Parshah Commentary
Parshat Shelach
Over the past nine months, I have returned again and again to a phone conversation I had with my mother-in-law in May 2021, amid a major Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. Sitting in Jerusalem, I couldn’t stop thinking about the rising death toll, or how the violence unleashed against the growing protest movement in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah was spreading across the country. When my mother-in-law—who left northern Israel for New England in the late 1990s—asked how I was doing, I responded with despair. “Well, of course,” she replied, “it’s a land that devours its inhabitants.”
She was quoting a verse that appears in this week’s parshah, Shelach. When Moses sends 12 spies from the desert to scout the Land of Israel, they return in unanimous agreement that the land is “flowing with milk and honey,” just as God promised. But ten of the spies caution against entering the region, regaling the terrified Israelites with tales of the giants who dwell in this “land that devours its inhabitants.” The people, doubting God’s plan for them, propose a return to Egypt. Enraged by the spies’ report and the Israelites’ lack of faith, God threatens to wipe out the entire people and start over with a new nation descended from Moses alone. Only after Moses begs for mercy does God curtail the punishment, proclaiming that while this generation will die in the desert, their children will enter “the land that you have rejected.” The traditional commentators see the ten spies’ actions as sinful, and even as the cause of future devastation. The Mishnah, for example, claims that the spies “have no share in the World to Come.” And according to the Talmud, the day the spies returned to the camp was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, or Tisha B’av, a date that marks the destruction of both Temples, along with other calamities. In fact, as one midrash relates, it was at the very moment that the spies delivered their report that the Temple’s fate was sealed and the Jewish people doomed to exile.
But elsewhere in the Talmud, the sinning spies appear in a quite different light. We’re told that a minyan—the quorum of Jews necessary to pray collectively and say specific blessings—requires ten people because this was the number of the naysaying spies. Why would our model of communal assembly, for gathering together to sanctify God’s name, derive from these spies of ill repute, from a bitter communal rift? Notably, the ten spies who sought to dissuade the people from entering the Land agree with the other two about the factual report; they simply disagree about the inevitability of devastation. Perhaps, our tradition is trying to tell us, being in a collective requires being able to look catastrophe in the eye. This suggests that the ten spies went wrong not in their grim assessment of the nature of the Land, but in their desire to turn back from it rather than confront its calamity. Indeed, the Sefat Emet, a 19th-century Hasidic rabbi, links the phrase “a land that devours its inhabitants” to a description of God in the book of Devarim as “a devouring fire.” Despite this devouring quality, the Sefat Emet notes, we are still told to cleave to God.
In this respect, the spies may only be a partial model. Yet they still show us that holy assemblies are formed in relation to cataclysm and communal schism. Our task, it seems, is to be resolute where they wavered—to turn fully toward the current catastrophe and the work of ending it. Like the generation of the spies, we may not be the ones who reach the Promised Land. But by joining together in this minyan of dissent, our wandering can begin to chart a way there.
Maya Rosen is the Israel/Palestine fellow at Jewish Currents.
