. Doesn’t this mode of decision-making attest to weakness in a leader? Why did Moses have to be drawn by a broad-based petition of the people into doing what any reasonable leader would be expected to do before embarking on a war of conquest—to request intelligence reports and estimations? Would it not have been better for decisions about battle preparations to be made in a forum of leaders, such as the elders, and not in an Athenian-style democratic parliament? [1] Furthermore, in the wake of the episode of the spies, Moses passed responsibility for his personal punishment onto the heads of the masses: “Because of you the Lord was incensed with me too, and He said: You shall not enter it either” (Deut.1:37). [2] Doesn’t a leader have to take responsibility for decisions that turn out badly?
It would be too simplistic to present Moses as someone with no backbone, incapable of standing up to the pressure of the masses, since the act itself of dispatching the spies was deemed proper not only by Moses by also by G-d, as stated in this week’s reading. [3] Therefore we must seek a deeper explanation for the fatal mistake of sending out the spies that justified sentencing an entire generation to perish in the wilderness.
In order to understand the moral and religious dilemma that
faced the Israelites prior to their entry into the land, we must first clarify how
they viewed war. Until then the
Israelites had experienced only two battles; the first was the battle of the
Lord against
The second battle was the one against Amalek.
Unlike the miracle at the sea, this battle
took place with the participation of two opposing armies,
Reality versus Miracles
At the beginning of Parashat Be-Shalah the Torah
intimates that in the future, during the conquest of the
This is a familiar religious and moral dilemma in the Jewish
tradition: having faith and trusting in
G-d, versus relying on human endeavor.
This dilemma also exists on the individual level; but on the level of
the body public, a leader can forcefully draft all the national means in order
to decide the battle. Apparently Moses made
it clear to the generation of Israelites who left
Assuming that battles are fought by natural means, two dangers face a person whose considerations are based solely on the real world: one danger actually lies in success. The Torah warns us not to be swept away by success due to noble human endeavor: “So Jeshurun grew fat and kicked” (Deut. 32:15). But there lurks another, no less threatening, danger, namely the risk of failure. Whoever weighs up the situation solely on the basis of concrete reality can become dispirited in the face of the balance of power that emerges from his analysis. Apparently, the words of the spies were a realistic analysis by people who had been there and seen what they had seen. So it turns out that the story of the spies presents a picture of how a war can be lost even before firing the first shot, when considerations of reality overshadow faith and vision.
The mood generated by the report of the spies was one of
crying and despair throughout the night.
This wailing (Heb. bekhi) is what gave birth to the expression, bekhiya
le-dorot, meaning ‘a tragedy for generations’.
However, in its original context of the
spies, it meant unjustified wailing that led to many catastrophic events in
subsequent generations, punishment being meted out measure for measure.
[8]
After their initial response, the people were
seized by panic which was quickly translated into unrest and then developed
into outright rebellion: “And they said …
‘Let us head back for
Even though Moses saw the request to dispatch spies in a
positive light, there may have been differences of view between Moses and his
people, which we can try to reconstruct.
For Moses, faith and human endeavor were more than inseparably combined;
for him, each of these components had no independent existence whatsoever.
For the people, however, who experienced only
the realities of life, human endeavor was all.
As recently emancipated slaves, lacking vision and faith, apparently
they viewed war as a concept in which the only categories are weak and
strong. Their lives as slaves depended
on passive survival, and presumably they had learned to admire physical force.
Therefore, when it was clear that the balance
of power was against them, they sought to abandon the national effort and
return to their cruel and enslaving, yet also fully familiar roots.
Perhaps now we can understand why Moses,
before his death, called the people he had been leading to task.
In his view, the battles at the
The most surprising turn in the entire episode of the spies is the battle attempted by the people the following day. After a night of crying, after the death of the ten spies who had “spread calumnies about the land,” and after the harsh tidings that they were doomed to perish in the wilderness, a new day dawned with fresh spirit. This is described at the end of chapter 14 (verses 40-45):
Early next morning they set out toward the crest of the hill country, saying, “We are prepared to go up to the place that the Lord has spoken of, for we were wrong.” But Moses said, “Why do you transgress the Lord’s command? This will not succeed. Do not go up, lest you be routed by your enemies, for the Lord is not in your midst. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites will be there to face you, and you will fall by the sword, inasmuch as you have turned from following the Lord and the Lord will not be with you.”
Yet defiantly they marched toward the crest of the hill country, though neither the Lord’s Ark of the Covenant nor Moses stirred from the camp. And the Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt in that hill country came down and dealt them a shattering blow at Hormah.
How can the fresh spirit moving the people be understood? The new battle-cry can be seen as reflecting the will to correct the previous day’s feeling of incapacity, a sort of repentance for their sins. Here we are dealing with more than just a change of mind by those who set out for the crest of the hill country. A psychological explanation can be given here. The new spirit can be seen as a response by people who made a sober assessment of the consequences of their actions. Given their fearful and defeatist response the night before, they decided to do an about-face in their mental orientation, an internal repair on the level of reality. Having been accused of lack of courage, they concluded that they had to be stronger in their human activity, they had to muster the emotional strength to meet the call of duty. A group of brave warriors organized forthwith, prepared to set out for the crest of the hill country and take on the most dangerous of their foes, the Canaanites and the Amalekites, face to face.
What Went Wrong?
So what went wrong? Blindness led these people to their ruin. Their one-dimensional response again made them fall into error. They sought to atone for their lack of courage by acts of heroism bordering on reckless self-sacrifice. They were prepared to go to war without receiving any spiritual help and religious support. The fighters in this battle only took into consideration the concrete reality without thinking about the spiritual aspect: the side with more will-power than the foe will be the victor; the side that is prepared to make greater sacrifices will be the victor. They entrenched themselves in their positions without having the wisdom to learn from recent and less recent history that without faith and without vision there is no value to self-sacrifice, however lofty it may be. That was the reason for the long period of dwelling in the wilderness, as explained in the concluding verse of the Deuteronomic narrative about the spies: “Thus, after you had remained at Kadesh all that long time, we marched back into the wilderness” (Deut. 1:46).
[1] Rashi
views the expression, “Then all of you came to me,” as indicative of a general
breakdown of order: He comments: “Children were pushing the elders and the
elders were pushing the leaders.” This
depiction contains more than a hint of failure in the story of the spies, and
perhaps explains the disaster that was later to befall them.
[2] It seems
from the plain sense of the text that the sin of the spies was why Moses could
not enter the land. This question has
been extensively debated by commentators.
See the article by Rabbi Ben-Zion Krieger, Bar-Ilan Weekly
Torah Studies on Parashat Devarim, 1999.
[3] Although
several commentators view the Lord’s consent as having reservations; see Rashi
as well as Sotah 34b.
[4] Ibn
Ezra’s brief remark on this is instructive:
“You hold your peace is the opposite of the Israelites cried
out.”
[5] Rashi
refers us to the Mishnah in Tractate Rosh ha-Shanah 29a that sees Moses’
hands as an indication of the faith of the fighting men:
“Could the hands of Moses determine the
outcome of the battle? Rather, this is
to inform you that as long as the Israelites looked upwards, making themselves subservient
to their Father in Heaven, they would have the upper hand, and if not, they
would succumb.”
[6]
Commentators try to see in Moses’ instruction to the spies as reflecting a
realist perception of the world, in which things proceed by the natural
process. Rashbam’s interpretation is in
this spirit: “And see what kind of
country it is – whether it is forested or bare; whether flooded with water
and humid; for according to what you see of the country you shall prepare
appropriate weapons of war, to chop down the forests and prepare the advance of
your troops. For they were sure that [the Lord] would give them the land of
[7] Rabbi
Dessler presents this episode from the opposite angle.
In his perception, human initiatives are a
mark of weakness in the believer, and sometimes even an outright sin.
Thus he explains the sin of the spies as
resulting from their endeavors, for they should have trusted in G-d alone. See
E. Dessler, Mikhtav me-Eliyahu, vol. 1, pp. 187-195.
[8] “That
was the night of the ninth of Ab.
The Holy One, blessed be He, said to them:
You cried bitterly for naught; now I shall
give you something to bemoan for all time” (Sotah 29a).