Parashat Shelach Lecha
Written by Dr Annette M Boeckler Wednesday, 06 June 2007
Rationality and Hope “It need not discourage us if we are full of doubts. Healthy questions keep faith dynamic. In fact, unless we start with doubts we cannot have a deep-rooted faith. One who believes lightly and unthinkingly has not much of a belief”. (Helen Keller, quoted from Sydney Greenberg, A Treasure of the Art of Living, Hollywood, CA 1967, p. 317).
What did the generation of former Egyptian slaves do that was so wrong as to deserve a form of capital punishment? (Num. 14:12). It seems as if they were merely doubting that they could conquer a land with large, fortified cities inhabited by masses of powerful men of gigantic size (13:28,32). Were these Israelites not doing well in being rational, dealing with facts and drawing logical conclusions?
Nevertheless, this generation of doubt died in the desert. Obviously we have to differentiate between rational doubts that deepen our faith and dangerous doubts that endanger Jewish life.
The story of the scouts is a story about interpretations. Much is seen and heard in this story. God told Moses “Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people” (Num. 13:2). It is not quite clear from this verse what the scouting is for. Perhaps God intended to give them a short preview in order to spread hope and pleasant anticipation?
Moses interpreted God’s command as “See what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country good or bad?” (13:18–19). The scouts finally understood that they were to give a military report including an analysis of strategic plans for an invasion, and they concluded: “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we”. (13:31) Two idealists among them disagreed, and said: “Let us go up, we shall surely overcome it” (13:30).
The Israelites drew conclusions from their reports. They saw the enormous grapes from valley Eshkol which the scouts brought with them and which had to be carried by two men (13:23) and they may have concluded: if the grapes in this land are so enormous, how much bigger than normal size the people be who live there must be! Whatever they might have thought, they did not see the advantages of these large grapes.
The scouts also spread the negative report: “This is a country that devours its settlers” (13:23). The Talmud teaches: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said, I intended this for good but they thought it in a bad sense. I intended this for good, because wherever the spies came, the chief of the inhabitants died, so that they should be occupied with his burial and not inquire about them. . . . But they thought it in a bad sense: ‘This is a country that devours its settlers’” (bSotah 35a).
The mistake of the generation of the scouts might have been that they interpreted facts and words without having hope as a hermeneutic key for understanding. Therefore their interpretations led to perspectives and conclusions without hope. They saw only their own restricted possibilities and had to conclude: “We will not be able to attack them, for they are stronger than we” (13:31). The Talmud explains: “They made a grievous statement at that moment, saying ‘ki hazak hu mimennu”: read not ‘stronger than we’ but ‘stronger than He’” (bSotah 35a: the Hebrew word mimennu can be translated either way; the rabbis claim that the scouts were saying that the native inhabitants were stronger than God).
Fortunately, the history of the Jews did not end with Parashat Shelach Lecha, because God pardoned Israel’s despair. However, it slowed down the process of reaching the goal. Only the next generation reached the destination of the journey. The generation of hopeless doubt kept wandering in the desert. They learned a lot about hope and trust in the following 40 years and the Torah does not report many activities of their children. So we study the experiences of a generation that had do learn how to deal with hope for the Jewish people. Perhaps we may learn from this how to deal with hope for humanity.
