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HEBREW TABERNACLE CONGREGATION June 20, 2009 D’var Torah
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Claire Rachel
Heuberger lives in Washington Heights with her parents and older brother,
Benjamin. She attended the Y’s Washington Heights and Inwood Nursery School, where
she first met her fellow bat mitzvah, Naomi Nesher. Claire is a now a sixth
grader at Anderson Middle School. Claire began her Jewish education at an
early age, hanging out in a stroller while her mom studied Torah with friends
at Beth Am. Her mitzvah projects included participation in Hands Across New
York 2009 (a volunteer project to help plant trees in Fort Tryon Park in
support of MillionTreesNYC), the Hebrew Tabernacle Book Fair, and the Lennox Annual
Book Sale. Claire’s varied interests include math, art, music, dancing,
singing, acting, writing, and reading—particularly her vast collection of
Archie comics. When she is not being annoyed by her brother, she plays
volleyball for AMS and runs track with the AMS track team. This summer she
will get away from her parents and attend sleepaway camp at Young Judaea’s
Sprout Lake. She is weighing her options for the longer term but she hopes
eventually to become a math teacher.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In this week’s parasha, Shelach-Lecha, God gives Moses permission to
send twelve men, one from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, to go to the
promised land of Canaan, scout it out, and bring back a report. When the
spies return after forty days, they bring back huge pomegranates, figs, and
grapes. After presenting these large fruits to the Israelites, the spies tell
an amazing story: Canaan is a land flowing with milk and honey, but the
people who live there are mighty giants and the towns are fortified and very
big. As the spies say in the Torah, “The land that we crossed over to
scout is one that eats its inhabitants and all the people that we saw are
giants. In our own eyes we were like grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed
in their eyes too.” Then Caleb gives a different account, a more positive
one, telling the Israelites that, yes, the land is great and the people too,
but God is on their side and “we shall prevail!” What do the Israelites do
when they hear this story? They get furious and hysterical! They turn against
Moses and Aaron, weeping and crying: “Would that we had died in the land of
Egypt! Let us go back!” Then the angry mob turns against Caleb and Joshua and
threatens to stone them! Alright. This is getting way too exciting. Let’s stop here and ask
some questions: How is it possible for twelve people to go out together to
check out the same land and come back with such vastly different stories?
Who’s telling the truth? Why do the Israelites react so violently and why are
they so willing to believe the negative reports and not the positive one? Fortunately, the rabbis give us plenty of commentary to explain the
behavior of the spies and why they gave the story that they did. Rabbi
Ramban, for example, argues that their fault lies in misunderstanding the
purpose of their mission and in their manner of reporting about it. “They are
sent,” Ramban says, “with the task of bringing back strategic details on how
to best conquer the land.” In this sense, the spies aren’t sent out to decide
when to invade, but how. But the spies didn’t do that. Instead the majority
of the spies come back with scary reports that the people in Canaan are
giants and that the Israelites are “like grasshoppers.” Even worse than the
words that the spies used, says Ramban, “is the tone in which they delivered
the information.” Their version is deliberately provocative. According to
Ramban, the ten spies wanted to provoke fear, to scare the Israelites, so
that they will decide not to enter the land. The scholar Rashi, however, argues that the sin of the spies was one
of lashon hara--speaking evil by producing an evil report—better known today as
“gossip.” In this case, speaking against the nation of Israel (or more
precisely, against God, since God promised to give the land to the people) is
a terrible act. Rabbi Morris Adles offers us another explanation for the
spies’ behavior. Their sin, he says, is the “subversion” of the people by the
deliberate misuse of their power. The spies, who were carefully chosen
leaders, violated the trust of the people, and brought about “panic and
disillusionment as surely as if the enemy’s legions had actually trampled
upon the Israelites.” But I’m not sure these interpretations really explain everything
that’s going on here with the spies. Yes, their story was “false,” as the
Torah says, in the sense that the ten spies exaggerated everything. Yes, they
could have toned it down a little. Or they could have been a little more positive,
saying that even if the Canaanites were giants and the Israelites were only
grasshoppers, well, it would still be OK, because God was on their side. But the spies don’t do that. And the Israelites believe their
negative tale. Why? Maybe the spies weren’t lying, not in the sense that the
rabbis thought. Maybe the spies were telling the truth about what they saw,
and maybe the Israelites believed them because of they didn’t know how to
believe otherwise, not after everything they had been through—being slaves
for so many generations. In this sense, the spies and the Israelites saw what they believed to
be true. And that vision came out of their experiences as slaves. As our
member and author, George Robinson, argues, their lack of faith is the result
of their “slave mentality.” The Israelites have been oppressed and beaten
down for so long that they don’t know how to think, or how to see, as
anything else as but slaves. In this view, the spies and Israelis see themselves
as weaklings, without any power, and, as a result, they think that the
Canaanites see them that way too. Remember, early in the story, the spies reveal their low self-esteem
when they say to the Israelites: “All
the people that we saw are giants. In our own eyes we were like grasshoppers,
and so we must have seemed in their eyes too.” Now, let’s ask ourselves: why
grasshoppers? The Torah tells us the grasshoppers are the smallest kosher
insects. I find that fact very interesting. Think of it. To describe
themselves, the spies picked the smallest insect that was still Jewish! These
people were obviously suffering from low self-esteem and that maybe it
influenced what they saw and how they reported it to others. For this reason, I don’t believe that the spies were necessarily terrible
people, although what they did had terrible results. When the spies return to
the Israelites after forty days, the Israelites are so scared and so
insecure—remember they were slaves in Egypt for generations and they probably
saw themselves as pretty worthless—that they believe the negative report too.
God has chosen them as God’s people, but they still can’t believe their good
luck and, as we shall see, they would all suffer terribly as a result for not
believing in God’s promise as Caleb had the courage to do. So how does God respond to these reports and to the reaction by the
Israelites? Well, as you can imagine, God is not pleased. And it’s easy to
see why. Pretend you’re God. You’ve already performed some major
miracles—including such highlights as the ten plagues in Egypt, the splitting
of the Sea of Reeds, the revelation at Sinai, manna falling from heaven every
morning, and the well of water that followed the Israelites through the
wilderness—and now your chosen people are refusing to believe that the land
you’ve promised them is theirs for the taking. Even worse: when presented
with two different versions of the same story—one positive and one negative—they
deliberately chose to believe the negative report! It’s not surprising that
God gets pretty mad. So mad, in fact, the Torah tells us, God punishes the
spies with death and the Israelites by forbidding them to enter the promise
land. Instead, the Israelites are forced to wander the desert for forty years
(one year for every day that the spies were away on their mission) until
everyone, except for Caleb and Joshua is dead. God even punishes the Israelites
who quietly agreed with Joshua and Caleb because they did not speak out for
what they believed in. Of course, there was always a chance that the spies might bring back
a negative report about the Promised Land, yet both God and Moses had faith
that the spies would bring back a positive report or, if they couldn’t, have
faith that God would be there to help. But only Caleb and Joshua see it that
way. The other spies can’t see what those two saw. And the generation of the Exodus believes the majority report because
they too do not trust in themselves or in God’s strength. These Israelites are
ill-treated, beaten slaves; they have learned to survive but not to make that
bigger leap of faith. To trust in the person who had led them out of Egypt
and in the God that had showered them with miracles of manna and water. Now
in freedom, and no longer in Egypt, God holds the Israelites as fully
responsible for their actions. Even if the Israelites may have seen
themselves as grasshoppers, God judges them by the standards of Giants. In the end, the Israelites get exactly what they feared: they die
somewhere in the desert and never reached the goal of the Promised Land. So what does this Torah portion teach us? It tells us that choices
matter and those choices have consequences. That may seem pretty obvious, but
I think it’s worth thinking about. My parents are constantly reminding me to
“make good choices” every day. And I try to do that every day, some days
better than others. But I know it’s not easy, and I can only imagine what it
must have been like for the Israelites who were coming out of Egypt as
generations of being slaves. Is it any wonder they believed the negative
reports? Who would you have believed:
the ten spies or Caleb and Joshua? How would you have seen yourself? As a
grasshopper or a giant? Would you have had the courage and faith to make the
right choice? In some ways, our life as Jews today is easier. We have a different
mindset and we therefore have the opportunity to make good choices. I think the
world is a better place today, and we as Jews have a responsibility, like our
ancestors before us, to make the right choices, to choose the positive over
the negative. But is life really just about making good choices? Sometime
life just happens. We can try to make good choices, to see things right, but
even then, sometimes it might not be enough. For example: you might really be
a grasshopper and your enemy might really be giants. What then? Should you
just give up? Decide to go back to your old safe, slave world? No. I don’t
think that’s the answer. Rather, I think this Torah story is telling us that maybe the best
you can do in that case is to take a leap of faith and just believe and trust
it will all turn out alright. Caleb and Joshua had that faith. Unfortunately,
the majority of the spies and the rest of the Israelites didn’t, and they were
punished terribly as a result. So, here’s my take away from this week’s parasha: we can only enter “promised
lands” when we have faith in ourselves and in God. The sin of the spies is their
failure of self-love and self-respect. For this reason, only Caleb and
Joshua, who refuse to see themselves as grasshoppers, are considered worthy
to enter the Promised Land. This may seem like a negative report on the Torah reading too. Is
there no positive spin to this story? Of course! If we learn nothing else
today, we should learn that believing in the positive can make a difference. But
I think there’s another lesson here too: you can’t force someone to believe
in themselves, but how you treat someone can affect how they see themselves. Just
knowing that people are influenced by how others see them, recognizing that positive
reinforcement and love matters, and pointing out those gifts a person brings
to the world, all those things are powerful parts to reshaping a person’s
self-confidence, and they can help to turn any grasshopper into a giant. So,
with the help of each other, maybe someday we will all be giants. Shabbat Shalom!
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