You can find the rest of the parsha text on Chabad.org at Shlach.
37 thoughts on “Shlach”
Wendy Berk
From Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Beyond the Fringe
SHELACH LECHA
Our Torah portion ends with one of the great commands of Judaism – tzitzit, the fringes worn on the corners of our garments as a perennial reminder of our identity as Jews and our obligation to keep the Torah’s commands:
The Lord said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites; tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout all the generations. To the fringe, on each corner, they should attach a blue cord. And this shall be your fringe: seeing it, you shall remember all the Lord’s commands and keep them. You will not then go astray, following the lusts of your heart or of your eyes. This is to remind you to keep all My commands, to remain holy to your God.”
Num. 15:37-40
So central is this command, that it became the third paragraph of the Shema, the supreme declaration of Jewish faith. I once heard the following commentary from my teacher, Rabbi Dr Nachum Rabinovitch.
He began by pointing out some of the strange features of the command. On the one hand, the Sages said that the command of tzitzit is equal to all the other commands together, as it is said: “Look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them.” It is thus of fundamental significance.
On the other hand, it is not absolutely obligatory. It is possible to avoid the command of fringes altogether by never wearing a garment of four or more corners. Maimonides rules: “Even though one is not obligated to acquire a [four-cornered] robe and wrap oneself in it in order to [fulfil the command of] tzitzit, it is not fitting for a pious individual to exempt himself from this command” (Laws of Tzitzit, 3:11). It is important and praiseworthy but not categorical. It is conditional: if you have such a garment, then you must put fringes on it. Why so? Surely it should be obligatory, in the way that tefillin (phylacteries) are.
There is another unusual phenomenon. In the course of time, the custom has evolved to fulfil the command in two quite different ways: the first, in the form of a tallit (robe, shawl) which is worn over our other clothes, specifically while we pray; the second in the form of an undergarment, worn beneath our outer clothing throughout the day.
Not only do we keep the one command in two different ways. We also make different blessings over the two forms. Over the tallit, we say, “who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to wrap ourselves in a fringed garment.” Over the undergarment, we say, “who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the precept of the fringed garment.” Why is one command split into two in this way?
Rabbi Rabinovitch gave this answer: there are two kinds of clothing. There are the clothes we wear to project an image. A king, a judge, and a soldier all wear clothing that conceals the individual and instead proclaims a role, an office, a rank. As such, clothes, especially uniforms, can be misleading. A king dressed as a beggar will not (or would not, before television) be recognised as royalty. A beggar dressed as a king may find himself honoured. A policeman dressed as a policeman carries with him a certain authority, an aura of power, even though he may feel nervous and insecure. Clothes disguise. They are like a mask, hiding the person beneath. Such are the clothes we wear in public when we want to create a certain impression.
But there are other clothes we wear when we are alone, that may convey more powerfully than anything else the kind of person we really are: the artist in his studio, the writer at his desk, the gardener tending the roses. They do not dress to create an impression. To the contrary: they dress as they do because of what they are, not because of what they wish to seem.
The two kinds of tzitzit represent these different forms of dress. When we engage in prayer, we sense in our heart how unworthy we may be of the high demands God has made of us. We feel the need to come before God as something more than just ourselves. We cover ourselves in the robe, the tallit, the great symbol of the Jewish people at prayer. We conceal our individuality – in the language of the blessing over the tallit, we “wrap ourselves in a fringed garment.” It is as if we were saying to God: I may only be a beggar, but I am wearing a royal robe, the robe of your people Israel who prayed to You throughout the centuries, to whom You showed a special love and took as Your own. The tallit hides the person we are and represents the person we would like to be, because in prayer we ask God to judge us not for what we are, but for what we wish to be.
The deeper symbolism of tzitzit, however, is that it represents the commandments as a whole (“look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord”) – and these become part of what and who we are only when we accept them without coercion, of our own free will. That is why the command of tzitzit is not categorical. We do not have to keep it. We are not obligated to buy a four-cornered garment. When we do so, it is because we choose to do so. We obligate ourselves. That is why opting to wear tzitzit symbolises the free acceptance of all the duties of Jewish life.
This is the most inward, intimate, intensely personal aspect of faith, whereby in our innermost soul we dedicate ourselves to God and His commands. There is nothing public about this. It is not for outer show. It is who we are when we are alone, not trying to impress anyone, not wishing to seem what we are not. This is the command of tzitzit as undergarments, beneath, not on top of, our clothing. Over this we make a different blessing. We do not talk about “wrapping ourselves in a fringed garment” – because this form of fringes is not for outward show. We are not trying to hide ourselves beneath a uniform. Instead, we are expressing our innermost commitment to God’s word and call to us. Over this we say the blessing, “who has commanded us concerning the precept of tzitzit” because what matters is not the mask but the reality, not how we wish to appear, but what we really are.
In this striking way tzitzit represent the dual nature of Judaism. On the one hand it is a way of life that is public, communal, shared with others across the world and through the ages. We keep Shabbat, celebrate the festivals, observe the dietary laws and the laws of family purity in a way that has hardly varied for many centuries. That is the public face of Judaism – the tallit we wear, the cloak woven out of the 613 threads, each one a command from God.
But there is also our inner life as people of faith. There are things we can say to God that we can say to no-one else. He knows our thoughts, hopes, fears, better than we know them ourselves. We speak to Him in the privacy of the soul, and He listens. That internal conversation – the opening of our heart to Him who brought us into existence in love – is not for public show. Like the fringed undergarment, it stays hidden. But it is no less real an aspect of Jewish spirituality. The two types of fringed garment represent the two dimensions of the life of faith – the outer persona and the inner person, the image we present to the world and the face we show only to God.
We begin the Hebrew month of Tammuz on Monday night, June 15. According to our mystical tradition, the area of healing associated with Tammuz is sight and seeing. This week, we read in the Torah portion Sh’lach about twelve men (anashim / אֲנָשִׁים) who are sent to “see” (Yaturu / יָתֻ֙רוּ֙) the land of Canaan.
“Send men to tour the land of Canaan.”
(Numbers 13:2)
The Hebrew word used for this activity is lator / לָתוּר. It is often translated as “spy” or “scout,” but it can also mean “seek,” as in this verse that appears earlier in the Israelites’ journey:
“They marched from the mountain of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey a distance of three days. The Ark of the Covenant of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey traveled in front of them on that three days’ journey to seek out a resting place for them.”
(Numbers 10:33)
The scouts and the Ark of the Covenant are engaged in the same activity, described by this word in Torah. I understand ‘lator’ as holy seeing. In the case of the Ark, it is a seeing that illuminates the best path forward—in this instance, a place of rest. How amazing that rest itself is the goal.
In the case of the scouts, it is a seeing of the truth beneath the surface, of the divinity within the land. It is seeing not only with the eyes, but with the heart and soul, with our deepest embodied knowing.
As the story goes, all twelve scouts saw the same land in its outer form. Yet upon their return, ten advise against entering, while only Caleb and Joshua stand up and declare that it is “very, very good.” The repetition of the word me’od / מְאֹד hints at an aspect of holiness within this goodness.
“The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land.”
(Numbers 14:7)
For Caleb and Joshua, their inner state determined their perception. Because of their faith and connection to God, they perceived holy goodness. Their seeing emanated from their inner being, and that is what they were seeking.
In fact, Caleb is described as having a “different spirit” (ruach acheret / רוּחַ אַחֶרֶת). Last week, my teacher and friend Diane Bloomfield shared a teaching from the Baal Shem Tov about Caleb’s name, כָּלֵב (Caf-Lamed-Bet). The name can be read as “like 32.” It begins with the Hebrew letter caf (כ), followed by lev (לב), the Hebrew word for “heart,” which has a numerical value of 32 in gematria (the practice of assigning numerical values to each letter in the Hebrew alphabet).
According to the Baal Shem Tov, Caleb was connected to the underlying wisdom of creation: the 32 mystical paths of wisdom described in the opening chapter of Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Creation, traditionally attributed to Abraham.
Just as Caleb saw into the inward holiness of the land, our embodied spiritual practices invite us to seek the truth beneath the surface of things. We listen inward and sense what is right for our bodies in any given moment. By looking and listening deeply, we discern when to move into a shape and how deeply to go. We sense the difference between an opening stretch that feels nourishing and one that pushes an edge not meant to be pushed.
As my teacher Barbara Voinar says, we must listen to our bodies, not demand from them. We learn to look inward into the landscape of our bodies as a source of deep knowing and holiness.
The month of Tammuz invites us to see with clarity and truth. Yet clear seeing is not always what we want to see. We must cultivate discernment and remember that what we perceive is often influenced by our inner state as much as by what is actually present.
On the same day, I can look at the “land” of my life—my home, my garden, my marriage, my work, my bank account—and see either what is lacking or what is “very, very good,” depending on my inner state. On that same day, I can look at my body’s limitations and soreness and perceive the holiness within—or not.
My level of seeing is related to what I seek and to my efforts to cultivate hakarat hatov, the practice of recognizing the good.
Directing my mind toward holiness and goodness is a choice, and it is an ongoing practice. As in the story of Caleb and Joshua, our ability to perceive goodness alongside difficulty is deeply influenced by faith and trust in a benevolent force within the universe, which for Caleb, is God.
Rav Avraham Isaac HaCohen Kook teaches that physical alignment is deeply connected to spiritual alignment (Orot HaKodesh). In our embodied spiritual practices, we seek alignment with Divinity, with what is holy and true.
Rashi notes that Caleb visited the graves of the ancestors in Hebron before entering the land. His faith and perception were strengthened through his connection to those who carried a deep knowing of the holy purpose of creation: that this world is a place filled with holy Divinity if we seek and see it.
The month of Tammuz ushers us into a season of both summer’s intensity and collective mourning. On the 17th of Tammuz, we commemorate the breaching of the walls of the Second Temple in 70 CE, beginning a period of three weeks of mourning leading to Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, when the first and second temples in Jerusalem were destroyed.
I can relate to the perspective of the ten fearful scouts. When my seeing is veiled by sorrow, grief, fear, or a lack of faith, I, too, struggle to perceive the goodness within my life. These final weeks of Sivan and the beginning of Tammuz bring multiple yahrzeits for beloved ones I have lost—my father, a best friend, and a cherished pet.
Yet the story of Caleb and Joshua inspires me. Their clear seeing was informed by passionate devotion and a willingness to look beneath the surface. Their faith enabled them to perceive a deeper truth.
As we approach Rosh Hodesh Tammuz, I send wishes for clear seeing through all our senses. May we perceive what is true, holy, and good, even when the circumstances of the world feel troubling and uncertain. May we see through the veils of what appears on the surface, so that with full-hearted devotion we may embody the holy vision our world so desperately needs – a vision through which the wisdom and holiness of creation can shine forth and lead the way.
In this weeks’ Torah portion, shelach lecha,
we witness the power of fear.
Twelve scouts were sent
to explore the land the people were journeying toward
and bring back a report.
Ten returned and inumbrated
the difficulties they saw,
the obstacles they faced.
They declared that going forward was impossible,
there was too much danger, too much risk.
The people wept with fear
and began imagining the horrors that would befall them.
Two of the scouts offered a different perspective.
Yes, we can do this, they said.
We have everything we need to go forward and thrive.
But fear had already taken root
and the people responded to the encouragement with rage.
Then the Glory of the Infinite appeared to all the people
and even this, a vision of the Divine Presence,
was not able to break the stranglehold of fear.
The people’s fright had become more powerful
than the truths they were seeing with their own eyes.
These days, as we know,
we are being encouraged to feel afraid–
to feel afraid of our differences,
to feel afraid of our liberties,
to feel afraid of each other.
Threats are being conjured to divide us
and keep us small.
Fear is a great tool for those seeking dominance and control.
It shuts down our reasoning and constricts our hearts.
Fear is contagious and once let loose it strengthens itself.
How do we break the vise grip of fear?
How do we develop the capacity to acknowledge fear
and not let it shape and define us?
Tradition teaches:
Do mitzvot
Engage in actions that create and strengthen connection:
Give thanks. Listen well.
Offer help. Seek guidance.
Engage with ritual. Share your blessings.
Show up for joy.
Act with kindness and generosity.
Make choices that benefit the community.
These actions help shift our perspective
and see beyond the stories fear creates.
They expand our vision
and reveal sparks of goodness, possibility and hope.
For the sake of each other and all life,
let us engage in acts of connection
and deny fear the power to shape our perceptions
and determine our deeds.
May love and healing grow from our words and actions.
When the spies returned to the Israelite camp in the wilderness of Paran after scouting out the Land of Canaan, they reported that the land did indeed flow with milk and honey but that it could not be conquered. It was full of warlike people—Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, Emorites, and Canaanites—men of enormous size and strength, giants descended from the sons of gods dwelling in fortified towns with walls that reached the sky. Even the land’s produce was intimidating, for it took two Israelite men holding a great pole on each end to carry out a single cluster of grapes that they had taken as a sample of the land’s bounty and as evidence of its supernatural scale. The spies were sincere in urging caution; they had been truly terrified by their experiences. When they were in Hebron, for example, they had hidden in a cave from giants. The cave was actually a pomegranate rind that a giant’s daughter had thrown away. But when the girl remembered her father’s admonition not to litter, she returned, picked up the pomegranate rind with the twelve spies inside it, and tossed it into her garden as easily as you pick up and throw an eggshell.
The spies told the Israelites all this and concluded their report by saying, “We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and in the eyes of the Canaanites as well!”
With such testimony, it was no wonder that the anodyne assurances of Joshua and Caleb did not outweigh the majority report, which concluded, “We cannot go up against this people, for they are stronger than we.” The Israelites lifted their voices and wept.
It is hard not to sympathize with those Israelites. They had now spent more than a year in a harsh desert, a place of serpents and scorpions, a thirsty place with no water, a place where they could not hope to survive without God’s constant intervention. They had come from a place where they had been enslaved. Now they learned from the spies that the land to which they were headed was one that consumes its own people and whose inhabitants could easily destroy them. In their distress, the familiar hardships of Egypt seemed better than the Promised Land or even the desert. In a mad moment, they considered returning to Egypt. But even they must have realized that the best they could expect there was to be again enslaved, after being punished for fleeing. No wonder they spent the night in lamentation.
In the morning light, admonished by Moses, despondent at learning their punishment—40 years of pointless wandering in the desert, never (in their lifetimes) to achieve the tranquility and security of living in a fertile land of their own—and stunned by the sudden death of the 10 who recommended against proceeding to the Land, the people had a change of heart and decided to invade after all. In their eagerness, they flouted Moses’s warning to remain in the camp and attacked—but Moses and the Ark of the Covenant stayed behind. It was too late to undo their failure of trust. God punished the leaderless mob of invaders by allowing the Amalekites and the Canaanites to decimate them.
The shocking thing about the episode is that it didn’t need to happen, for physically, the people of the desert generation were anything but weaklings. Tradition reports that as the 40 years went by, they aged and died one after the other, and their corpses lay baking in the desert for centuries. One time, an Arab traveler said to a rabbi, “Come with me, and I’ll show you the Desert Dead.” He got up and went with the Arab. Deep in the desert lay a whole generation of Israelites on their backs, huge petrified corpses—so huge that the Arab could ride on his camel under one corpse’s flexed knee with his lance raised. Not only were the Desert Dead huge, but they also enjoyed mysterious protection from the elements and from men. The 6th-century Hebrew poet Yannai confirmed the formidability of the spies, saying that the men were like lions and tigers, elite warriors bearing trenchant swords.
The Israelites of the desert generation might have been as intimidating to the Canaanites as the Canaanites were to them. Indeed, God rebuked them for so misjudging their own powers: “Perhaps you seemed to yourselves to be grasshoppers, but how could you know that you appeared as grasshoppers to the Canaanites? Maybe to them you were giants!”
Were they giants or grasshoppers?
Which are we?
In thinking about the condition of the Jewish people in his own time, the poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik revived the image of the gigantic Desert Dead in his great poem of that name (“מתי מדבר” in Hebrew). He depicted the endless, silent desert strewn with their enormous corpses lying as if petrified in the sun, impervious to time and its vicissitudes. One by one, the desert beasts—the eagle, king of the heavens; the serpent, king of the underworld; and the lion, king of the terrestrial realm—approach, attack, are mysteriously repelled, and wander off, while the Desert Dead lie inert, oblivious to any threat, even to any presence.
But once in a long while comes a moment when the desert rebels against its fate of eternal stasis and against the Creator who has doomed it to eternal desiccation. A violent storm blows up and throws the desert into chaos. Rocks and the dunes seem to rise up against the heavens, as if trying to throw off the chains that have bound them to eternal sameness. With the desert, the Desert Dead, too, are at last roused. They wake and sit up, their eyes flashing with their ancient martial vigor. Their hands reach for their swords, and their voices sound loud over the crashing tumult of the raging desert:
Mighty warriors we!
The last of the slaves,
The first of the free! . . .
We and heaven’s eagles have sipped freedom at its source!
Who is lord over us? . . .
In the face of heaven and all its spite,
Here we are, ready to storm, to conquer!
And if God has withdrawn from us,
If His Ark will not move from its place—
We will conquer without Him!
(Translation from Bialik’s Hebrew by Raymond Scheindlin)
The moment passes. The sun and the silence return, the desert goes quiet, and the Desert Dead are again recumbent, impassive, immutable. For a moment, they had glimpsed their own power—and for once, correctly assessed their own vigor and potential—but they have fallen back into their native passivity and once again have lost the power to affect anything, even themselves. The poem concludes:
The silence returns as before.
The desert stands barren.
Were they giants or grasshoppers? Which are we?
The imaginative elaborations of the story of the spies (from Numbers ch. 13 and 14) used in this piece can be found among the rabbinic traditions collected by Louis Ginzberg in Legends of the Jews (7 vols.; Philadelphia, 1909-46) 3:261-78; their sources are identified ibid. 6: 92-96. Yannai’s poem is found in Z. M. Rabinovitz, (מחזור פיוטי יניי 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1987) 2:48-49.
No matter how excellent we are at what we do,
how hard-working we are,
how fallible, but committed to the work we are;
a time will come when we lay down that work.
We often wait too long
to teach someone how to carry it on.
Joshua had 40 years to understudy before headlining,
40 years to think about how to do the job,
40 years to plan the moment he began leading,
40 years to place the Ark at the head,
40 years to choose to share that moment with one person from each tribe,
as he led the People across the Jordan on dry land,
40 years to begin to fulfill the Promise as the People entered the Land.
Could one tiny letter really be so important? At the beginning of this week’s parashah, as Moshe sends twelve scouts to tour the Land of Canaan, we are told that Moshe changed Joshua’s name from Hoshea to Yehoshua:
וַיִּקְרָא מֹשֶׁה לְהוֹשֵׁעַ בִּן־נוּן יְהוֹשֻׁעַ
Moshe called Hoshea the son of Nun ‘Yehoshua’” (Num. 13:16).
Midrash Rabbah (Sotah 34b and Rashi on this verse) tells us that this name change was in fact a prayer for Yehoshua to be saved from the counsel of the other scouts, as the verb “called” can also refer to prayer (cf. Jeremiah 29:12) and the name “Yehoshua” can mean “May YHWH save him.” In consonantal Hebrew, the change from Hoshea/הושע to Yehoshua/יהושע is achieved by the addition of the single letter yod, י. But the midrash teaches us that this was no ordinary י; God had been saving it for this moment in time. When God changed Avram and Sarai’s names to Avraham (via the addition of a medial ה) and Sarah (via the replacement of the final י with a ה), the letter י complained to God: “Because I am the smallest of all the letters, you have taken me out of the name of the righteous Sarah!” God appeased this י by telling it that its new location would be at the beginning of Yehoshua’s name. This special little י knew that despite its size it was fulfilling a holy purpose in the world by being a part of a righteous person’s name, and it didn’t want to settle for anything less (Bereishit Rabbah 47:1).
The י may be the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet but it is important. Beyond its place in the names of biblical righteous people, י stands in the most prominent place of the most prominent name of all: the beginning of God’s holy name, the Tetragrammaton, יקוק/YHWH. The י also played an important role in YHWH’s creation of the world. Isaiah 26:4 reads:
Trust in YHWH forever, indeed, in Yah, YHWH, the Eternal Rock.[1]
Midrash Tehillim (114:1). reads the second half of this verse in an acontextual hermeneutic manner, as is the midrashic way: “for with “Y-H” (the letters yod/י and heh/ה) God formed the worlds.” That is, God used the two letters to create two worlds, this World and the World to Come. But which letter was used to create which World?! Genesis 2:4 reads: אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” The ה in the word בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם is written small in the Torah, serving as an invitation for rabbinic interpretation. Midrashically, the word can be read as if it were vocalized בְּ׳ה׳־בְּרָאָם (with the letter ה God created them). Thus, the heavens and earth, i.e., this World, were created with the letter ה, and the World to Come was created with the letter י. What a large feat for such a small letter!
Elsewhere, Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, teaches that just as the written letter י floats above the other letters on a line of text, the י represents the metaphysical—that which transcends the earthly physical world and its constraints of time, matter, and space. Thus, י is truly the letter of the metaphysical World to Come. The letter י is also the recipient of a few special written forms in a Torah scroll. The text of each Torah scroll is written precisely, with certain layout formats, certain words beginning each column of text, certain words written with seemingly superfluous or missing letters, and certain letters written in unusual forms, e.g., upside down, inverted, majuscule/enlarged, minuscule (such as the aforementioned ה in Genesis 2:4), and with dots placed above them.[2] One occurrence of the letter י with a special written form appears in this week’s parashah where an enlarged י is found in Moshe’s plea to God to muster God’s strength to forgive the nation for their rebellion:[3]
וְעַתָּה יִגְדַּל־נָא כֹּחַ אֲדֹנָי
Now may the power of the Lord be magnified (Num. 14:17).
This enlarged י is understood by biblical commentators in various ways. One explanation is that the י, which has a numerical value of ten, is a hint to the forefathers—and particularly Avraham, who underwent ten tests of faith—that in their merit God should forgive the nation (Paaneah Raza, Tur). R. Bahya explains that the י, which represents the divine name YHWH and, therefore, God’s attribute of Mercy, indicates Moshe’s plea for God’s attribute of Mercy to ascend and prevail over God’s attribute of Justice (represented by the divine name Elohim).[4] Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch suggests that the enlarged י in the word יִגְדַּל / “may the power be magnified,” indicates the magnitude of the strength God would need to forgive the people— a level greater than all the strength God had showed in all the miracles performed thus far, both in Egypt and throughout the wilderness.
The Jewish people share a kinship with the letter י. The י is the smallest letter and the Jewish people are the smallest nation, as acknowledged in Deuteronomy 7:7:
כִּי־אַתֶּם הַמְעַט מִכׇּל־הָעַמִּים
for you are the fewest of all peoples.
But despite our size, we can, like the letter י, strive both individually and collectively for holiness and not settle for anything less. We can be great and even limitless, and not let our size hold us back. We can strive for transcendence, and always channel faith, divine mercy, and willpower. Let us strive to learn these lessons from the י and live our lives in a manner resonant with this tiny but great letter. And as we do so, may the letter י, representing YHWH, protect us from negative influence and save us from harm, as it did Yehoshua many years ago.
[1] Shadal (R. Shmuel David Luzzatto, 17th century, Italy) explains the word יכִּ in this verse as a word conveying emphasis (i.e., “indeed”) rather than introducing a reason (i.e., “for, because”), as is prevalent in poetic passages.
[2] There are many different traditions regarding writing majuscule and minuscule letters in a sefer Torah; few of them are universal.
[3] This majuscule yod, רבתי י, though not universal, is attested in the commentaries of the Paaneach Raza (Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yehudah haLevi, 13th century, N. France), Rabbeinu Bahya (Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, 13-14th century, Spain), the Tur (Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher, 14th century, Germany/Spain), Minchat Shai (Rabbi Yedidyah Shlomo Norzi, 16-17th century, Italy), and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th century, Germany).
We often make assumptions about people based on first impressions or on accepted stereotypes. Sometimes, however, on deeper consideration new aspects may be revealed to us. That teenager with the nose ring and the huge tattoo could be a Rhodes scholar. That old man with the stutter might have some important things to say.
There are many Jewish women in the Hebrew Bible who are unambiguously presented as heroes — brave people who through their selfless actions became saviors. One immediately thinks of Esther and Deborah.
The Bible also presents a number of non-Jewish women who are heroic: Tamar the Udalamite, the Egyptian midwives Shifra and Pua, Pharaoh’s unnamed daughter, Ruth the Moabite, Yael the Kenite, and Rahav the Jerichoan.
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Shelach Lecha, centers around themes of scouts or spies sent ahead and the aftermath of their false report. The Haftarah tells Rahav’s story, which also begins with spies sent ahead. Joshua, the new leader of the Israelites, sends a pair of spies to see what it will take to capture the city of Jericho. So they set out, eventually lodging for the night at the home of a woman named Rahav. The king of Jericho finds out there are Israelite spies staying at Rahav’s place and demands that she hand them over. Here is where Rahav becomes a hero. Disobeying the orders of her king, she saves the Israelite spies and thus ensures the success of their mission. She professes allegiance not to her land and its gods, but to the God of Israel. What happens next is told in story and song: The Israelite army under Joshua’s command surrounds the city of Jericho, blowing on horns. The walls of the city collapse and the city is destroyed. Only Rahav and her family are spared as a reward for her heroism.
In the text, Rahav is called a zonah, which typically is translated as prostitute. In the Bible as in contemporary society, prostitutes tend to be regarded with harsh judgment and relegated to the margins. Biblical law stipulated that a zonah, if found guilty, should be stoned to death or burnt alive! (Leviticus 21:9) Yet Rahav is portrayed as a good person, despite her profession. Rahav is brave, decisive, and quick to give orders. She acknowledges the existence of the Israelite God, and defies her own king in order to help the Israelites.
Could a zonah be a hero?
Indeed, in post biblical literature, Rahav is portrayed as a beautiful person, regardless of her status as a zonah. The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 15a) links Rahav with three unquestionably virtuous and heroic women: “Our rabbis taught: There were four women of extraordinary beauty in the world: Sarah, Rahav, Avigail, and Esther.” The Talmud also portrays Rahav as a convert to Judaism, who, following conversion, married Moses’s successor, Joshua. (Megillah 14b)
Furthermore, in the Christian Bible (Matthew 1:5) Rahav is understood to be the wife of Salmon, one of the two spies she sheltered. Their son was Boaz, who married Ruth, who was the grandmother of King David, among whose descendants was Jesus of Nazareth.
In these post biblical texts, Rahav, who begins triply marginalized—Canaanite, woman, and prostitute—moves to the center and merits our admiration.
Conventional wisdom suggests that Rahav is a woman of sin who becomes a woman of valor. But this is not just about teshuvah (repentance) or conversion; there is a lesson to be learned here. A lesson about the fallibility of our own perception. If we dismiss her only as a zonah, we fail to see that she was perceptive, had faith in the Israelites and in their God enough to defy her own government, even engaging in civil disobedience.
Perhaps the message is that we need to take a closer look at those others who are seemingly marginalized and demonized. Although our first instinct may be to reject them, they may be the righteous ones. Perhaps even our saviors.
Parashat Shelah 5784
Equality, Hierarchy, and Tzitzit
by Rabbi Rob Scheinberg
A French Catholic teen’s first glimpse of Jews wrapped in their Tallitot led him to intuit one of Judaism’s essential values
One autumn afternoon in the 1880s, two Catholic teenagers passed by the synagogue in their home city of Lyon, France, and something inexplicable prompted them to enter. Being religious Catholics, neither had ever set foot in a non-Catholic house of worship.
One of these young men, Aimé Pallière, would later write that his visit to that synagogue was a life-changing experience for him, which set him on a spiritual journey that would last for the rest of his life.
Coincidentally, the day that Pallière and his friend visited the synagogue happened to be Yom Kippur, and they caught a glimpse of the Neilah service. But what transformed Pallière was something that he could have seen there any day of the year. “The spectacle of that large number of men assembled, their shoulders covered by Tallitot, suddenly disclosed to my eyes a far-off past…. At first on seeing the prayer-shawls uniformly worn by all the participants in the service, I thought that in a way they were all officiating.” (Pallière, The Unknown Sanctuary, 20-21) For Pallière, this sight of a room full of people all wearing religious garb, such that (in contrast to his own Catholic church) he could not tell based on their clothing which of them was the leader of the community or the officiant at that prayer service, exemplified for him “the form of collective priesthood” that characterizes Judaism, in which any individual, if sufficiently knowledgeable, could be called upon to lead the community in prayer, to read from the Bible, and to teach the community. All these people appearing to wear the robes of religious leaders reminded him of the verse from Exodus, “You shall be for me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)
Pallière was so moved by this experience that it propelled him to delve more deeply into Judaism, and he even returned to the synagogue for Yom Kippur the following year (to the consternation of the educators in the Catholic school he was attending). He even contemplated conversion to Judaism. But the rabbis he consulted with (including the rabbi who would become his primary mentor, Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh of Leghorn, Italy) encouraged him to fulfill the values that he admired so much in Judaism but without conversion. He took this advice and, without converting, remained a life-long student and teacher of Judaism. In his later years, living in France under the Nazis, he did what he could to assist the Jewish community and to give them spiritual support.
For Aimé Pallière, the Tallit became a symbol of Judaism’s non-hierarchical ethos and its belief in the radical equality of all. He had in fact identified one of the original messages of the Tallit and the tzitziyot (fringes) that are tied on it.
The mitzvah of Tzitzit, the fringes on the Tallit, is described in this week’s Torah portion of Shelah. The Torah instructs: “Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes (tzitzit) on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue (tekhelet) to the fringe at each corner.” (Numbers 15:37ff). This cord of blue is an essential part of the meaning of the tzitzit. Today we take it for granted that we can wear whatever colors we would like, and it is not necessarily more expensive to get clothes in one color rather than another. But it used to be that certain dyes were especially expensive to produce, and as a result, certain colors became the mark of royalty or nobility. One of those royal colors was tekhelet, deep azure blue. Under the Roman Empire, there were even regulations about who was allowed to wear anything of this noble color. Yet the Torah commands that all Israelites wear one cord of this royal, special color on their garments, to highlight the special status of everyone in the community. (Over the last 2000 years, this commandment of the blue thread has fallen into disuse, in part because obtaining such blue threads were prohibitively expensive. Today, however, it is again possible to obtain threads of tekhelet for use on a tallit.)
Additionally, the word tzitzit itself is regarded by many scholars to be a diminutive form of the word tzitz, the golden frontlet or headplate worn by the High Priest (attached to his turban by a cord of tekhelet; see Exodus 28:36-37). The tzitz is an adornment specifically for the High Priest, but all Israelites were to wear a tzitzit, or a “little tzitz,” demonstrating that all people in the community have some level of the special holiness that characterizes the High Priest. In other words, the tzitzit evokes both royal and priestly garments, and yet it is worn by the community at large, to highlight that everyone is at least a little bit royal and a little bit priestly in this “kingdom of priests.”
These days, in most of the communities represented in the AJR family, people of every gender (and not only men) are encouraged to wear tzitzit. As a result, today tzitzit can be an even more powerful symbol of the non-hierarchy to which the Jewish community aspires — a quality that Aimé Pallière noticed when he saw what he thought was a room full of officiating religious leaders.
Send yourself,
your real self,
the self that’s a small piece of the Self of all there is,
the self wrapped in fringes to remind you of the Self you’re part of.
Don’t send your fear.
Don’t send the distortion your feelings can cause.
Don’t filter the beauty of the present
with your un-healed pain.
Leave that behind.
Send yourself
and you’ll see the divine sparks planted in everything.
Taking Turns Holding Hope: Shlach 5783
This week’s parsha, Shlach, holds the story of the scouts. God tells Moses to send scouts to explore the land of promise, one from each tribe. Twelve are chosen. When they reach the land, they find grapes so big that they require two men and a carrying-frame. Upon returning, ten of the scouts say: there are giants there. We felt like grasshoppers. We can’t do this..
Joshua and Caleb argue otherwise. They plead, “don’t be afraid!” (Num. 14:9) But the ten who’ve lost faith carry the day. And their loss of faith is contagious. “If only we had died in Egypt!” the people shout. “Or if only we might die in this wilderness!” The children of Israel don’t have hope that anything will ever become better than they’ve known it to be so far.
And God says, “fine, you know what: if you don’t trust in Me even after everything you’ve just seen, the Exodus, the signs and wonders, you can stay here in the desert for forty more years. When this generation is gone, then I’ll lead the children of Israel into the land of promise. But you are clearly too scarred by the traumas you’ve endured. You don’t get to make it there.”
This year I’m feeling empathy for the minyan of ten who didn’t think they could do it, the ones who said, “I don’t have it in me, and I can’t believe that I ever will. This is too big. I’ve spent my whole life slaving to meet Pharaoh’s demands, or to try to feed my family in traumatic circumstances. All I can see ahead is more grind, and I’ve lost heart for the struggle.”
I suspect we’ve all felt that way. I don’t have it in me, and I can’t believe that I ever will. All I can see ahead is more grind, and I’ve lost heart. Loss can put us in that place. Or depression. Or grief, or overwhelm, or illness, or disappointment – you don’t need me to count the ways. The scouts get a bad rap for losing faith, but I suspect we can all relate to them.
There’s nothing wrong with fear or doubt. “Spirituality” that pretends we never have those feelings is at best incomplete. I don’t think any life is entirely devoid of those – not if we’re paying attention and being real. The place where the scouts got themselves into trouble, I think, was giving in to despair. As Reb Nachman of Breslov teaches, “it is forbidden to despair.”
It’s forbidden because despair means giving up on God’s capacity to lift us out of life’s narrow places. If the “G-word” doesn’t work for you, try: despair is giving up on the possibility of change, the possibility of hope, the possibility of anything ever being better than this. It’s noteworthy that Reb Nachman was depressive. Was he giving the advice he himself most needed to hear?
Enter Caleb and Joshua: the scouts who say, “wait, we can do this.” Sometimes we need to hear that the future can be more than whatever limitations are currently constraining our hearts. When we’re in the narrow place of not being able to see a way out, we need someone to remind us that change is possible and that the future can be sweeter than we can currently see.
These roles – the person who despairs; the person who offers hope for better – aren’t innate. We take turns. Sometimes I’m the one with the reminder that life can be better than we fear, and sometimes I’m the one who needs to be reminded. All of us are the weary souls too demoralized to imagine better, and all of us are the dreamers who can see a better world.
When we despair we need someone to walk with us, to feel with us, and to remind us that when we feel most stuck, change can be waiting in the wings – even (or especially) if we can’t see it. I think about how Isaac might have felt during the akedah: bound, immobile, his father’s knife raised over him – not yet knowing there was a ram waiting just outside the frame.
To be clear: the loved one who is ill may not be cured. The grief that comes with loss can’t be short-circuited. Sometimes what’s broken can’t be repaired. But change is always possible, even if that change is “only” internal. Honestly, internal change can be… everything. Maybe not what is, but how we feel about what is. How we experience what is, and how we respond.
The scouts represent the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Our mystics associate the tribes with different qualities, weaknesses, and strengths. The cleric, the judge, the scholar, the sufferer: each tribe is linked with a different archetype or journey. In today’s world, I don’t think these energies define us. I suspect we each resonate with different core qualities at different times.
The tribe of Judah, Caleb’s ancestor, is associated with leadership and with gratitude (hoda’ah). And Joshua descends from Ephraim, who is associated with transformation and with thriving even in tight places. These same qualities can fuel us when we accompany each other into tough times, and when we hold on to hope for those who can’t feel it right now themselves.
I’ve come to see God’s threat of a lifetime in the wilderness not as prescriptive but as descriptive. It’s not that our lack of faith is punished by a lifetime of suffering. Rather: when we’re mired in despair, that’s what our lived experience becomes. Our work is to transform the prospect of a lifetime of wilderness wandering into a sacred journey of becoming.
And we can’t do that alone. We all have moments of feeling like grasshoppers faced with giants; we need each other. When we’re in this together the fact of the wilderness is the same, but the internal dynamics and lived experience can be different. And when we hold hope for each other, we keep open the door to possibility, and the promise of blessing, and change.
Open My Eyes to Your Wonders
By Rabbi David Maayan
Parashat Shelach L’cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41)
“Who lit the wonder before our eyes and the wonder of our eyes?” With these words, R. Abraham Joshua Heschel evokes the profound sense of wonder at the world that we see as well as the wonder of the experience of our seeing itself. This week’s parashah opens with the story of the twelve spies whom Moses sends to scout out the Land of Israel. What Jewish tradition refers to as “the sin of the spies” culminates in the negative and profoundly discouraging report brought back by ten of the twelve spies, which send the people reeling into despair and anger. Yet in the view of R. Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits [d. 1854], the problem of the spies did not begin with their verbal report. It was rooted in their eyes, and how they saw the Land. He thus opens his discussion of the incident by quoting the verse “Open my eyes, and I will gaze upon the wonders of Your Torah” (Psalms 119:18). What do his reflections reveal about the possibilities open to us through the “wonder of our eyes?”
According to the Izhbitser Rebbe, the specialness of the Land of Israel is the unique way that Torah is manifest there. Nonetheless, just as with the text of the Torah itself, this manifestation of meaning and divinity is not on the surface, nor is perceiving it merely a passive process. The Torah is not simply laid bare before anyone who turns her or his eyes to it—one must seek Torah. This is expressed in the traditional name for a place of Torah study—a Beit ha-Midrash, literally a House of Seeking Out, of active interpretation.
It is significant that the same verse (Deuteronomy 11:12) which describes the Land of Israel as the place where “the eyes of Hashem your God are always upon it,” also calls it the Land that Hashem seeks out (doresh otah). Even the eyes of God are, as it were, constantly searching and questing in the Land. The opening verse succinctly expresses the sense that, if I do not see the wonders of God’s Torah, it is not that such wonders are not before me but rather that my gaze needs to be transformed, my eyes “opened” to be able to see. To be willing to admit this, and to ask for divine help, is an essential element of revelation. Revelation is not simply an act that we perceive, it is a process that we must willingly participate in by offering ourselves, including our wonder and our questions.
Numbers 14:2 tells us that Moses sent the spies not simply to “see” the land but to “search in her” (from the root tur). This verb, R. Leiner teaches, means “to gaze into the inward depths,” to quest for the hidden truth and not simply to take in outward impressions. (It is a rare verb in the Torah, found only in Numbers and once in Deuteronomy, almost exclusively referring to the work of the spies.) Looking only on the surface was an essential element in the spies’ failure.
It is crucial to clarify which model of “searching the depths” is intended here. For this metaphor could be employed in terms of conquest and violence. For example, one who is aware of something of value beneath the surface may demolish a mountain to search for gold, or plan a raid to steal hidden treasures. In contrast, the Izhbitser Rebbe is presenting a model of mutuality and love. The Izhbitzer evokes this by drawing upon a profoundly influential passage from the Zohar (II:99a), in which the inward depth of the Torah is compared to a princess in a tower. She reveals herself, sending out her searching gaze towards her potential lover outside. Such a gaze communicates not simply the raw fact of her existence but something of her inner desire and true being. The student of Torah who would respond to this call must also be willing to reveal inner secrets, to share their inner being with that of the Torah. Like a lover’s gaze, the gaze of one who is “searching the depths” in love conveys a willingness to be seen by, as well as a desire to see, the beloved.
Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav [d. 1810] powerfully offers another image of a loving request that communicates desire rather than violence and conquest. He teaches that the rock which Moses was instructed to speak to (in Numbers 20) represents the Heart of the Divine, and the flowing water he sought, the revelation of Torah. Rebbe Nachman compares Moses’ sinful act in striking the rock to one who seeks to “grab” Torah insights by force. By contrast, Moses was called upon to stand before the Divine Heart and pray, revealing himself in a devotional stance. (See Likkutei Moharan I, Lesson 20.)
Yet if the spies didn’t reveal themselves, is this not the very thing that spies can never do? Of course a spy attempts to avoid being seen—indeed at all costs, a spy must not be truly seen, that is, recognized as a spy. Perhaps the sin of the spies was rooted not only in their superficial seeing, but also in their unwillingness to be seen.
The spies’ mission operated on multiple levels. Yes, they were gathering pragmatic and strategic information about the land and the people who lived there—and for this they had to operate undercover. Yet on another level their job was to gaze upon the land of God’s promise, to meet the Divine gaze in this land that God’s eyes are always searching out. Their mission was to fill in the Divine promise, which the whole of Israel knew of, with specific visions and revelations, to communicate the wonder and possibilities by fleshing them out. It is here that they fell so short—as the Izhbitser Rebbe teaches, because they did not pray to God to open their eyes to see these wonders.
Rashi tells us that Caleb traveled to the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs in order to pray that he not be drawn into the approach of the majority of the spies. Caleb understood that their full mission required standing before God and revealing themselves in prayer. Only when one reveals oneself to God in prayer does the Torah—and the Torah hidden within the world, and particularly in the Land of Israel—reveal itself. “Open my eyes, and I will gaze upon the wonders of Your Torah.”
The word challah is taken directly from the Bible and means “offering.” It refers to the small portion of pre-baked dough that was given as a weekly Shabbat offering to the Kohanim, or priests, during the Temple period. This practice helped sustain the priests, who had no land of their own to farm. To commemorate this ancient law, a small portion of dough often symbolically continued to be separated after the destruction of the Temple. This small olive sized piece of dough is baked and then burnt to represent the destruction of the Temple. Before being thrown away, a special prayer is said.
During the period of the Temple, challot were used for the “Showbread” ritual. “And thou shalt take fine flour, and baked 12 cakes thereof; two tenths parts of an ephah shall be in one cake. And thou shalt set them in 2 rows, 6 in a row, upon the pure table before the Lord. And thou shalt put pure frankincense with each row, that it may be to the bread for a memorial-part, even an offering made by fire unto the Lord” (Leviticus 24:5-7).
Twelve (represented the 12 tribes of Israel) freshly baked breads were brought each Shabbat morning to the sanctuary, where they were displayed for a week on a special table. Frankincense burned continually over the showbreads, filling the sanctuary with the aroma of earth-sweetness. When the weekly transfer ceremony of the showbreads took place, the old breads were first covered with a blue and purple cloth. The blue symbolized the eternal heavens or spiritual life, and the purple the sea or physical aspects of life. The shape was originally round, but no configuration was ever prescribed. Rice, millet, and pea flours were not permitted, because they were considered to be inferior grains. The breads were, as they still continue to be, white and sweet.
The custom of braiding challah, dates back to the 15th century, primarily among Ashkenazi Jews. In some communities, the bread was called barches or berches, which closely resembles the Yiddish word broches (or Hebrew brachas), which means blessings. More often it is known by its Hebrew name, which is usually spelled challah or challes, hallah or hallot. Ashkenazi tradition regards challah as an absolute necessary for celebrating Shabbat, and if one is unable to afford wine and challah, one is expected to choose challah. Customarily two breads were placed on the Shabbat table. This is considered by many to be symbolic of the double portion of manna that fell each Friday for Shabbat during the Exodus wandering. (After manna fell, its seeds were ground and pounded into flour, and baked into cakes that tasted like wafers made with honey). Some people consider the poppy or sesame seeds that are often sprinkled upon challah before baking to be representative of manna.
There are various explanations given for challah covers, and their usual white color. White symbolizes purity and some believe it symbolizes the white color of the desert sands. An explanation for covering challah alludes to the covering of the showbreads in the Temple. A further explanation is the shielding of the challah during the Kiddush, since the challah is not honored first. In this allegory, “if we are so concerned about the feelings of inanimate objects, how much more then, should be we concerned about the feelings of people.” Another popular Shabbat allegory is the comparison of our home to the ancient Temple and our Shabbat table to an altar.
After blessing challot, in some traditions broken pieces of the bread are tossed around the table. Many Sephardic Jews consider this as a way to celebrate Shabbat with joy (and not one of condolence, where they place bread into the palms of mourners). Tossing bread, rather than passing it by hand, has also been considered by Ashkenazim as a reminder that bread comes from G-d, and not just from our hands.
Traditionally salt has commonly been connected with challot. Some consider salt to be a reminder of awareness and gratefulness, and others see it as symbolic of the covenant between G-d and Israel. “Never shall you suspend the salt covenant of your G-d…with all your offerings you shall offer salt.” Leviticus 2:13. There are some interesting customs centered around salt, with Sephardic Jews often dipping the pieces of bread into salt before tossing them. Iraqi Jews often place a salt container between the 2 or 4 breads they bless for Shabbat, and Yemenite Jews dip their pieces of bread into salt to ward off the “evil eye.”
The Shabbat and weekday breads of Sephardim are usually similar and probably more closely resemble ancient biblical breads. Generally, most are round and plain, though there is some regional variation, and the tradition of setting aside a small portion, called terumah, is observed. On holidays, Moroccan Jews sometimes mix almonds and rose water into their dough. Some Moroccan Jews also follow a kabbalistic ritual of using 12 small breads, though most use 2 breads. Between the Kiddush and ritual washing of the hands for the Hamotzi, Moroccans frequently eat fish, and also often fruits, vegetables, and other appetizers. One explanation for this has to do with the privilege of being able to say extra blessings. The custom of eating fish appears to have originated with Kabbalists. Found in the Zohar is: “Whoever eats fish on the Sabbath will be saved from judgment and punishment.” Another interpretation for serving fish on Shabbat, the 7th day of the week, is that the numerical letter value of dag, the Hebrew word for fish (daled, gimel), also equals 7.
Interesting, Syrian Jews used to abstain from eating bread on Friday. This deprivation was meant to increase the joy and taste of their special bread and foods for Shabbat. They flanked their Shabbat breads with fruit (from a tree) on one side and vegetables (from the earth) on the other side. Pieces of fresh parsley were then scattered on top. All of this was covered with a large cloth, with a branch of sweet myrtle placed in the center of the cover. Before blessing the breads, the head of the household would rub some of the myrtle leaves between his hands and bless this fragrance. While blessing the breads, he would cover the breads with all his fingers outstretched. He would then tear the breads into pieces, dip them into salt, and throw them around to each person. Following this, he would bless the fruit and vegetables.
Many Iranian Jews used a special baker, and the first breads removed from his oven for Shabbat, would be reserved for the families of the Kohanim. Children would weekly come to collect the breads for their families. When blessing two breads on Friday night, Iranian Jews would break off and bless a piece from the bottom bread. This piece represented night because it was closer to darkness. For the second meal on Saturday following morning services, a piece was broken off from the upper bread from a fresh pair of challot to bless. This piece from the top bread, which was closer to sunlight, was symbolic of the day. At the beginning of the third meal in mid afternoon, pieces from each of the pair of breads were broken off together and blessed. This combination of light and dark represented dusk.
Yemenite Jews would set two breads back to back directly on top of the tablecloth, with a small mound of salt placed directly on top of the breads, and a cloth placed over them. Some Yemenite Jews baked pita like breads in outdoor primitive ovens called mlawach. Others prepared a bread called saluf, which was made from wheat dough that they rolled out and slapped onto the inner sides of a hot oven wall, where it quickly browned. Yemenite Jews often baked additional breads for the poor. One woman recollected how her mother baked an additional 20 loaves that she gave away to 10 poor families each week. In Israel, there is a distinctive custom among Judeo-Spanish congregations of donating 2 breads to the poor each Friday.
Challot shapes may vary. Among Hasidim, the braided challah has evolved into a complex assortment of shapes. The most popular forms have been created from 3 to 7 or more strands of dough, with sometimes smaller twists superimposed upon larger ones. They may be either elongated, circular or wreathlike in shape, and vary from 1 to 3 feet in length. Very large challot are often referred to as koilitchen.
The idea of a crown shaped challah for Rosh Hashanah, originated in the Ukraine in the 18th century. The crown suggests the “King of Kings, who created the universe” It also signifies the universal hope for peace, goodness, and abundance, and was considered a mystic symbol for the unification of all existence. “The integration of the self through connection to G-d, for the gathering of a fragmented Jewish community, to become one, and for the convergence of a splintered world into global unity.” Another Rosh Hashanah challah is one shaped like a ladder or a round challah with a ladder on top, which is meant to help our prayers ascend to heaven.
A challah in the shape of a bird originated in 18th century Ukraine, for the pre-fast Yom Kippur meal. “May our sins be carried away by the bird, and may she fly with our prayers for salvation straight up to G-d.” Throughout 18th and 19th century persecutions, birds were a metaphorical image of a protecting and rescuing G-d: “As hovering birds, so will the Lord protect Jerusalem” Isaiah 31:5.
Spiral challah are another Rosh Hashannah shape that began in the Ukraine in the 18th century. These breads are sweet, with raisins or other dried fruit and a round form symbolizing universal peace, harmony, and prosperity. One Sephardi tradition adds anise seeds to the dough. Even chopped apples, which have been sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar have been added by some to help bring about a sweet year.
Freda Reider, in her delightful book “The Hallah Book,” describes a rich and imaginative assortment of additional challot shapes, many of which she herself created. Such challot include ones in the shape of a menorah, dreidel, magen david, the letter shin (symbolizing shalom or shekkinah), chamsa, hamantaschen, fish, dove of peace, etc. Freda also presents ideas and instructions for creating personalized challah covers.
No matter how a challah is shaped and served, the respect for challah and blessing for it remains the same.
I’ll bet you thought challah refers to the two braided loaves of bread reserved for Shabbat meals. It does. But challah is also the small chunk of dough we tear off and burn before baking any bread.
Originally, that dough was given to a kohen, a descendant of Aaron who served in the Temple. In Messianic times, we’ll reinstate this practice. Meanwhile, we need to burn that challah before we can eat the bread from which it was taken.
Taking challah tells us that whatever we are given is not for our use alone. If we have wisdom, money or good health, our first step is to put them towards a Divine purpose.
The mitzvah of separating challah applies to every Jew, man or woman. Traditionally, however, this has been one of the special mitzvahs entrusted to the Jewish woman. In her role as the akeret habayit (foundation of the home), the woman is entrusted with mitzvahsthat uplift and sanctify mundane activities, and nourish her family physically and spiritually.
What:
Challah is taken from wheat, rye, barley, oat or spelt batches that use at least 59 ounces of flour. If you use less than this but more than 43 ounces, take challah, but don’t recite the blessing.
The liquid you mix with the flour should contain water. If not, add a little water and then take challah with a blessing.
Cakes and cookies sometimes need challah taken, as well. If you’re planning to bake something with more than 10 cups of flour, check the rules here.
How:
After you knead the dough, before shaping it into loaves, place all your dough in a single pan or bowl and recite:
Blessed are You, L‑rd our G‑d, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to separate challah.
Separate a small piece (approx. one ounce) and say: “This is challah.”
Wrap the challah in foil and place it in the empty broiler or oven, or burn it by any other method.
The Perils of Groupthink
The story of the spies offers an object lesson in the importance of diversity — and the danger of homogeneity.
BY RABBI ASHER LOPATIN
Perhaps the most nagging question in this week’s parsha is: What went wrong?
Parashat Sh’lach tells the story of the spies who were dispatched by Moses to investigate the land of Israel prior to its capture by the Israelites. But the spies return with a report that frightens the people, who refuse to go forth and take the land as God had commanded.
In the version of the story related in Deuteronomy 1:22, the blame for the fiasco is put on the Israelites, who pressured Moses to send a group of spies to inspect the promised land instead of simply going in and conquering it. But in the version of the story related in Parashat Sh’lach, it is Moses who chooses the spies — all leaders of the people — and sends them on their mission.
So how did this hand-picked group of leaders go so bad, give up their faith in God, and pervert the will of the people? Moreover, how did the people, just months after building the Tabernacle and experiencing God’s presence in their midst, not to mention having not long before received the Torah (and a rebuke for building the Golden Calf), succumb so easily to the negative report of the spies?
There are philosophical, psychological and political answers to these questions, but they are not even hinted at in the text, which tells us only that God concludes that the people lack the faith necessary to enter the land. But that doesn’t quite make sense either, since several verses later the people appear to change their minds and decide they do want to enter the land after all. Yet by then it’s too late, and Moses tells the people not to attempt to conquer the land or they will be defeated miserably.
In both these instances, the people were unified in failing to heed God’s word. While it’s not clear from the Torah that God appreciated this particular display of national unity, the ancient rabbis clearly did. In the Talmud (Megilla 23b), we learn that a prayer quorum, or minyan, is constituted by ten people precisely because the ten spies in the story who gave a negative report were referred to as an “evil nation.” Just as the spies represented the entire unified Jewish nation, a minyan of ten also represents the unified Jewish nation. Though it’s a bit strange to think that the source for minyan comes from a group described as “evil,” the rabbis may have been tipping their hats to their sense of unity, even though here it resulted in tragedy.
In fact, the rabbinic admiration of unity can perhaps help us understand our original question, how this group of leaders erred so badly? Later in the parsha, after God tells the Israelites that on account of the sin of the spies they will not enter the land for 40 years, God comforts them by relating various laws pertaining to the land of Israel. In three verses in chapter 15, the Torah makes a point of equating the status of a stranger or convert with the natural born Israelite. Verse 14 makes the point most adamantly: “There shall be one law for you and for the resident stranger; it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the LORD.”
Why this sudden emphasis on the stranger? Perhaps the Torah is answering our nagging question – how could they? – by explaining that what we saw as the best of the Jews, their cohesion and unity, was really the very thing that got them in trouble. Until this last section of the parsha, there had been no mention of the stranger. Only representatives of the Twelve Tribes, born Israelites, were allowed to represent the people as spies. There were no strangers or converts or “others” in this group.
Yet that was precisely their downfall. God is telling the Israelites that when they get to the land they must make sure there are foreigners and converts in their midst, all abiding by the same law, a full part of society. With a diverse group residing together, the people will then be better insulated from the groupthink that gripped them in the sin of the spies. Diversity and difference is the key to the survival of our people; homogeneity is a recipe for its downfall.
In this context, it’s important to remember the last story in the Book of Leviticus, in which the son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man gets into a fight with a full-bred Israelite. The rabbis say that the fight arose after the half-Israelite was prevented from pitching his tent with the Tribe of Dan because his father was not a member of that tribe. Maybe had the tribe found a way to accept the stranger, it may have been the one to think differently and stand up to the spies. Instead, we get groupthink.
Parashat Sh’lach is a warning about the dangers of too much unity of thought. Let us work on bringing the stranger not only into the community, but into our thinking. Let us embrace difference in order to thrive as a people and thrive in the land.
The episode of the spies was one of the most tragic in the entire Torah. Who sent them and to what end is not entirely clear. In this week’s parsha, the text says that it was God who told Moses to do so (Num. 13:1–2). In Deuteronomy (1:22), Moses says that it was the people who made the request. Either way, the result was disaster. An entire generation was deprived of the chance to enter the Promised Land. The entry itself was delayed by forty years. According to the Sages, it cast its shadow long into the future.[1]
Moses told the spies to go and see the land and bring back a report about it: Are the people many or few, strong or weak? What is the land itself like? Are the cities open or fortified? Is the soil fertile? They were also tasked with bringing back some of its fruit. The spies returned with a positive report about the land itself: “It is indeed flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit” There then followed one of the most famous ‘buts’ in Jewish history: “But – the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak [‘the giant’] there” (Num. 13:28).
Sensing that their words were demoralising the people, Caleb, one of the spies, interrupted with a message of reassurance: “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” However, the other spies insisted: “We cannot attack those people; they are stronger than we are.… All the people we saw there are of great size.… We seemed like grasshoppers…” (Num. 13:30–33). The next day, the people, persuaded that the challenge was completely beyond them, expressed regret that they had ever embarked on the Exodus and said, “Let us appoint a leader and go back to Egypt” (Num. 14:4).
Thus far the narrative. However, it is monumentally difficult to understand. It was this that led the Lubavitcher Rebbe to give a radically revisionary interpretation of the episode.[2] He asked the obvious question. How could ten of the spies come back with a defeatist report? They had seen with their own eyes how God had sent a series of plagues that brought Egypt, the strongest and longest-lived of all the empires of the ancient world, to its knees. They had seen the Egyptian army with its cutting-edge military technology, the horse-drawn chariot, drown in the sea while the Israelites passed through it on dry land. Egypt was far stronger than the Canaanites, Perizzites, Jebusites, and other minor kingdoms that they would have to confront in conquering the land. Nor was this an ancient memory. It had happened not much more than a year before.
What is more, they were entirely wrong about the people of the land. We discover this from the book of Joshua, in the passage read as the haftarah to Shelach Lecha. When Joshua sent spies to Jericho, the woman who sheltered them, Rahab, described for them what her people felt when they heard that that the Israelites were on their way:
I know that the Lord has given this land to you. A great fear of you has fallen on us…We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt.… When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below. (Josh. 2:9–11)
The people of Jericho were not giants. They were as fearful of the Israelites as the Israelites were of them. Nor was this something that was disclosed only later. The Israelites of Moses’ day had already sung in the Song at the Sea:
The peoples have heard; they tremble;
Pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;
Trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;
All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
Terror and dread fall upon them;
Because of the greatness of Your arm, they are still as a stone.
(Ex. 15:14–16)
How was it that they forgot what, not long before, they knew?
What is more, continued the Rebbe, the spies were not people plucked at random from among the population. The Torah states that they were “men who were heads of the People of Israel.” They were leaders. They were not people given lightly to fear. The questions are straightforward, but the answer the Rebbe gave was utterly unexpected. The spies were not afraid of failure, he said. They were afraid of success.
Never had a people lived so close to God.
If they entered the land, their lifestyle of camping around the Sanctuary, eating manna from heaven, living in continuous contact with the Shechinah would vanish. They would have to fight battles, maintain an army, create an economy, farm the land, worry about the weather and their crops, and all the other thousand distractions that come from living in the world. What would happen to their closeness to God? They would be preoccupied with mundane and material pursuits. Here they could spend their entire lives learning Torah, lit by the radiance of the Divine. There they would be one more nation in a world of nations with the same kind of economic, social, and political problems that every other nation has to deal with.
They were afraid of success, and the subsequent change it would bring about. They wanted to spend their lives in the closest possible proximity to God. What they did not understand was that God seeks, in the Midrashic phrase, “a dwelling in the lower worlds.”[3] One of the great differences between Judaism and other religions is that while others seek to lift people to heaven, Judaism seeks to bring heaven down to earth.
Much of Torah is about things not conventionally seen as religious at all: labour relations, agriculture, welfare provisions, loans and debts, land ownership, and so on. It is not difficult to have an intense religious experience in the desert, or in a monastic retreat, or in an ashram. Most religions have holy places and holy people who live far removed from the stresses and strains of everyday life. About this there is nothing unusual at all.
But that is not the Jewish project, the Jewish mission. God wanted the Israelites to create a model society where human beings were not treated as slaves, where rulers were not worshipped as demigods, where human dignity was respected, where law was impartially administered to rich and poor alike, where no one was destitute, no one was abandoned to isolation, no one was above the law, and no realm of life was a morality-free zone. That requires a society, and a society needs a land. It requires an economy, an army, fields and flocks, labour and enterprise. All these, in Judaism, become ways of bringing the Shechinah into the shared spaces of our collective life.
The spies did not doubt that Israel could win its battles with the inhabitants of the land. Their concern was not physical but spiritual. They did not want to leave the wilderness. They did not want to become just another nation among the nations of the earth. They did not want to lose their unique relationship with God in the reverberating silence of the desert, far removed from civilisation and its discontents. This was the mistake of deeply religious men – but it was a mistake.
Clearly this is not the plain sense of the narrative, but we should not dismiss it on that account. It is, as it were, a psychoanalytical reading of the unconscious mindset of the spies. They did not want to let go of the intimacy and innocence of the time-out-of-time and place-out-of-place that was the experience of the wilderness. Ultimately the spies feared freedom and its responsibilities.
But Torah is about the responsibilities of freedom. Judaism is not a religion of monastic retreat from the world. It is a religion of engagement with the world. God chose Israel to make His presence visible in the world. Therefore Israel must live in the world. The Jewish people were not without their desert-dwellers and ascetics. The Talmud speaks of R. Shimon b. Yochai living for thirteen years in a cave. When he emerged, he could not bear to see people engaged in such earthly pursuits as ploughing a field (Shabbat 33b). He held that engagement with the world was fundamentally incompatible with the heights of spirituality (Brachot 35b). But the mainstream held otherwise.[4] It maintained that “Torah study without an occupation will in the end fail and lead to sin” (Mishnah Avot 2:2).
Maimonides speaks of people who live as hermits in the desert to escape the corruptions of society.[5] But these were the exceptions, not the rule. It is not the destiny of Israel to live outside time and space as the world’s recluses. Far from being the supreme height of faith, such a fear of freedom and its responsibilities is, according to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the sin of the spies.
They did not want to contaminate Judaism by bringing it into contact with the real world. They sought the eternal dependency of God’s protection and the endless embrace of His all-encompassing love. There is something noble about this desire, but also something profoundly irresponsible. The spies demoralised the people and provoked the anger of God. The Jewish project – the Torah as the constitution of the Jewish nation under the sovereignty of God – is about building a society in the land of Israel that so honours human dignity and freedom that it will one day lead the world to say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Deut. 4:6).
The Jewish task is not to fear the real world but to enter and transform it, healing some of its wounds and bringing to places often shrouded in darkness fragments of Divine light.
Shabbat Shalom
[1] On the phrase, “the people wept that night” (Num. 14:1), the Talmud says that God vowed, “I will make this a day of weeping throughout the generations.” That day was Tisha B’Av, on which, in later centuries, the First and Second Temples were destroyed (Taanit 29a; Sota 35a).
[2] A translation can be found in Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Torah Studies, adapted by Jonathan Sacks (London: Lubavitch Foundation, 1986), 239–245.
[3] See Midrash Tanchuma, parshat Naso 16.
[4] Brachot 35b cites the view of R. Ishmael as evaluated by Abaye.
From the day the Children of Israel were first given the Sabbath, they managed to observe just one day of rest together as a whole community. By Sabbath number two, it seems there were those who had already had enough. That’s what Rashi tells us at the end of this week’s parsha, when we read:
When the Children of Israel were in the wilderness, they came upon a man gathering twigs on the Sabbath day. (Numbers 15:32)
Why, Rashi wants to know, does the verse tell us it was when they “were in the wilderness”? Of course it was. Where else would they be? The answer, he suggests, is that it happened as soon as they were in the wilderness.
This is meant to indicate a shame to Israel, for they had only kept that first Sabbath, and then, on the second, this one came and desecrated it.
בגנותן של ישראל דבר הכתוב, שלא שמרו אלא שבת ראשונה, ובשניה בא זה וחללה
Not only that, says Rashi, but:
They warned him, but he still didn’t stop gathering – even though they had seen him and told him to stop.
שהתרו בו ולא הניח מלקושש אף משמצאוהו והתרו בו
Now, this was new to them, encountering someone who simply refused to keep the commandments. The people didn’t know how to to handle the situation. So they brought the gatherer before Moses and Aaron. But even Moses had no idea what to do. So they placed the man under guard, and turned to the ultimate authority for answers – the Almighty Judge.
And God did indeed have an answer for them. But it wasn’t a pleasant one:
The Eternal said to Moses, “This man shall be put to death: the whole community shall pelt him with stones him outside the camp.” (v. 35)
Now, we know that the Torah has the death penalty. We’ve even seen it carried out once before, for a man who publicly cursed God. But why does the Torah go out of its way, now, to interrupt our story and give us another incident of stoning?
And then there is another, more serious narrative problem. This kind of gathering has actually happened before. It turns out the first Sabbath was not a complete success story either. When God first gave the commandment to rest on the Sabbath day, Moses specifically told the people, “Six days you shall gather [manna]; but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.” And yet:
On the seventh day, some of the people went out to gather, but they found nothing. (Exodus 16:27)
Well, there you have it! More gatherers! More Sabbath violators! Kill them all!!
Right, God?
But that’s not what God says at all:
The Eternal said to Moses, “How long will you men refuse to obey My commandments and My teachings? See that the Eternal has given you the Sabbath, and therefore gives you two days food on the sixth day. Let everyone rest: let no one leave his place on the seventh day.” So the people rested on the seventh day. (vv. 28-30)
Well, this is different. God is upset, certainly – but there is no death penalty. In fact, there seems to be no punishment at all. Just a patient repetition of the rules. A teaching moment. And it works! The people then keep the Sabbath. So why does the same violation, just a week later, result in a public stoning?
Maybe God only gives one second chance. Maybe God is particularly upset because this was already explained. Maybe it is the sheer brazenness of this guy: they warned him, after all, and he didn’t seem to care. What is it? What is so terrible about the case of the Gatherer?
The answer may lie hidden in the language of that title itself: ‘The Gatherer.’ The word used in Hebrew is not the typical term for gathering used in the earlier story, but an unusual verb – mekoshesh (מקשש) – used specifically for collecting dead plant matter.
In fact, there is only one other time in the Torah when this verb is used – way back in the book of Exodus, when the Israelites are still slaves in Egypt. Moses has just begun the revolt against Pharaoh, and delivered his first “Let my people go” speech. And Pharaoh, incensed, decides to show Moses who’s boss, by increasing the people’s already backbreaking labor in the following manner:
Pharaoh charged the taskmasters and foremen of the people, saying, “You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making the bricks as you have been doing; let them go and gather – kosheshu (קששו) – their own straw.” (Exodus 5:6-7)
The people have to do the same amount of work they have hardly been able to keep up with, but now they have to gather the materials as well. In other words, Pharaoh is asking the impossible. He is pushing them beyond their limit.
This is the lowest moment in the history of the Egyptian slavery. This is the people at their most broken, most defeated.
And now, in these first weeks after liberation, along comes The Gatherer, and goes out gathering wood on the Sabbath, in just the same way that the slaves gathered straw in their darkest hour. That is, he chose an act that specifically recalled the labor one would most want to be freed from – as if to say, “even this I do not honor.” He meant not only show disregard for the Sabbath day itself, but also to deliberately dismiss the pain and suffering of his own people.
The Gatherer, then, was not just a sinner – he was a sort of nihilist, filled with hate for all things, and already willing to destroy this delicate new society. He did not just deny God; he denied also the meaning of human freedom.
For these are the two underlying principles of the Sabbath itself: a celebration of the Divine, and of humanity. We see these two layers indicated in the Torah’s two records of the Ten Commandments. In the Book of Exodus, at Mount Sinai, the Fourth Commandment looks like this:
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy… For in six days the Eternal made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Eternal blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it. (Exod. 20:7,10)
זָכוֹר אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת, לְקַדְּשׁוֹ… כִּי שֵׁשֶׁת-יָמִים עָשָׂה ה אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֶת-הַיָּם וְאֶת-כָּל-אֲשֶׁר-בָּם, וַיָּנַח, בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי; עַל-כֵּן, בֵּרַךְ ה אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת–וַיְקַדְּשֵׁהוּ.
But in the retelling of Revelation, in the Book of Deuteronomy, the same commandment has some distinct differences:
Guard the Sabbath day and keep it holy… Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Eternal, your God, freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Eternal, your God, has commanded you to keep the seventh day. (Deut. 5:12,15)
The Sabbath is a recognition of God as the Creator. But the Sabbath is also a recognition of God the Liberator – Who hears the cries of the oppressed, and brings a redeemer to set them free.
The Gatherer broke the Sabbath, fundamentally rejecting God as the source of all existence. That, however, God can handle. God has forgiven gathering before, after all.
But the Gatherer also specifically broke the Sabbath with an action that made a mockery of human suffering. And that God will not abide.
If the Gatherer does not value human life, he has forfeited his own. Measure for measure.
As you have gathered sticks, we shall gather stones.
The Blue of the Ocean, the Sky and the Tzitzit
Our relationship with the Divine must also encompass a relationship with the world that surrounds us.
BY ELIZABETH RICHMAN
Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make tzitzit for themselves on the corners of their garments through all the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the tzitzit of each corner. That shall be your tzitzit; look at it and recall all of God’s commandments and observe them… Thus shall you be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God… (Numbers 15: 38-41).
Parashat Sh’lach concludes with these famous instructions to attach tzitzit (fringes) to the corners of our clothing as a reminder of and a directive to keep God’s commandments. The instruction of tzitzit is seen as a reminder of the entirety of religious practice. Our Sages believed that it was so important that they incorporated it verbatim into the Shema, one of the most central prayers in Judaism.
Blue Resembles…
The Rabbis wondered why God commanded the inclusion of one blue thread among the white threads of the tzitzit. Tractate Menahot of the Babylonian Talmud reports Rabbi Meir asking “Why is blue different from all other colors?” and then answering, “Because blue resembles the sea, and the sea resembles sky, and the sky resembles God’s Throne of Glory…as it is written: ‘Above the sky over their heads was the semblance of a throne, like sapphire in appearance…’”
In other words, Rabbi Meir hypothesizes that the blue thread in tzitzit is meant to guide its wearers through a chain of associations beginning with immediate visualization of tzitzit and ending with the expansiveness of God. But why didn’t Rabbi Meir simply say that the color blue reminds us of God’s throne? Why do we first need to think of the ocean and the sky?
Rabbi Meir is alluding to the intimate connection between our religious actions and the real world. Our relationship with the Divine must also encompass a relationship with the world that surrounds us: the ocean, the sky, and the rich variety of life that dwells in between. We must learn to truly see, and thereby to know, the full world that God has created, from the depths of the ocean to the heights of the sky and the vastness of earth.
A Reminder for Action
Indeed, we are not permitted to merely contemplate the world–we must be part of it. Immediately preceding Rabbi Meir’s comment, the Talmud asks why we are told to look at tzitzit and remember God’s commandments. The Talmud offers the answer that “seeing leads to remembering and remembering leads to doing.”
Seeing or reading about tzitzit is meant to remind us to act. This is true as much today as it was when these words were written. Perhaps thinking of the blue of the ocean and the sky can serve as a reminder to care for the earth and make choices that lead to sustainable development. Perhaps remembering those who inhabit the expanse of land between ocean and sky, and recalling our communal redemption story, should remind us of our obligation to build a world that honors the dignity and equality of all people.
We can see the earth differently by traveling and interacting with a diversity of people, visiting the developing world, or simply walking down the streets of our own cities, eyes wide open, speaking with those who need help. If we look carefully enough, what we see may remind us, like the Shema does, of our ancient and modern family stories.
Ours are stories about slavery, poverty, immigration, environmental degradation, suffering, and, in many cases, redemption. Our stories can help us to see the stories of others and to act in ways that will bring about redemptive endings. As the Rabbis imply in their teaching about tzitzit and its place in the Shema, when we look around we are challenged to make empathic connections between ourselves and the world around us. These connections obligate us to act.
The color blue that reminds us of ocean, sky, and God’s throne also reminds of this connection. The particular shade of blue to be used in tzitzit is called tekhelet. Ramban (Nahmanides) suggests that tekhelet was chosen because its spelling is very close to the word takhlit, which means purpose or goal.
The relationship between the two words summarizes the Talmud’s teaching on tzitzit. The purpose of our religious rituals is to truly see and engage with the world and its people. This engagement with the world leads us into relationship with the Divine. Only then, as the end of Parashat Sh’lach tells us, we will be holy to our God.
Provided by special arrangement with American Jewish World Service. To learn more, visit http://www.ajws.org.
On Grasshoppers and Angels
By Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld
At the beginning of this week’s parsha, we encounter the Israelites in a moment of intense vulnerability and self-doubt.
The people have been wandering in the wilderness for over a year. So much is behind them: moments of miraculous rescue, relief, revelation; other moments of thirst, terror, and trembling; and always, the thin, almost imperceptible line between them.
What lies ahead is unknown. Guided on their journey by a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud by day, these ex-slaves – still strangers to their own new-found freedom – are commanded to follow a God they cannot see to a land they cannot imagine. It is not difficult to understand why they slip so easily, again and again, from faith into raw fear.
As our portion opens, Moses is commanded by God to send men to “scout out the land of Canaan” – which he does immediately, selecting twelves spies, a leader from each tribe, and sending them off with these instructions: “Go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor?”
All good questions. The spies spend forty days scouting out the land. When they return, they go directly to Moses and Aaron and, before the entire community, they make their report. It begins on a positive note. “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey.” But as they continue with a description of the people who inhabit the land, the message becomes more equivocal. “The people who inhabit the country are extremely powerful and the cities are fortified and very large.” A less glowing report, but still, a seemingly reasonable response to their assignment.
It is at this point that things begin to unravel. Caleb steps forward, offering words of encouragement and trying to stem the tide of panic rising among the people. But the other spies take on an even more ominous tone. Their message now turns from one that is tinged with fear to one that predicts certain failure. “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” And then, reaching fever pitch, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are giants. We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
It is an exquisite articulation of self-doubt: “Lo nuchal. We can’t do this.” And the ever-so-human projection of one’s own sense of inadequacy onto others: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
It is this statement that captures the attention of an extraordinarily poignant commentary from Midrash Tanchuma. “The Blessed Holy One said to the scouts: “You don’t know what you have just let your mouths utter. I am ready to put up with your saying, ‘We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves.’ But I do take offense at your asserting, ‘And so we must have looked to them.’ Could you possibly know how I made you appear in their eyes? How do you know but that in their eyes you were like angels?’”
In this brief imagined exchange between God and the scouts, the midrash underscores the insidious nature of self-doubt, the way we can mistake it for truth, the way it can indeed become “a land that devours its inhabitants.”
The antidote, the midrash insists, is cultivating the capacity to open up some space between our inner experience and outer reality. This is the vital, life-giving space of breath, hope, possibility. The voice of God is the voice that speaks to us, saying: I understand that you are afraid. I understand that you feel small. But take a minute. Leave room for the possibility that your fear is not the whole story. How do you know but that in their eyes you were like angels?
Perhaps the very end of this week’s portion – the mitzvah of tzitzit, of wearing fringes on the corners of our garments – can best be understood as a way of ritually enacting this very truth, a way of keeping open this dialogue with the divine voice in our own lives.
The word tzitzit, according to Rashi and other commentators, is related to the Hebrew word metzitz, or “to peer,” as in the verse from Song of Songs, “metzitz min hacharakim” – “peering through the latticework.”
We, who have a tendency to see ourselves as grasshoppers at times, need to be continually reminded to expand our vision and remember that we stand in every moment before a loving God. In those moments when self-doubt clouds or constricts our vision, we are asked to lift our eyes, to try to peer through the cracks in the walls we have built, and open ourselves to the possibility that we may be like angels in the eyes of an Other.
And here is a heartbreaking, deep question. The spies had clear prophecy. They were all the greatest pupils of Moshe Rabbeinu. Why did they come back and say bad things about Israel? And also, Calev and Yehoshua, who gave them the strength to hold out? And there’s so many, so many Torahs. Let me share with you one.
The first thing is that the truth is–yes, they [the spies] had clear prophecy. You know what they saw? They saw rivers of blood coming out of Yerushalayim, flooding the whole world. They saw the destruction of the First Temple and they saw the destruction of the Second Temple. They saw Auschwitz; they saw Dachau. They saw the Six-Day War, they saw the Yom Kippur War, and, you know, they said, “Why do we need it? Let’s stay in the desert.” So they were right. The only thing is, they made one mistake. They didn’t realize that all this is only happening because of them. If they would come back and say good things, all the rivers of blood from Yerushalayim would be turned into rivers of joy.
You know how deep this is? Sometimes we see bad things in the world, we see terrible things in another human being …. but it’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. I mean, this is deeper than Yom Kippur–cuts right through you in a million ways.
But Yehoshua and Calev had holy eyes and were so pure they immediately saw the Gevaltige rivers of joy, so they said it’s a great Land. Every time we see only good in another person we are fixing the mistake of the spies, hastening the redemption; may it be quick in our days. Amen.
Parshat Shlach introduces some frightening mythical beings: the Anakites, giant people; and the Nefilim, disruptive princes who survived the great flood. When the Israelite scouts return from their tour of the Land, ten of them insist that a military campaign is impossible, because “all the people that we saw in the land are men of great size; we saw the Nefilim there – the Anakites are part of the Nefilim – and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” (Num 13:32-33)
But forty years later, the Israelites do wage war on Anakite kings and defeat them – most notably, as Moshe proudly reports, “King Og of Bashan…his bedstead, an iron bedstead…is nine cubits long and four cubits wide, by the standard cubit!” (Deut 3:11)
How do the Israelites succeed? Moshe suggests that the people learn to let go of their fear; after that, God delivers Og into their hands. Midrash explains how they let go: they find the strengths hidden within their limitations. So what if they are only grasshoppers compared to the other armies? Grasshoppers can, after all, mutate into locusts. “Og King of Bashan said, “I will go and uproot a hill and throw it upon the Israelites and kill them. He uprooted it and brought it along on his head. And the Holy One of Blessing brought locusts which bored through it.” (Talmud Berachot 45b)
When we become aware that fear prevents us from moving forward with something important, we can apply the lesson from the midrash. We can ask, “What am I afraid I cannot do? Does this fear come from any positive quality in me? If so, how can I use this good trait to move forward?”
by Rav DovBer Pinson
In this week’s Torah portion Moshe/Moses sends the twelve scouts, the leaders of the tribes of Israel, to go from their encampment in the desert and observe the land of Israel.
The Torah reading begins with the words;“Hashem spoke to Moshe saying. Send out men…Ve’yasuru/ and they shall observe the Land…which I am giving to the children of Israel (13:1-2) Moshe instructs the spies to “see what the land is like” (13:18)
Their task is to see the land.
The common misconception is that they were told to be spies. But looking at the verse carefully, they were not sent to spy and figure out the best possible way to conquer the land, they were merely asked to observe.
Moshe sends them to see the land, on a deeper level, not only to see for themselves the goodness of the land, but to actually effect through their seeing, a positive elevation of the land. In this way they would ‘acquire’ the land, it would become theirs and transformed into a holy land.
The ancient philosophers argued about how we see things. There are two major theories: in order to see something, the light from the object comes toward us and we receive it, or, our eyes emit the ‘light’ of vision, which goes out to meet objects.
Today, empirical evidence proves that sense-objects are received in your brain. As you look at something, for example, the words on this screen, rays of light pass from the screen to your eyes, and these register as an inverted image of the page in your retina. Light-sensitive cells then cause impulses to pass through your optic nerve, leading to complex electrochemical patterns in your brain, which you finally interpret as a page with words on it. This is a one-way path, from the object to the subject.
One thing still remains a mystery in this process. Why do we see the image of the page in front of us ‘outside’ of us, when the image is actually appearing within us, or within our brain?
If one were perceiving accurately, perhaps it would be more natural to say, ‘I am seeing a page in my mind,’ rather than ‘I am seeing a page two feet away from my face.’ Only our projection of the image outward onto an assumed ‘outside’ world makes objects appear outside of ourselves.
Therefore, in a sense, while light is received by our eyes and nervous system, we can also argue that we project or ‘emit’ the light of vision outward. Our minds extend to the outside world, so-to-speak.
Taking this idea further, we enter the realm of basic quantum theory, in which the observer is understood to affect the observed. Biologists and theorists discuss another mystery: some people can accurately sense when an unseen person is staring at them. Here, not only does a ‘seer’ affect the seen, but a ‘seer’ ‘out there’ can seem to affect us ‘in here’. This is the amazing power of ‘seeing’.
According to the deep teachings of Torah, the way we see affects the things we are viewing. For example, someone with pure intention creates a positive energy when looking at something, and the opposite holds true as well. Our vision emits subtle vibrations into the universe and towards the object/person we are viewing.
Coming back to the story of the twelve scouts and its unfortunate ending, we find that ten of the twelve scouts failed in their mission. They returned with a negative report; “And there we saw the giants…and we were in our own eyes as grasshoppers, and so were we in their eyes.” (13:33)
They had no real way of knowing how they were perceived in the eyes of the natives, however, since in their own view they were unfit and not ready to enter the land, they therefore assumed that that was the reality, the natives were ‘giants’ and they were mere ‘grasshoppers.’ They looked from a perspective of negativity, not wanting and desiring to enter the land, and therefore the land was negative and impossible to enter and inhabit.
We don’t see things the way they are, rather, we perceive things the way we are.
The ten spies were pessimistic about entering the land of Israel. They had other motives, wishing to remain spiritually sheltered in the desert and led by Moshe and therefore went in with a negative and self-defeating attitude, and created a negative reality for themselves and the people.
In contrast, the other two spies, Yehoshua and Kalev, understood the inherent benefit of inhabiting the land of Israel and appreciated it as the gift that it was. They were passionate and excited about Israel and so, even though the land they observed was the same as the other scouts, the land they ‘saw’ was completely different. The message they came back with was, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” (13:30)
This created a reality in which they truly were able to conquer. In fact, it was Yehoshua, the scout who saw the land in a positive light, who was empowered to finally lead the nation into their land.
Energy of the Week
Positive Vision
This week’s energy imbues us with the ability to see positively all the events and people we come in contact with.
We can choose the things we see. If we understand deeply that what we see is a reflection of who we are and how we are choosing to perceive, we can then choose to perceive in a positive and uplifting manner.
When we immediately see something as negative, we need to go back into ourselves, where the light is being absorbed, and change the refraction. If we can imagine something as being wonderful and positive, we can see it that way, and when we see it that way – it becomes that way.
We must be careful how we view things, or interpret them, as our very ‘seeing’ affects the quality of that thing.
When we view an event or a person in a positive light, we actually create positive energy which changes the very nature of that event or person.
Be conscious that when you see something deeply, it becomes a part of you, and thereby choose to create a better reality for yourself with positive vision.
Shlach means “Send!” Moshe sends 12 scouts to tour and analyze the land of Canaan and analyze it from lifestyle and strategic points of view. Can it support a mixed agricultural lifestyle? How difficult would it be for an army to enter?
All the scouts report that the land is agriculturally abundant, yielding giant grapes. But ten of the scouts also report that no army could enter be because the farmers are also giants. The assembled crowd hears the report, panics, and moves to attack Moshe for exposing them to danger. Calev leaps forward and says, “But we can do it!”
Who is Calev? If you remove the vowels from under the letters of his name and read it in a familiar way, you will read kelev, Dog. We know that dogs can be very brave out of loyalty to a master. Torah also suggests that dogs are spiritually and emotionally attuned to their surroundings, as it reports that dogs kept their silence on the night of the tenth plague.
If you replace the vowels under the letters of Calev’s name and read it aloud, you will notice it literally means “like a heart,” or, in Biblical Hebrew, “like a mind.” As a mob forms, Calev keeps his focus and thinks clearly. He is attuned to the well-being of his leader Moshe, and he encourages the people to take heart.
If you imagine that the names of the twelve scouts were the formal leadership names they chose, you can see that Calev chose his own name intentionally. Under stress, he brought forward the best qualities of the animal that inspired him.
Animal characters in Hebrew Bible are never random. The authors know their biology. And they know their ecology. And they assume that you do too. So if you know how an animal lives, then you can understand its role in a story, and you can deeply receive the story’s spiritual message.
Today’s animal is…the grasshopper. A strong supporting character throughout Hebrew Bible.
ISAIAH INVOKES GRASSHOPPERS…ALSO KNOWN AS LOCUSTS
The Prophet Isaiah says, “Don’t you get it? God dwells above the circle of the earth, and those who dwell on earth are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40: 21-22).
From the human perspective, grasshoppers are really small. About the size of an adult’s thumb. From this human perspective, Isaiah reminds us that God is infinitely creative, powerful, everlasting, energetic, and wise – while we are only kinda sorta a little bit creative and wise, with a little bit of power and a little bit of energy.
But from the grasshopper’s perspective, a grasshopper is not small at all. It’s just the right size. The right size to inspect grassy grains, to see how plants grow, and decide what to eat. And the right size to launch a leap with a height 10x the grasshopper’s length…and a distance 20x the grasshopper’s length. The grasshopper is just the right size to vault up…and catch a glimpse of heaven as it travels. Isaiah wants us to know that we may be small, but we can glimpse the infinity of God. Just like the grasshopper!
GRASSHOPPERS CARRY SPARKS OF DIVINITY
Isaiah’s poetic Hebrew gives us two hints of the grasshopper’s spirituality. Two hints that the grasshopper holds a little spark of the essence of God. Isaiah uses the same word to talk about how God lives, and how the grasshopper lives. God yoshev, dwells, above the earth, and the grasshopper is among the earth’s in-dwellers, yoshveiha. Both God and the grasshopper “dwell.”
Isaiah also draws a connection between where God lives and the word for “grasshopper.” God dwells above the chug, the circle, of planet earth, and earth-dwellers are like chagavim, the grasshoppers. Can you hear the alliteration? Yoshev, yoshveiha; Chug, chagavim. A grasshopper may look small to us, but God’s life and the grasshopper’s life are connected.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE GRASSHOPPERS
Isaiah presses this message because misunderstanding a grasshopper’s power can have terrible consequences. As it does in this story from the Book of Numbers (Num. 13:1-14:39). The Israelites are camped in the wilderness, somewhere between Egypt and Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey. God says to Moses, “Get yourself twelve scouts. Twelve distinguished people with good leadership qualities. Send them to scout out this land of Canaan where you’ll be living. You can hear straight from them what kind of a land it is.”
Moses appoints the scouts, and sends them out. Forty days later, the scouts come back. They report to Moses in front of all the people. They say: “This is indeed a land flowing with milk and honey. Just look at these grapes and pomegranates and figs we brought back! They’re gigantic! But so are the people. Next to them, we looked to ourselves like grasshoppers.”
As soon as the people hear the word “grasshoppers,” they start yelling and crying. They become terrified. They rail against Moses and Aaron. “Why did God bring us to the wilderness just to kill us!?! We might as well die right here and now!”
And God says, “You know, you’re right. You are not ready to enter the land. You’ll get your wish to die in the wilderness. When the next generation grows up, they’ll have the opportunity to enter the land flowing with milk and honey.”
WHEN GRASSHOPPERS BECOME LOCUSTS
Why do the people become afraid as soon as they hear “we looked to ourselves like grasshoppers”? Because they are thinking only of how small the grasshopper’s body is. They’ve forgotten about the grasshopper’s extraordinary jump, and the glimpses it gets of heaven every time it jumps.
And they’ve forgotten one more important thing about grasshoppers. They’ve forgotten about grasshopper transformation. When a big group of grasshoppers get together, their bodies and their minds change. They become migratory locusts.
For years, modern biologists tried to identify the baby form of a migratory locust. But they couldn’t find any babies – until entomologist Boris Uvarov figured it out in the early 20th century. When desert drought gets extreme, and only a few tiny patches of moist grass can be found, grasshoppers congregate there. When the area gets so crowded that the grasshoppers can’t move without rubbing up against one another, their brain chemistry literally changes. Their serotonin levels rise. Their bodies harden. They eat more. Mate more. Develop a group mind. And they fly off together, a billion strong, in search of food. Once they’ve swarmed, nothing can stand in their way. Your field becomes their lunch. Their dinner. And their breakfast.
BIBLICAL LOCUSTS ARE MISSION SPECIALISTS
In Hebrew Bible, locust swarms are God’s armies. Their deployment is never random. Locusts are mission specialists. Sometimes people forget that a creative, energetic, and wise God dwells above the chug, the circle of the earth. That’s when the locusts, the community of chagavim, grasshoppers, show up.
They visit Pharaoh in the Exodus story. Pharaoh is not a fan of inclusive community. He feels terribly threatened by immigrants. Especially the numerous Israelites. So he oppresses them, enslaves them, kills them. God sends a message, “Let my people go.” Pharaoh ignores God and ignores God’s message. So God sends a giant community, a swarm of locusts, to strip Pharaoh’s fields. Pharaoh doesn’t get it, but his advisors do. They say, “Let the people go, so they can worship their God!”
LOCUSTS: A POWERFUL COMMUNITY
Locusts visit the Israelites in the time of the prophet Joel. Years of abundant harvest have destroyed Joel’s community. Agribusiness has created huge divisions between exploitive landowners and desperate day laborers. Rich and poor alike have forgotten that their number one religious responsibility is to look out for the welfare of others. So, God sends a giant community, a swarm of locusts, to remind them. When the locusts consume the fields, the prophet Joel sees the power of their community. And he calls his people into community to start over together (Joel 1-4).
And now you see, that Isaiah’s little reference to the grasshopper is not little at all. Isaiah hints at the locusts. He hints at Pharaoh, at Joel, at the power of inclusive community. After mentioning the grasshopper, Isaiah continues. “God brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, when God blows upon them, and they wither. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? The One who brings out their host and counts them, calling them all by name. Because God is great in strength, mighty in power, not one fails to show up.” (Isaiah 40:23-26)
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ISAIAH’S GRASSHOPPERS?
Isaiah just about says that we are the grasshoppers. We’re tiny, in the grand scheme of creation. Sometimes we get lost in our solitary concerns. But when times get tough, we glimpse a different spiritual possibility. We gather into community to support one another. In community, we become strong, we find a political voice, and we inspire other communities.
Isaiah speaks to the community of Judeans returning from exile in 530 BCE. Today, our communities include synagogues, mosques, churches and temples. They can include networks of spiritual groups across traditions. When our connections are strong, no one can divide us for political gain.
Send him send him send me –
What did we know
that another ten did not?
Was it safe?
I don’t know.
The other ten were certain
There are giants in the Land –
Scared the hell out of us.
One took a side trip
prayed on the graves of his ancestors
and from that drew strength to be optimistic –
Now we are optimists, he said.
What’s an optimist? I asked.
One who fails with enthusiasm –
I told my children this
and instructed them to tell their children
etcetera etcetera –
far into the future
until there came a generation
that spoke only dark words.
Send Somebody, part 2
In the generation of dark words
we started over –
it was not unexpected
but we didn’t prepare enough to avoid it entirely.
A lady stuck her head outside the second floor window –
What’re you boys looking for? The Land?
It’s yours, the hearts of all the people have melted.
Have you seen the blue?
A thread of blue
to look and remember
the blue comes up once every seventy years –
until recently.
Nowadays I carry it around in my bag.
A minority story saves us
a thread of blue reminds us now and again
of the essential:
There were twelve
ten were full of it
one of them laid flat out on the graves of the ancestors
got strong there
brought another one in –
From the future we prefer
the minority report
because
Question: In regards to the Shelakh-Lekha parsha, it opens with, “The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people; send one man from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among them.’ So Moses, by the LORD’s command, sent them out from the wilderness of Paran, all the men being leaders of the Israelites. And these were their names…” (Be-Midbar, 13:1-4). It then goes directly into the names and the tribal relevance, the list of which is part of the beginning of this parsha. I intuit there is information here with how we may relate to this on another level, perhaps even with how we may navigate through the sefirot with this list. It appears that these names and the related tribes are symbols and keys, but what are they symbols of, if that is even the case? How do we relate to this teaching that is coming through here as hasidim? Please clarify.
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: This is a good question.
One thing I would want to say as an important principle is there are a lot of sources for decoding but, one thing I would say as a general principle is there is a way in which the microcosm and the macrocosm are related. And so, a lot of the things that we get in Tanakh and in the Torah are the map of the macrocosm and the kind of information that we need to get is how that map applies to each person as a microcosm. The land of Israel is a kind of model for understanding the disparate parts of both the macrocosm and the microcosm. So, one of the things that we have to do is first of all take a look at the map and see where each tribe is located.
Question: How do you mean? Which map are we looking at?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: The map of how the land of Israel was physically divided. That’s the macrocosm. And so the principle is first you have to have a map, a model of the totality and, even beyond that, there is more than one level because the land of Israel itself represents the model of conscious energy that is working to accomplish the Ge’ulah, the redemption, which is ultimately a macrocosmic redemption, meaning that its interest is in the entire world although it is expressed kiveyachol, locally. I’m reminded of Reb Zalman who loves to say, “Act locally and think globally,” and in a way that is what kind of map this is: locally this is sort of where you work in these places and there is a different energy in each part of the land of Israel that’s apportioned to a particular tribe.
So let’s say there are three levels, the first of which is the macro-macrocosm, for which, there are actually more levels than this. We’re just looking at three as a way of simplifying the example. For example, someone like Gurdjieff tried to map out these levels with the various octaves and different planets. The point being these maps and models can be made to be universal and global, galactic even; these models can go out and out and out, but the main focus for us is Gaia, is the Earth.
Question: So the micro-macrocosm would be the first level, so to speak? This being the physical land of Israel and then the macrocosm of the land of Israel is Gaia, our manifest world…?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: Right. And there’s a macro even for that map of the land of Israel, to be even more specific. The land of Israel can be a micro in relation to an even bigger macro and all of these levels of micro and macro are analogous to a particular relationship to a related macro and micro sphere, which can be extended out infinitely
Question: So these maps of micro in relation to a macro is reflective of the way the Etz Chayim works? We’re talking about a model quite similar to the Etz Chayim?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: That’s right. The thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that the maps are just like a yardstick: the yardstick gives you markings that are dynamic and relative that is a usable range, but we can’t measure the whole macro-world with a yardstick. But, you can move the yardstick, for example, when you get to the end of what appears measurable, you can bump up or adjust the yardstick to measure further out, so to speak. But if you have a yardstick, you then have a way to measure what appears from one’s distinct perspective top and bottom, the left and the right, and all the six directions the Sefer Yetzirah talk about. But people often think that the yardstick is the totality whereas in actuality it’s only a movable and relative means to measure where one is in the various worlds as we do not know what the limits are.
Question: The yardstick, then, implies that we’re measuring something we recognize and, the fact of the matter is that this yardstick grows, so to speak, as we grow and further explore the dimensions the Sefer Yetzirah teaches about, all the while further increasing the size of our map?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: Yes, that’s right. This process extends and can expand infinitely.
Question: And so this relates to our ancestral tribes…
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: …because they are part of the map. Each tribe is given a spot, a particular domain within the land of Israel. So, to be able to decode the information, the first thing you need to do is get a map of the land of Israel, of where the tribes are within the land of Israel. You can get such a map, for example, in Aryeh Kaplan’s Chumash translation, “The Living Torah.” Then you can clearly see where each tribe is located and everything has meaning in terms of the model. So once you have the clarity of the map, then you can transfer the information from the macro of the land of Israel to the micro of the individual human being.
Let’s say that as an individual human being, you are an analogue of the land of Israel if you are engaged in the Jewish tradition. By engaging the tradition you are in effect saying you’re using this particular map and this model in order to understand yourself in the universe. So first you have to see where it is in the land of Israel to understand what part of your person, what part of your body, and what part of your neshamah is governed by which particular tribe. This is called K’lal Yisrael, being a complete Israel, Israel in totality and some of the secrets in the decoding. If we’re going to look into the decoding, we can find it in the blessings that Yaakov, that Jacob gives to each of the tribes. Before his death he calls all of the tribes in and each one receives a specific blessing. There’s the information relevant to what the function is of how each one is different from another and what their function is and so forth.
The Nesi’im is one of the terms used…there is the Nasi, which is usually translated, “the prince,” or “chieftain” or something like that, but what it really means is something like what we saw in the parsha from two weeks ago, which is parshat Naso’, it means “lifting up.” What is the active agent that lifts up the function of each tribe? Then, to understand that you have to go to the specific names, for example, the Nesi’im of this particular tribe is so and so and so and so. And generally, because of the letters in Hebrew all represent specific building blocks or types of energy, according to the Sefer Yetzirah, there is an encoded message in the very name, for example, of each of these tribes. Further, for example in Naso’ last week, a lot of the parsha talks about the Gershuney, the sub-tribe whose name comes from Gershon, which is an aspect of the Levites. The name Gershon has within it the root Gimel-Reish-Shen, which means Geyrush, “driven out,” or “separated.” So this is a particular family in the macro of the people of Israel. To complete this example of a specific name, this name represents that element within us which has a tendency to fall out and which has to be lifted up. So in the torah of Naso’, one aspect is that it’s about raising up the name of Gershon, this being the element which gets separated. What is the element that gets separated? It is the heart, it’s what comes in the middle as when we generally get stuck, very often we’re in binary form.
Binary form for us means we’re somewhat split between a mind and a body and we have trouble keeping the two integrated together and this is really what dualism is: when we function as a conscious mind separate from a body, when the body appears to be doing one thing and the mind is somewhere else. But then there is the piece that comes between.
The Torah is basically dialectical and the dialectical principle is basically in threes, it’s in triads. There’s a version, for example, of this that also appears in Gurdjieff’s work. He talks very specifically about triads. Gurdjieff didn’t get this out of the blue! The Torah is really based on triads; there’s a whole midrash that says, ‘the three-part Torah (Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim) was given to the three-part people (Kohen, Levi, Yisrael) by the Third Born (Moshe) on the third day of the third month,’ to get across to us that we need triads. Dyads are good but if we don’t have the piece in the middle then they pull each other apart. The middle is where the Gershuneys function; the part that has to be lifted up is the heart that connects the head—that integrates the head—with the body.
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Question: In looking deeper into this parsha, can we apply the concept of triads and the reminder to go back and explore the macrocosm of Israel? And as we explore the macrocosm and then are led to the microcosm that is us as individuals, but also globally…what is the triad that is being formed here? How do we increasingly stay connected with our tribes of Israel as taught in the Torah, both as individuals and communities?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: As you said, the tribe is very important here because, even though the yardstick could be extended infinitely, for us there are basically three main levels that we need to be cognizant of, which is our own individual self as the micro-microcosm. But we, as the micro-microcosm, in order to have power, in order to have meaning, we have to have the macrocosm that gives the micro its relative map and it is this map that gives meaning. The map that is giving us meaning is K’lal Yisrael. So we’re participating both as an analogue of the land of Israel and its divisions and also as an analogue to the tribes of Israel, which is like body and neshamah. But in order for this practice to have power, then we have to see that our map is itself a micro and its power comes from and is vested in its analogue, which is something much greater. And this is why it’s important for us to keep, stay with, and use our tradition, to relate to it and to draw power from it but also to draw the power from beyond our macro, because power is ultimately infinite, but practically speaking it gets exhausted if it’s not renewed. So every macro is a micro in relation to something else and we need a macro for our macro and that’s the triad for us. So it becomes the mediating point between something that is bigger and higher than it is and by doing so it can pass on to us, through its unique model, the energies that will be conducive to transformation on our personal, micro-level.
What I learn from Reb Sholom’s comment (above) is a reminder of how much our spiritual practice as Jews is about engaging in the day-to-day material world around us.
The land of Yisrael — literally “wrestling with God” — is a metaphor for the whole world, this world of stuff in which we find ourselves. As human beings, we are here on two levels. The first is to “plough, plant, sow and reap.” The second is, while we’re doing all this, to draw down the light from above and lift up the sparks from below. What an awesome mission! May be blessed to strengthen each other along the way.
Parshat Shelach
Torah Reading for Week of May 30 – June 5, 2010
“The Challenge of the Spies”
by Tamar Frankiel, PhD
AJR, CA Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Comparative Religion
This parsha opens with the story of the sin of the spies, which led to forty years of wandering in the wilderness. This event carries echoes of the worst previous sin, that of the golden calf a year before. In each, G-d threatened to destroy the Jewish people; in each, resolution came from Moshe’s recitation of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, the only two times that recitation occurs in the Torah. In addition, the “murmurings” against Moshe in last week’s parsha remind us of the times a year before that the people had also complained for lack of food and water.
With these parallels between the two times of complaining, the two great sins, and their resolution, the Torah seems to invite comparison and contrast. What can we learn from this?
The apparent failure of Moshe to return from the mountaintop led to the crisis of the calf. In a state of panic that turned into mania, the people created a substitute that they could worship. At the sin of the spies, leadership was again the issue in a different way: ten of the spies questioned and rebelled against him.
As Nechama Liebowitz points out, those spies gave three different reports. To Moshe they said, “We came into the Land . . . it does flow with milk and honey; nevertheless the people are fierce. . . and the cities strongly fortified.” When Caleb urged preparation for immediate conquest, they told him, “We are not able to go against the people; they are stronger than we.” Then, when they spoke to the rest of Bnei Yisrael, they said, “The land . . . eats up its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of great size.” The three different stories reveal the spies’ own internal conflict. They report to Moshe with reasonable accuracy. To their colleague, they challenge his assessment. To the people, they exaggerate in order to turn everyone against the project, and against Moshe. After the murmurings and complaints of the previous parsha, this was not a difficult job.
With the golden calf incident, the people just had to sit and wait; but like anxious children, they could not tolerate the anxiety. At the time of the spies, they had been confronted with adult responsibility. G-d was asking them to get moving – go into the world, take responsibility for their mission, and defeat all obstacles. For this, the people were far less ready than Moshe thought. G-d too was disappointed.
Yet this is human nature. Most of us know that feeling – the moment when we are called to do what we said we would do, and we suddenly fear we’re not ready. Our stomach clenches, our knees shake, we feel a chill. Sometimes we overcome our doubt and march ahead. At other times, we back off, look for an escape, make excuses, or find someone to blame for setting an impossible task.
How do we cope with fear and anxiety, the sense of falling apart in the face of enormous challenges? The end of the parsha contains an answer symbolically, in the mitzvah of tzitzit, which we also recite daily as the third paragraph of the Shema. The tzitzit are four strands, folded and tied in a very specific way. If you have ever tied tzitzit, you know it takes patience and attention, but the strands then form a very strong bond. The tzitzit themselves proclaim: when you feel your life is disintegrating under the challenges you face, you can tie it back together. The mitzvah is to look, to see into reality rather than feed off our fears; to remember, calling to mind all the service we do for G-d; and to be mindful also of our ultimate purpose, to be holy to your G-d.
This essay is in honor of the bar mitzvah parsha of our son Yaakov Asher, born 21 Sivan.
The Nephilim, these Goliaths who inhabit the Promised Land are already mentioned back in Genesis 6:4. There we learn that in those primordial times “the Nephilim were then on earth.” This account is so long ago, at the beginning of Genesis, because it is also deep within the childhood memory of every human being. Now there was a time when real giants prowled the land and we felt like grasshoppers. It is an indelible, if repressed, unonconscious memory in each of us. Contrary to the intended effect of nursery pastel colors and soft lullabies, this was frequently not a time of abiding personal security. Who could relax with giants everywhere?
Taking possession of the Land of Canaan may therefore also be a metaphor for returning to the scene of one’s childhood–now prepared to stand one’s own against its inhabitants, to conquer it for oneself. It is going back to when you were a child among huge people. If you were lucky, they were kind and loving, but even if they were, the thought must have crossed every child’s mind: If those guys ever get mad at me, I’m toast. So, to be able to stand toe-to-toe with them, now that you’re grown up yourself, must surely be one of the great joys of coming of age.
Menahem Mendl Morgenstern of Kotzk says that it’s all right to say you feel like a grasshopper in your own eyes– that means you’re alert–but when you start guessing what you look like to someone else, you’ve given them permission to define you, so you’re still a child. For this reason, Caleb, who refused to let anyone else define him, is a man and, along with Joshua, was one of the only two men of the wilderness generation to live to enter the Promised Land. But that’s another story.
It is a land that consumes its inhabitants (13:32)
What was the reason that the Spies, who were leaders of Israel and men of lofty stature, did not want to enter the Land?
The explanation of the matter is as follows:
A great majority of the physical mitzvot can be implemented only in the Land of Israel, especially the agricultural laws and the laws of the offerings brought to the Holy Temple… The Spies, who were on a most lofty spiritual level, did not wish to lower themselves to the level of physical action, preferring to remain in the desert, where they received all their needs from above, and related to G-d by means of the loftier levels of thought and speech (i.e., study of Torah and prayer). They desired to draw down all the Divine emanations into the “Land of Israel” that exists in the realm of Malchut, the world of Divine speech, where there also is a “Jerusalem” and a “Holy Temple.” Regarding the physical Land of Israel, they said: “It is a land that consumes its inhabitants”–if the Divine light were to be drawn down into the physical world, our entire existence would be nullified.
But Joshua and Caleb said, “The Land is very, very good.” It is specifically in the Land of Israel down below, and specifically by means of the mitzvot implemented by physical action, that the truly infinite light of G-d is drawn down–a light that includes both the spiritual and the material, which is why it is “very, very” good.
(Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi)
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And they found a man gathering sticks (15:32)
The gatherer was Tzelaphchad (whose daughters petitioned Moses to receive his share in the Land–cf. Numbers 27)… this is Rabbi Akiva’s view. Said Rabbi Judah ben Beteira to him: “Akiva! In either case you will be called to task. If you are right, the Torah shielded him, while you reveal him! And if not, you cast a stigma upon a righteous man.”
(Talmud, Shabbat 96b)
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And it shall be to you as fringes; and you shall see it (15:39)
Said Rabbi Meir: it does not say, “and you shall see them,” but “and you shall see Him” (the Hebrew Otto, also translates as “him”). This teaches that every one who fulfills the mitzvah of tzitzit, it is as if he has greeted the face of the Divine Presence. For the blue thread resembles the sea, the sea resembles grasses, grasses resemble the sky, and the sky resembles the Divine throne.
Every evening and morning, we say the Shema, Judaism’s supreme declaration of monotheistic faith. In the first passage, we accept upon ourselves the yoke of God’s sovereignty. And in the second, we accept God’s commandments.
Six Themes
Interestingly, the Sages added a third paragraph to the Shema — the passage commanding us to wear tzitzit (tassels) on the corners of our garments (Num. 15:37-41). Why did they decide to add this particular paragraph, out of the entire Torah, to the central prayer of Judaism?
The Talmud (Berachot 13) explains that the passage of tzitzit contains not one, but six major themes:
•The mitzvah of wearing tzitzit on our garments;
•The Exodus (“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt”);
•Accepting the mitzvot (“You will thus remember and keep all of My commandments”);
•Resisting heresy (“You will not stray after your hearts”);
•Refraining from immoral and sinful thoughts (“and after your eyes”);
•Eschewing idolatry (“which have led you astray”).
Is there a common motif to these six themes? And secondly, while most are indeed fundamental concepts of Judaism, what is so special about the mitzvah of tzitzit, more than the other 612 commandments?
Spiritual Focus
This mitzvah in fact does contain a fundamental message. It touches on the basic issues of life: how do we realize our spiritual potential? How can we truly fulfill ourselves as human beings?
As Maimonides wryly noted, the philosophers composed numerous volumes and entire libraries trying to answer these questions. Despite their efforts, they failed to exhaust the topic. The Talmudic sages, on the other hand, succeeded in encompassing the issue by revealing its essence in one pithy statement: “Let all your deeds be for the sake of Heaven” (Avot 2:12).
Human perfection is attained by establishing a worthwhile spiritual goal for all of our efforts and activities in life. Once we have set our spiritual focus, we need to direct all of our aspirations, wants and actions according to that objective. Then we will be complete in all aspects and levels of our existence.
This is the message of tzitzit. The sky-blue techelet thread reminds us of the heavens and the Throne of Glory. The soul’s external expressions — character traits, emotions and actions — are like a garment worn on the outside, over the body. We need to connect all of these outer manifestations to our inner spiritual goal, our tachlit, in the same way that we tie our outer clothes with the special thread of techelet.
The Exodus from Egyptian bondage expands on this theme. We are no longer slaves, subjected to physical and moral repression. A slave cannot set goals for his life and actions — they are not under his control. God liberated us from slavery, giving us the freedom to elevate ourselves and to aspire towards our spiritual calling.
The acceptance of practical mitzvot continues the same message. All of our detailed actions should connect with our overall objective. Thus, we attain completion in all aspects of our existence: our intellect, emotions and conduct.
Avoiding the Pitfalls
The first three themes in the passage of tzitzit teach us how to fulfill the maxim, “All of your deeds should be for the sake of heaven.” The second three themes deal with three interrelated obstacles to this guideline.
The first pitfall is heresy. The fear of all-inclusive commitment, the desire to avoid moral responsibilities, can lead to denial of God or His Oneness. The path of heresy means abandoning elevated goals and rejecting ethical aspirations. Without a comprehensive objective and direction, the soul naturally seeks some other occupation. Lacking an overriding goal, the soul is tossed and flung like a stick in the sea, pulled by any internal or external lure. This leads to the second pitfall: attraction to base and corrupt actions.
In the end, however, a self-indulgent lifestyle leaves the soul with feelings of horrible emptiness. The soul recognizes that a life without meaning is a contradiction to its very essence. But since it has already lost its rational beacon by rejecting the light of truth, the soul seeks purpose and meaning in foreign fields. It tries to find spiritual sustenance in broken cisterns, the foundations of idolatry.
Thus, we see that this short passage includes the fundamental themes of Judaism. It describes that which gives our lives meaning and direction, and the major obstacles that can lead the soul astray. It is a fitting conclusion to our acceptance of God’s kingship in the Shema prayer.
This Torah portion tells the story of the spies that are sent forth to survey the Land of Canaan in preparation for its conquest. They return with a mixed message. The Land is superb but too well-fortified to be conquered. Moses is bitterly disappointed with their fearful report and so decides that the people must wander another 40 years (until the generation of slavery has died out) before they can enter the Land.
Shelach Lekha concludes with the instruction to wear fringes of blue as reminders of holiness.
THE BLESSING
GOD SAYS TO MOSES: “Shelach Lekha” (send for yourself) spies to scout out the Land. The spies sent by Moses return both enraptured by the land and terrified at the prospect of making their permanent home in that elevated state of consciousness.
So too, this portion blesses us with a mission: Spy out the Land of our Inheritance, taste the milk and honey that flows from the Land of Promise, and let that taste guide us on your journey. The blessing we receive is a glimpse. What we do with that glimpse becomes the challenge.
Over a lifetime we are given glimpses, flashes, and hints that open our awareness to the Reality of paradise and unity that underlies this world of constant flux. We are graced with a timeless moment in which the infinite is revealed as the source of our finite world. We are sent to that land of expanded consciousness through imagination, practice and grace. We return from this taste of enlightenment either empowered to receive and integrate the supreme blessing into our lives, or completely terrorized by the incomprehensible immensity of what we feel is beyond our grasp.
“The land eats up its inhabitants,” report the spies. And they are correct. The small ego-driven separate self cannot survive in the pure air of that land. The “I” will be dissolved, called beyond itself, merging with the beauty and the mystery of that place.
The spies return from their mission divided.
AFTER A PEAK EXPERIENCE, we return to our life shaken. Whatever negativity is in us, born of grief or conditioning, is still there. Yet some part of us remembers that immensity, that taste of the infinite… or tries to remember.
That is our work: to remember what we have glimpsed and to plant the glimpse like a seed in the soil of our lives.
Shelach Lekha blesses us with both the mitzvah of remembering and a technology for fulfilling that mitzvah. We are instructed to put “tzitzit” (fringes) on the corners of our garments and to place at each corner a thread of the purest blue. Looking upon that color we will be reminded of the Sea, and the Sea will remind us of the Heavens, and the Heavens will remind us of the Throne of Glory that we glimpsed in a moment of clarity.1
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE
THE BLESSING WE RECEIVE IS A GLIMPSE. What we do with that glimpse becomes the challenge.
When I was in my twenties, I read Be Here Now by Ram Dass and I thought, “How simple! And how wonderful! That is how I will live my life.”
And then I had a dream. The dream gave me a glimpse into the state of consciousness that I was asking for – one of complete openness and presence. The dream showed me just a few minutes of that state. I saw the brilliance of every color, the symphony in every sound; each breath was breathed as a miracle; each moment held a lifetime of experience. I woke up totally overwhelmed… and sobered.
I knew for sure that I was not ready to enter the Land. I understood how naïve I had been to think I could attain that state without preparation. And I began to get a sense of the work that would have to be done in the wilderness during the next 40 years. I would need to build the strength of the container that might receive my inheritance: the fullness, the richness, the beauty, the mystery of each moment.
WE GLIMPSE THE PROMISED LAND, the place that is flowing with milk and honey, and then must return to the wilderness of our lives. This circuitous journey sets up a tension within us. We know the taste of perfection and yet the urge to reach for it calls us to battle again and again. We know that beneath the mask of suffering, there is grace. We have seen the light that is imprisoned within the shell of the world, the shell whose stubborn opacity shields us from the power of the truth within. The memory of our glimpse fuels our journey and keeps us from succumbing to the illusion and tyranny of this-is-all-there-is physical reality. That memory guides us through the wilderness.
SHELACH LEKHA GIVES ME THIS SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE: to remember what I have glimpsed and to plant the glimpse, like a seed, in the soil of my life. And Shelach Lekha warns me that if I deny that glimpse – if I doubt- its validity – then I will be denied entrance to the Land of Promise – the state of consciousness that witnesses Divine Presence filling the whole world. To plant the seed of that glimpse requires that I acknowledge and celebrate it, and that I nurture its growth with my loving attention.
I’m standing naked in a long straight line with 200 other naked young men. We’re at the
Armed Forces Examining and Induction Station in Oakland. There’s an orange stripe on
the gunmetal gray floor, and we’re all facing the stripe, with the other guys to our right
and our left. Following orders, we each have our clothes folded in a bundle and placed on
the floor to the left of where we’re standing….
Actually I’m not completely naked. I’m wearing my kippah on my head, and my tzitzit,
which is the fringed undergarment worn by religious Jewish men. To get an idea of what
it looks like, picture a piece of thin white cloth with a silk texture, about six feet long and
two feet wide, with a slit in the middle for the head to go through. It has little stripes
embroidered along its length. At each corner there is a set of white strings that are tied in
a series of complex knots, which leave the ends of the strings to hang in fringes. There
are 613 knots in the tzitzit, which stand for the 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the
Torah.
Here’s how Shlomo taught us about tzitzit. The word mitzvah is much deeper than
commandment. The Hebrew root is tzav, which means to tie, to connect. A mitzvah is
action in this world, right action that connects us to our deepest truth, and to God.
Shlomo said, why are the knots of the tzitzit tied to the corners? What is it about corners?
The Torah says, don’t be led by the impulses, the lusts and fears of your heart and your
eyes, which will get you lost; when you see the tzitzit, remember all My mitzvot and do
them. When we say those words in the morning prayers, we hold onto the tzitzit. So
Shlomo says, when do we most need something to hold onto? It’s when we’re backed
into a corner. It’s when I’m trapped and have no where to go; when I can’t find a way
out. That’s when I need to let go of my own eyes and heart and mind, and hold onto
God’s.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention, besides the tzitzit, I have my guitar strapped over
my shoulder, and I’m holding a stack of antiwar pamphlets from the American Friends
Service Committee.
From Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Beyond the Fringe
SHELACH LECHA
Our Torah portion ends with one of the great commands of Judaism – tzitzit, the fringes worn on the corners of our garments as a perennial reminder of our identity as Jews and our obligation to keep the Torah’s commands:
The Lord said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites; tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout all the generations. To the fringe, on each corner, they should attach a blue cord. And this shall be your fringe: seeing it, you shall remember all the Lord’s commands and keep them. You will not then go astray, following the lusts of your heart or of your eyes. This is to remind you to keep all My commands, to remain holy to your God.”
Num. 15:37-40
So central is this command, that it became the third paragraph of the Shema, the supreme declaration of Jewish faith. I once heard the following commentary from my teacher, Rabbi Dr Nachum Rabinovitch.
He began by pointing out some of the strange features of the command. On the one hand, the Sages said that the command of tzitzit is equal to all the other commands together, as it is said: “Look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them.” It is thus of fundamental significance.
On the other hand, it is not absolutely obligatory. It is possible to avoid the command of fringes altogether by never wearing a garment of four or more corners. Maimonides rules: “Even though one is not obligated to acquire a [four-cornered] robe and wrap oneself in it in order to [fulfil the command of] tzitzit, it is not fitting for a pious individual to exempt himself from this command” (Laws of Tzitzit, 3:11). It is important and praiseworthy but not categorical. It is conditional: if you have such a garment, then you must put fringes on it. Why so? Surely it should be obligatory, in the way that tefillin (phylacteries) are.
There is another unusual phenomenon. In the course of time, the custom has evolved to fulfil the command in two quite different ways: the first, in the form of a tallit (robe, shawl) which is worn over our other clothes, specifically while we pray; the second in the form of an undergarment, worn beneath our outer clothing throughout the day.
Not only do we keep the one command in two different ways. We also make different blessings over the two forms. Over the tallit, we say, “who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to wrap ourselves in a fringed garment.” Over the undergarment, we say, “who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the precept of the fringed garment.” Why is one command split into two in this way?
Rabbi Rabinovitch gave this answer: there are two kinds of clothing. There are the clothes we wear to project an image. A king, a judge, and a soldier all wear clothing that conceals the individual and instead proclaims a role, an office, a rank. As such, clothes, especially uniforms, can be misleading. A king dressed as a beggar will not (or would not, before television) be recognised as royalty. A beggar dressed as a king may find himself honoured. A policeman dressed as a policeman carries with him a certain authority, an aura of power, even though he may feel nervous and insecure. Clothes disguise. They are like a mask, hiding the person beneath. Such are the clothes we wear in public when we want to create a certain impression.
But there are other clothes we wear when we are alone, that may convey more powerfully than anything else the kind of person we really are: the artist in his studio, the writer at his desk, the gardener tending the roses. They do not dress to create an impression. To the contrary: they dress as they do because of what they are, not because of what they wish to seem.
The two kinds of tzitzit represent these different forms of dress. When we engage in prayer, we sense in our heart how unworthy we may be of the high demands God has made of us. We feel the need to come before God as something more than just ourselves. We cover ourselves in the robe, the tallit, the great symbol of the Jewish people at prayer. We conceal our individuality – in the language of the blessing over the tallit, we “wrap ourselves in a fringed garment.” It is as if we were saying to God: I may only be a beggar, but I am wearing a royal robe, the robe of your people Israel who prayed to You throughout the centuries, to whom You showed a special love and took as Your own. The tallit hides the person we are and represents the person we would like to be, because in prayer we ask God to judge us not for what we are, but for what we wish to be.
The deeper symbolism of tzitzit, however, is that it represents the commandments as a whole (“look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord”) – and these become part of what and who we are only when we accept them without coercion, of our own free will. That is why the command of tzitzit is not categorical. We do not have to keep it. We are not obligated to buy a four-cornered garment. When we do so, it is because we choose to do so. We obligate ourselves. That is why opting to wear tzitzit symbolises the free acceptance of all the duties of Jewish life.
This is the most inward, intimate, intensely personal aspect of faith, whereby in our innermost soul we dedicate ourselves to God and His commands. There is nothing public about this. It is not for outer show. It is who we are when we are alone, not trying to impress anyone, not wishing to seem what we are not. This is the command of tzitzit as undergarments, beneath, not on top of, our clothing. Over this we make a different blessing. We do not talk about “wrapping ourselves in a fringed garment” – because this form of fringes is not for outward show. We are not trying to hide ourselves beneath a uniform. Instead, we are expressing our innermost commitment to God’s word and call to us. Over this we say the blessing, “who has commanded us concerning the precept of tzitzit” because what matters is not the mask but the reality, not how we wish to appear, but what we really are.
In this striking way tzitzit represent the dual nature of Judaism. On the one hand it is a way of life that is public, communal, shared with others across the world and through the ages. We keep Shabbat, celebrate the festivals, observe the dietary laws and the laws of family purity in a way that has hardly varied for many centuries. That is the public face of Judaism – the tallit we wear, the cloak woven out of the 613 threads, each one a command from God.
But there is also our inner life as people of faith. There are things we can say to God that we can say to no-one else. He knows our thoughts, hopes, fears, better than we know them ourselves. We speak to Him in the privacy of the soul, and He listens. That internal conversation – the opening of our heart to Him who brought us into existence in love – is not for public show. Like the fringed undergarment, it stays hidden. But it is no less real an aspect of Jewish spirituality. The two types of fringed garment represent the two dimensions of the life of faith – the outer persona and the inner person, the image we present to the world and the face we show only to God.
From Julie Emden
We begin the Hebrew month of Tammuz on Monday night, June 15. According to our mystical tradition, the area of healing associated with Tammuz is sight and seeing. This week, we read in the Torah portion Sh’lach about twelve men (anashim / אֲנָשִׁים) who are sent to “see” (Yaturu / יָתֻ֙רוּ֙) the land of Canaan.
שְׁלַח־לְךָ֣ אֲנָשִׁ֗ים וְיָתֻ֙רוּ֙ אֶת־אֶ֣רֶץ כְּנַ֔עַן
“Send men to tour the land of Canaan.”
(Numbers 13:2)
The Hebrew word used for this activity is lator / לָתוּר. It is often translated as “spy” or “scout,” but it can also mean “seek,” as in this verse that appears earlier in the Israelites’ journey:
וַיִּסְעוּ֙ מֵהַ֣ר יְהֹוָ֔ה דֶּ֖רֶךְ שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת יָמִ֑ים וַאֲר֨וֹן בְּרִית־יְהֹוָ֜ה נֹסֵ֣עַ לִפְנֵיהֶ֗ם דֶּ֚רֶךְ שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת יָמִ֔ים לָת֥וּר לָהֶ֖ם מְנוּחָֽה׃
“They marched from the mountain of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey a distance of three days. The Ark of the Covenant of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey traveled in front of them on that three days’ journey to seek out a resting place for them.”
(Numbers 10:33)
The scouts and the Ark of the Covenant are engaged in the same activity, described by this word in Torah. I understand ‘lator’ as holy seeing. In the case of the Ark, it is a seeing that illuminates the best path forward—in this instance, a place of rest. How amazing that rest itself is the goal.
In the case of the scouts, it is a seeing of the truth beneath the surface, of the divinity within the land. It is seeing not only with the eyes, but with the heart and soul, with our deepest embodied knowing.
As the story goes, all twelve scouts saw the same land in its outer form. Yet upon their return, ten advise against entering, while only Caleb and Joshua stand up and declare that it is “very, very good.” The repetition of the word me’od / מְאֹד hints at an aspect of holiness within this goodness.
“הָאָ֗רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֨ר עָבַ֤רְנוּ בָהּ֙ לָת֣וּר אֹתָ֔הּ טוֹבָ֥ה הָאָ֖רֶץ מְאֹ֥ד מְאֹֽד׃”
“The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land.”
(Numbers 14:7)
For Caleb and Joshua, their inner state determined their perception. Because of their faith and connection to God, they perceived holy goodness. Their seeing emanated from their inner being, and that is what they were seeking.
In fact, Caleb is described as having a “different spirit” (ruach acheret / רוּחַ אַחֶרֶת). Last week, my teacher and friend Diane Bloomfield shared a teaching from the Baal Shem Tov about Caleb’s name, כָּלֵב (Caf-Lamed-Bet). The name can be read as “like 32.” It begins with the Hebrew letter caf (כ), followed by lev (לב), the Hebrew word for “heart,” which has a numerical value of 32 in gematria (the practice of assigning numerical values to each letter in the Hebrew alphabet).
According to the Baal Shem Tov, Caleb was connected to the underlying wisdom of creation: the 32 mystical paths of wisdom described in the opening chapter of Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Creation, traditionally attributed to Abraham.
Just as Caleb saw into the inward holiness of the land, our embodied spiritual practices invite us to seek the truth beneath the surface of things. We listen inward and sense what is right for our bodies in any given moment. By looking and listening deeply, we discern when to move into a shape and how deeply to go. We sense the difference between an opening stretch that feels nourishing and one that pushes an edge not meant to be pushed.
As my teacher Barbara Voinar says, we must listen to our bodies, not demand from them. We learn to look inward into the landscape of our bodies as a source of deep knowing and holiness.
The month of Tammuz invites us to see with clarity and truth. Yet clear seeing is not always what we want to see. We must cultivate discernment and remember that what we perceive is often influenced by our inner state as much as by what is actually present.
On the same day, I can look at the “land” of my life—my home, my garden, my marriage, my work, my bank account—and see either what is lacking or what is “very, very good,” depending on my inner state. On that same day, I can look at my body’s limitations and soreness and perceive the holiness within—or not.
My level of seeing is related to what I seek and to my efforts to cultivate hakarat hatov, the practice of recognizing the good.
Directing my mind toward holiness and goodness is a choice, and it is an ongoing practice. As in the story of Caleb and Joshua, our ability to perceive goodness alongside difficulty is deeply influenced by faith and trust in a benevolent force within the universe, which for Caleb, is God.
Rav Avraham Isaac HaCohen Kook teaches that physical alignment is deeply connected to spiritual alignment (Orot HaKodesh). In our embodied spiritual practices, we seek alignment with Divinity, with what is holy and true.
Rashi notes that Caleb visited the graves of the ancestors in Hebron before entering the land. His faith and perception were strengthened through his connection to those who carried a deep knowing of the holy purpose of creation: that this world is a place filled with holy Divinity if we seek and see it.
The month of Tammuz ushers us into a season of both summer’s intensity and collective mourning. On the 17th of Tammuz, we commemorate the breaching of the walls of the Second Temple in 70 CE, beginning a period of three weeks of mourning leading to Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, when the first and second temples in Jerusalem were destroyed.
I can relate to the perspective of the ten fearful scouts. When my seeing is veiled by sorrow, grief, fear, or a lack of faith, I, too, struggle to perceive the goodness within my life. These final weeks of Sivan and the beginning of Tammuz bring multiple yahrzeits for beloved ones I have lost—my father, a best friend, and a cherished pet.
Yet the story of Caleb and Joshua inspires me. Their clear seeing was informed by passionate devotion and a willingness to look beneath the surface. Their faith enabled them to perceive a deeper truth.
As we approach Rosh Hodesh Tammuz, I send wishes for clear seeing through all our senses. May we perceive what is true, holy, and good, even when the circumstances of the world feel troubling and uncertain. May we see through the veils of what appears on the surface, so that with full-hearted devotion we may embody the holy vision our world so desperately needs – a vision through which the wisdom and holiness of creation can shine forth and lead the way.
From Rabbi Yael Levy
In this weeks’ Torah portion, shelach lecha,
we witness the power of fear.
Twelve scouts were sent
to explore the land the people were journeying toward
and bring back a report.
Ten returned and inumbrated
the difficulties they saw,
the obstacles they faced.
They declared that going forward was impossible,
there was too much danger, too much risk.
The people wept with fear
and began imagining the horrors that would befall them.
Two of the scouts offered a different perspective.
Yes, we can do this, they said.
We have everything we need to go forward and thrive.
But fear had already taken root
and the people responded to the encouragement with rage.
Then the Glory of the Infinite appeared to all the people
and even this, a vision of the Divine Presence,
was not able to break the stranglehold of fear.
The people’s fright had become more powerful
than the truths they were seeing with their own eyes.
These days, as we know,
we are being encouraged to feel afraid–
to feel afraid of our differences,
to feel afraid of our liberties,
to feel afraid of each other.
Threats are being conjured to divide us
and keep us small.
Fear is a great tool for those seeking dominance and control.
It shuts down our reasoning and constricts our hearts.
Fear is contagious and once let loose it strengthens itself.
How do we break the vise grip of fear?
How do we develop the capacity to acknowledge fear
and not let it shape and define us?
Tradition teaches:
Do mitzvot
Engage in actions that create and strengthen connection:
Give thanks. Listen well.
Offer help. Seek guidance.
Engage with ritual. Share your blessings.
Show up for joy.
Act with kindness and generosity.
Make choices that benefit the community.
These actions help shift our perspective
and see beyond the stories fear creates.
They expand our vision
and reveal sparks of goodness, possibility and hope.
For the sake of each other and all life,
let us engage in acts of connection
and deny fear the power to shape our perceptions
and determine our deeds.
May love and healing grow from our words and actions.
From Hadar
Rabbi Avital Hochstein
How to Stand in Minority
https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HochsteinParashatShelah5786.pdf
From JTS
SHELAH LEKHA
BY : RABBI RAYMOND SCHEINDLIN
When the spies returned to the Israelite camp in the wilderness of Paran after scouting out the Land of Canaan, they reported that the land did indeed flow with milk and honey but that it could not be conquered. It was full of warlike people—Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, Emorites, and Canaanites—men of enormous size and strength, giants descended from the sons of gods dwelling in fortified towns with walls that reached the sky. Even the land’s produce was intimidating, for it took two Israelite men holding a great pole on each end to carry out a single cluster of grapes that they had taken as a sample of the land’s bounty and as evidence of its supernatural scale. The spies were sincere in urging caution; they had been truly terrified by their experiences. When they were in Hebron, for example, they had hidden in a cave from giants. The cave was actually a pomegranate rind that a giant’s daughter had thrown away. But when the girl remembered her father’s admonition not to litter, she returned, picked up the pomegranate rind with the twelve spies inside it, and tossed it into her garden as easily as you pick up and throw an eggshell.
The spies told the Israelites all this and concluded their report by saying, “We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and in the eyes of the Canaanites as well!”
With such testimony, it was no wonder that the anodyne assurances of Joshua and Caleb did not outweigh the majority report, which concluded, “We cannot go up against this people, for they are stronger than we.” The Israelites lifted their voices and wept.
It is hard not to sympathize with those Israelites. They had now spent more than a year in a harsh desert, a place of serpents and scorpions, a thirsty place with no water, a place where they could not hope to survive without God’s constant intervention. They had come from a place where they had been enslaved. Now they learned from the spies that the land to which they were headed was one that consumes its own people and whose inhabitants could easily destroy them. In their distress, the familiar hardships of Egypt seemed better than the Promised Land or even the desert. In a mad moment, they considered returning to Egypt. But even they must have realized that the best they could expect there was to be again enslaved, after being punished for fleeing. No wonder they spent the night in lamentation.
In the morning light, admonished by Moses, despondent at learning their punishment—40 years of pointless wandering in the desert, never (in their lifetimes) to achieve the tranquility and security of living in a fertile land of their own—and stunned by the sudden death of the 10 who recommended against proceeding to the Land, the people had a change of heart and decided to invade after all. In their eagerness, they flouted Moses’s warning to remain in the camp and attacked—but Moses and the Ark of the Covenant stayed behind. It was too late to undo their failure of trust. God punished the leaderless mob of invaders by allowing the Amalekites and the Canaanites to decimate them.
The shocking thing about the episode is that it didn’t need to happen, for physically, the people of the desert generation were anything but weaklings. Tradition reports that as the 40 years went by, they aged and died one after the other, and their corpses lay baking in the desert for centuries. One time, an Arab traveler said to a rabbi, “Come with me, and I’ll show you the Desert Dead.” He got up and went with the Arab. Deep in the desert lay a whole generation of Israelites on their backs, huge petrified corpses—so huge that the Arab could ride on his camel under one corpse’s flexed knee with his lance raised. Not only were the Desert Dead huge, but they also enjoyed mysterious protection from the elements and from men. The 6th-century Hebrew poet Yannai confirmed the formidability of the spies, saying that the men were like lions and tigers, elite warriors bearing trenchant swords.
The Israelites of the desert generation might have been as intimidating to the Canaanites as the Canaanites were to them. Indeed, God rebuked them for so misjudging their own powers: “Perhaps you seemed to yourselves to be grasshoppers, but how could you know that you appeared as grasshoppers to the Canaanites? Maybe to them you were giants!”
Were they giants or grasshoppers?
Which are we?
In thinking about the condition of the Jewish people in his own time, the poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik revived the image of the gigantic Desert Dead in his great poem of that name (“מתי מדבר” in Hebrew). He depicted the endless, silent desert strewn with their enormous corpses lying as if petrified in the sun, impervious to time and its vicissitudes. One by one, the desert beasts—the eagle, king of the heavens; the serpent, king of the underworld; and the lion, king of the terrestrial realm—approach, attack, are mysteriously repelled, and wander off, while the Desert Dead lie inert, oblivious to any threat, even to any presence.
But once in a long while comes a moment when the desert rebels against its fate of eternal stasis and against the Creator who has doomed it to eternal desiccation. A violent storm blows up and throws the desert into chaos. Rocks and the dunes seem to rise up against the heavens, as if trying to throw off the chains that have bound them to eternal sameness. With the desert, the Desert Dead, too, are at last roused. They wake and sit up, their eyes flashing with their ancient martial vigor. Their hands reach for their swords, and their voices sound loud over the crashing tumult of the raging desert:
Mighty warriors we!
The last of the slaves,
The first of the free! . . .
We and heaven’s eagles have sipped freedom at its source!
Who is lord over us? . . .
In the face of heaven and all its spite,
Here we are, ready to storm, to conquer!
And if God has withdrawn from us,
If His Ark will not move from its place—
We will conquer without Him!
(Translation from Bialik’s Hebrew by Raymond Scheindlin)
The moment passes. The sun and the silence return, the desert goes quiet, and the Desert Dead are again recumbent, impassive, immutable. For a moment, they had glimpsed their own power—and for once, correctly assessed their own vigor and potential—but they have fallen back into their native passivity and once again have lost the power to affect anything, even themselves. The poem concludes:
The silence returns as before.
The desert stands barren.
Were they giants or grasshoppers? Which are we?
The imaginative elaborations of the story of the spies (from Numbers ch. 13 and 14) used in this piece can be found among the rabbinic traditions collected by Louis Ginzberg in Legends of the Jews (7 vols.; Philadelphia, 1909-46) 3:261-78; their sources are identified ibid. 6: 92-96. Yannai’s poem is found in Z. M. Rabinovitz, (מחזור פיוטי יניי 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1987) 2:48-49.
From Hadar
Rabbi Tali Adler
When The Story Changes
https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/AdlerParashatShelah5785.pdf
From Herb Levy
From Haftarah
No matter how excellent we are at what we do,
how hard-working we are,
how fallible, but committed to the work we are;
a time will come when we lay down that work.
We often wait too long
to teach someone how to carry it on.
Joshua had 40 years to understudy before headlining,
40 years to think about how to do the job,
40 years to plan the moment he began leading,
40 years to place the Ark at the head,
40 years to choose to share that moment with one person from each tribe,
as he led the People across the Jordan on dry land,
40 years to begin to fulfill the Promise as the People entered the Land.
From JTS
The Large Significance of the Littlest Letter
SHELAH LEKHA
BY : DR MALKA STRASBERG EDINGER
Could one tiny letter really be so important? At the beginning of this week’s parashah, as Moshe sends twelve scouts to tour the Land of Canaan, we are told that Moshe changed Joshua’s name from Hoshea to Yehoshua:
וַיִּקְרָא מֹשֶׁה לְהוֹשֵׁעַ בִּן־נוּן יְהוֹשֻׁעַ
Moshe called Hoshea the son of Nun ‘Yehoshua’” (Num. 13:16).
Midrash Rabbah (Sotah 34b and Rashi on this verse) tells us that this name change was in fact a prayer for Yehoshua to be saved from the counsel of the other scouts, as the verb “called” can also refer to prayer (cf. Jeremiah 29:12) and the name “Yehoshua” can mean “May YHWH save him.” In consonantal Hebrew, the change from Hoshea/הושע to Yehoshua/יהושע is achieved by the addition of the single letter yod, י. But the midrash teaches us that this was no ordinary י; God had been saving it for this moment in time. When God changed Avram and Sarai’s names to Avraham (via the addition of a medial ה) and Sarah (via the replacement of the final י with a ה), the letter י complained to God: “Because I am the smallest of all the letters, you have taken me out of the name of the righteous Sarah!” God appeased this י by telling it that its new location would be at the beginning of Yehoshua’s name. This special little י knew that despite its size it was fulfilling a holy purpose in the world by being a part of a righteous person’s name, and it didn’t want to settle for anything less (Bereishit Rabbah 47:1).
The י may be the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet but it is important. Beyond its place in the names of biblical righteous people, י stands in the most prominent place of the most prominent name of all: the beginning of God’s holy name, the Tetragrammaton, יקוק/YHWH. The י also played an important role in YHWH’s creation of the world. Isaiah 26:4 reads:
בִּטְחוּ בַיהֹוָה עֲדֵי־עַד כִּי בְּיָהּ יְהֹוָה צוּר עוֹלָמִים׃
Trust in YHWH forever, indeed, in Yah, YHWH, the Eternal Rock.[1]
Midrash Tehillim (114:1). reads the second half of this verse in an acontextual hermeneutic manner, as is the midrashic way: “for with “Y-H” (the letters yod/י and heh/ה) God formed the worlds.” That is, God used the two letters to create two worlds, this World and the World to Come. But which letter was used to create which World?! Genesis 2:4 reads: אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” The ה in the word בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם is written small in the Torah, serving as an invitation for rabbinic interpretation. Midrashically, the word can be read as if it were vocalized בְּ׳ה׳־בְּרָאָם (with the letter ה God created them). Thus, the heavens and earth, i.e., this World, were created with the letter ה, and the World to Come was created with the letter י. What a large feat for such a small letter!
Elsewhere, Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, teaches that just as the written letter י floats above the other letters on a line of text, the י represents the metaphysical—that which transcends the earthly physical world and its constraints of time, matter, and space. Thus, י is truly the letter of the metaphysical World to Come. The letter י is also the recipient of a few special written forms in a Torah scroll. The text of each Torah scroll is written precisely, with certain layout formats, certain words beginning each column of text, certain words written with seemingly superfluous or missing letters, and certain letters written in unusual forms, e.g., upside down, inverted, majuscule/enlarged, minuscule (such as the aforementioned ה in Genesis 2:4), and with dots placed above them.[2] One occurrence of the letter י with a special written form appears in this week’s parashah where an enlarged י is found in Moshe’s plea to God to muster God’s strength to forgive the nation for their rebellion:[3]
וְעַתָּה יִגְדַּל־נָא כֹּחַ אֲדֹנָי
Now may the power of the Lord be magnified (Num. 14:17).
This enlarged י is understood by biblical commentators in various ways. One explanation is that the י, which has a numerical value of ten, is a hint to the forefathers—and particularly Avraham, who underwent ten tests of faith—that in their merit God should forgive the nation (Paaneah Raza, Tur). R. Bahya explains that the י, which represents the divine name YHWH and, therefore, God’s attribute of Mercy, indicates Moshe’s plea for God’s attribute of Mercy to ascend and prevail over God’s attribute of Justice (represented by the divine name Elohim).[4] Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch suggests that the enlarged י in the word יִגְדַּל / “may the power be magnified,” indicates the magnitude of the strength God would need to forgive the people— a level greater than all the strength God had showed in all the miracles performed thus far, both in Egypt and throughout the wilderness.
The Jewish people share a kinship with the letter י. The י is the smallest letter and the Jewish people are the smallest nation, as acknowledged in Deuteronomy 7:7:
כִּי־אַתֶּם הַמְעַט מִכׇּל־הָעַמִּים
for you are the fewest of all peoples.
But despite our size, we can, like the letter י, strive both individually and collectively for holiness and not settle for anything less. We can be great and even limitless, and not let our size hold us back. We can strive for transcendence, and always channel faith, divine mercy, and willpower. Let us strive to learn these lessons from the י and live our lives in a manner resonant with this tiny but great letter. And as we do so, may the letter י, representing YHWH, protect us from negative influence and save us from harm, as it did Yehoshua many years ago.
[1] Shadal (R. Shmuel David Luzzatto, 17th century, Italy) explains the word יכִּ in this verse as a word conveying emphasis (i.e., “indeed”) rather than introducing a reason (i.e., “for, because”), as is prevalent in poetic passages.
[2] There are many different traditions regarding writing majuscule and minuscule letters in a sefer Torah; few of them are universal.
[3] This majuscule yod, רבתי י, though not universal, is attested in the commentaries of the Paaneach Raza (Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yehudah haLevi, 13th century, N. France), Rabbeinu Bahya (Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, 13-14th century, Spain), the Tur (Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher, 14th century, Germany/Spain), Minchat Shai (Rabbi Yedidyah Shlomo Norzi, 16-17th century, Italy), and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th century, Germany).
[4] Midrash Aggadah (Buber) and Rashi, Genesis 1:1, s.v. אלהים ברא.
From The Hebrew College
Joshua’s spies and the “zonah” in Jericho
Josh Jacobson
Haftarat Shelach Lecha (Joshua 2:1-24)
We often make assumptions about people based on first impressions or on accepted stereotypes. Sometimes, however, on deeper consideration new aspects may be revealed to us. That teenager with the nose ring and the huge tattoo could be a Rhodes scholar. That old man with the stutter might have some important things to say.
There are many Jewish women in the Hebrew Bible who are unambiguously presented as heroes — brave people who through their selfless actions became saviors. One immediately thinks of Esther and Deborah.
The Bible also presents a number of non-Jewish women who are heroic: Tamar the Udalamite, the Egyptian midwives Shifra and Pua, Pharaoh’s unnamed daughter, Ruth the Moabite, Yael the Kenite, and Rahav the Jerichoan.
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Shelach Lecha, centers around themes of scouts or spies sent ahead and the aftermath of their false report. The Haftarah tells Rahav’s story, which also begins with spies sent ahead. Joshua, the new leader of the Israelites, sends a pair of spies to see what it will take to capture the city of Jericho. So they set out, eventually lodging for the night at the home of a woman named Rahav. The king of Jericho finds out there are Israelite spies staying at Rahav’s place and demands that she hand them over. Here is where Rahav becomes a hero. Disobeying the orders of her king, she saves the Israelite spies and thus ensures the success of their mission. She professes allegiance not to her land and its gods, but to the God of Israel. What happens next is told in story and song: The Israelite army under Joshua’s command surrounds the city of Jericho, blowing on horns. The walls of the city collapse and the city is destroyed. Only Rahav and her family are spared as a reward for her heroism.
In the text, Rahav is called a zonah, which typically is translated as prostitute. In the Bible as in contemporary society, prostitutes tend to be regarded with harsh judgment and relegated to the margins. Biblical law stipulated that a zonah, if found guilty, should be stoned to death or burnt alive! (Leviticus 21:9) Yet Rahav is portrayed as a good person, despite her profession. Rahav is brave, decisive, and quick to give orders. She acknowledges the existence of the Israelite God, and defies her own king in order to help the Israelites.
Could a zonah be a hero?
Indeed, in post biblical literature, Rahav is portrayed as a beautiful person, regardless of her status as a zonah. The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 15a) links Rahav with three unquestionably virtuous and heroic women: “Our rabbis taught: There were four women of extraordinary beauty in the world: Sarah, Rahav, Avigail, and Esther.” The Talmud also portrays Rahav as a convert to Judaism, who, following conversion, married Moses’s successor, Joshua. (Megillah 14b)
Furthermore, in the Christian Bible (Matthew 1:5) Rahav is understood to be the wife of Salmon, one of the two spies she sheltered. Their son was Boaz, who married Ruth, who was the grandmother of King David, among whose descendants was Jesus of Nazareth.
In these post biblical texts, Rahav, who begins triply marginalized—Canaanite, woman, and prostitute—moves to the center and merits our admiration.
Conventional wisdom suggests that Rahav is a woman of sin who becomes a woman of valor. But this is not just about teshuvah (repentance) or conversion; there is a lesson to be learned here. A lesson about the fallibility of our own perception. If we dismiss her only as a zonah, we fail to see that she was perceptive, had faith in the Israelites and in their God enough to defy her own government, even engaging in civil disobedience.
Perhaps the message is that we need to take a closer look at those others who are seemingly marginalized and demonized. Although our first instinct may be to reject them, they may be the righteous ones. Perhaps even our saviors.
From Academy for Jewish Religion
Parashat Shelah 5784
Equality, Hierarchy, and Tzitzit
by Rabbi Rob Scheinberg
A French Catholic teen’s first glimpse of Jews wrapped in their Tallitot led him to intuit one of Judaism’s essential values
One autumn afternoon in the 1880s, two Catholic teenagers passed by the synagogue in their home city of Lyon, France, and something inexplicable prompted them to enter. Being religious Catholics, neither had ever set foot in a non-Catholic house of worship.
One of these young men, Aimé Pallière, would later write that his visit to that synagogue was a life-changing experience for him, which set him on a spiritual journey that would last for the rest of his life.
Coincidentally, the day that Pallière and his friend visited the synagogue happened to be Yom Kippur, and they caught a glimpse of the Neilah service. But what transformed Pallière was something that he could have seen there any day of the year. “The spectacle of that large number of men assembled, their shoulders covered by Tallitot, suddenly disclosed to my eyes a far-off past…. At first on seeing the prayer-shawls uniformly worn by all the participants in the service, I thought that in a way they were all officiating.” (Pallière, The Unknown Sanctuary, 20-21) For Pallière, this sight of a room full of people all wearing religious garb, such that (in contrast to his own Catholic church) he could not tell based on their clothing which of them was the leader of the community or the officiant at that prayer service, exemplified for him “the form of collective priesthood” that characterizes Judaism, in which any individual, if sufficiently knowledgeable, could be called upon to lead the community in prayer, to read from the Bible, and to teach the community. All these people appearing to wear the robes of religious leaders reminded him of the verse from Exodus, “You shall be for me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)
Pallière was so moved by this experience that it propelled him to delve more deeply into Judaism, and he even returned to the synagogue for Yom Kippur the following year (to the consternation of the educators in the Catholic school he was attending). He even contemplated conversion to Judaism. But the rabbis he consulted with (including the rabbi who would become his primary mentor, Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh of Leghorn, Italy) encouraged him to fulfill the values that he admired so much in Judaism but without conversion. He took this advice and, without converting, remained a life-long student and teacher of Judaism. In his later years, living in France under the Nazis, he did what he could to assist the Jewish community and to give them spiritual support.
For Aimé Pallière, the Tallit became a symbol of Judaism’s non-hierarchical ethos and its belief in the radical equality of all. He had in fact identified one of the original messages of the Tallit and the tzitziyot (fringes) that are tied on it.
The mitzvah of Tzitzit, the fringes on the Tallit, is described in this week’s Torah portion of Shelah. The Torah instructs: “Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes (tzitzit) on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue (tekhelet) to the fringe at each corner.” (Numbers 15:37ff). This cord of blue is an essential part of the meaning of the tzitzit. Today we take it for granted that we can wear whatever colors we would like, and it is not necessarily more expensive to get clothes in one color rather than another. But it used to be that certain dyes were especially expensive to produce, and as a result, certain colors became the mark of royalty or nobility. One of those royal colors was tekhelet, deep azure blue. Under the Roman Empire, there were even regulations about who was allowed to wear anything of this noble color. Yet the Torah commands that all Israelites wear one cord of this royal, special color on their garments, to highlight the special status of everyone in the community. (Over the last 2000 years, this commandment of the blue thread has fallen into disuse, in part because obtaining such blue threads were prohibitively expensive. Today, however, it is again possible to obtain threads of tekhelet for use on a tallit.)
Additionally, the word tzitzit itself is regarded by many scholars to be a diminutive form of the word tzitz, the golden frontlet or headplate worn by the High Priest (attached to his turban by a cord of tekhelet; see Exodus 28:36-37). The tzitz is an adornment specifically for the High Priest, but all Israelites were to wear a tzitzit, or a “little tzitz,” demonstrating that all people in the community have some level of the special holiness that characterizes the High Priest. In other words, the tzitzit evokes both royal and priestly garments, and yet it is worn by the community at large, to highlight that everyone is at least a little bit royal and a little bit priestly in this “kingdom of priests.”
These days, in most of the communities represented in the AJR family, people of every gender (and not only men) are encouraged to wear tzitzit. As a result, today tzitzit can be an even more powerful symbol of the non-hierarchy to which the Jewish community aspires — a quality that Aimé Pallière noticed when he saw what he thought was a room full of officiating religious leaders.
Send yourself,
your real self,
the self that’s a small piece of the Self of all there is,
the self wrapped in fringes to remind you of the Self you’re part of.
Don’t send your fear.
Don’t send the distortion your feelings can cause.
Don’t filter the beauty of the present
with your un-healed pain.
Leave that behind.
Send yourself
and you’ll see the divine sparks planted in everything.
From Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
Taking Turns Holding Hope: Shlach 5783
This week’s parsha, Shlach, holds the story of the scouts. God tells Moses to send scouts to explore the land of promise, one from each tribe. Twelve are chosen. When they reach the land, they find grapes so big that they require two men and a carrying-frame. Upon returning, ten of the scouts say: there are giants there. We felt like grasshoppers. We can’t do this..
Joshua and Caleb argue otherwise. They plead, “don’t be afraid!” (Num. 14:9) But the ten who’ve lost faith carry the day. And their loss of faith is contagious. “If only we had died in Egypt!” the people shout. “Or if only we might die in this wilderness!” The children of Israel don’t have hope that anything will ever become better than they’ve known it to be so far.
And God says, “fine, you know what: if you don’t trust in Me even after everything you’ve just seen, the Exodus, the signs and wonders, you can stay here in the desert for forty more years. When this generation is gone, then I’ll lead the children of Israel into the land of promise. But you are clearly too scarred by the traumas you’ve endured. You don’t get to make it there.”
This year I’m feeling empathy for the minyan of ten who didn’t think they could do it, the ones who said, “I don’t have it in me, and I can’t believe that I ever will. This is too big. I’ve spent my whole life slaving to meet Pharaoh’s demands, or to try to feed my family in traumatic circumstances. All I can see ahead is more grind, and I’ve lost heart for the struggle.”
I suspect we’ve all felt that way. I don’t have it in me, and I can’t believe that I ever will. All I can see ahead is more grind, and I’ve lost heart. Loss can put us in that place. Or depression. Or grief, or overwhelm, or illness, or disappointment – you don’t need me to count the ways. The scouts get a bad rap for losing faith, but I suspect we can all relate to them.
There’s nothing wrong with fear or doubt. “Spirituality” that pretends we never have those feelings is at best incomplete. I don’t think any life is entirely devoid of those – not if we’re paying attention and being real. The place where the scouts got themselves into trouble, I think, was giving in to despair. As Reb Nachman of Breslov teaches, “it is forbidden to despair.”
It’s forbidden because despair means giving up on God’s capacity to lift us out of life’s narrow places. If the “G-word” doesn’t work for you, try: despair is giving up on the possibility of change, the possibility of hope, the possibility of anything ever being better than this. It’s noteworthy that Reb Nachman was depressive. Was he giving the advice he himself most needed to hear?
Enter Caleb and Joshua: the scouts who say, “wait, we can do this.” Sometimes we need to hear that the future can be more than whatever limitations are currently constraining our hearts. When we’re in the narrow place of not being able to see a way out, we need someone to remind us that change is possible and that the future can be sweeter than we can currently see.
These roles – the person who despairs; the person who offers hope for better – aren’t innate. We take turns. Sometimes I’m the one with the reminder that life can be better than we fear, and sometimes I’m the one who needs to be reminded. All of us are the weary souls too demoralized to imagine better, and all of us are the dreamers who can see a better world.
When we despair we need someone to walk with us, to feel with us, and to remind us that when we feel most stuck, change can be waiting in the wings – even (or especially) if we can’t see it. I think about how Isaac might have felt during the akedah: bound, immobile, his father’s knife raised over him – not yet knowing there was a ram waiting just outside the frame.
To be clear: the loved one who is ill may not be cured. The grief that comes with loss can’t be short-circuited. Sometimes what’s broken can’t be repaired. But change is always possible, even if that change is “only” internal. Honestly, internal change can be… everything. Maybe not what is, but how we feel about what is. How we experience what is, and how we respond.
The scouts represent the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Our mystics associate the tribes with different qualities, weaknesses, and strengths. The cleric, the judge, the scholar, the sufferer: each tribe is linked with a different archetype or journey. In today’s world, I don’t think these energies define us. I suspect we each resonate with different core qualities at different times.
The tribe of Judah, Caleb’s ancestor, is associated with leadership and with gratitude (hoda’ah). And Joshua descends from Ephraim, who is associated with transformation and with thriving even in tight places. These same qualities can fuel us when we accompany each other into tough times, and when we hold on to hope for those who can’t feel it right now themselves.
I’ve come to see God’s threat of a lifetime in the wilderness not as prescriptive but as descriptive. It’s not that our lack of faith is punished by a lifetime of suffering. Rather: when we’re mired in despair, that’s what our lived experience becomes. Our work is to transform the prospect of a lifetime of wilderness wandering into a sacred journey of becoming.
And we can’t do that alone. We all have moments of feeling like grasshoppers faced with giants; we need each other. When we’re in this together the fact of the wilderness is the same, but the internal dynamics and lived experience can be different. And when we hold hope for each other, we keep open the door to possibility, and the promise of blessing, and change.
From The Hebrew College
Open My Eyes to Your Wonders
By Rabbi David Maayan
Parashat Shelach L’cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41)
“Who lit the wonder before our eyes and the wonder of our eyes?” With these words, R. Abraham Joshua Heschel evokes the profound sense of wonder at the world that we see as well as the wonder of the experience of our seeing itself. This week’s parashah opens with the story of the twelve spies whom Moses sends to scout out the Land of Israel. What Jewish tradition refers to as “the sin of the spies” culminates in the negative and profoundly discouraging report brought back by ten of the twelve spies, which send the people reeling into despair and anger. Yet in the view of R. Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits [d. 1854], the problem of the spies did not begin with their verbal report. It was rooted in their eyes, and how they saw the Land. He thus opens his discussion of the incident by quoting the verse “Open my eyes, and I will gaze upon the wonders of Your Torah” (Psalms 119:18). What do his reflections reveal about the possibilities open to us through the “wonder of our eyes?”
According to the Izhbitser Rebbe, the specialness of the Land of Israel is the unique way that Torah is manifest there. Nonetheless, just as with the text of the Torah itself, this manifestation of meaning and divinity is not on the surface, nor is perceiving it merely a passive process. The Torah is not simply laid bare before anyone who turns her or his eyes to it—one must seek Torah. This is expressed in the traditional name for a place of Torah study—a Beit ha-Midrash, literally a House of Seeking Out, of active interpretation.
It is significant that the same verse (Deuteronomy 11:12) which describes the Land of Israel as the place where “the eyes of Hashem your God are always upon it,” also calls it the Land that Hashem seeks out (doresh otah). Even the eyes of God are, as it were, constantly searching and questing in the Land. The opening verse succinctly expresses the sense that, if I do not see the wonders of God’s Torah, it is not that such wonders are not before me but rather that my gaze needs to be transformed, my eyes “opened” to be able to see. To be willing to admit this, and to ask for divine help, is an essential element of revelation. Revelation is not simply an act that we perceive, it is a process that we must willingly participate in by offering ourselves, including our wonder and our questions.
Numbers 14:2 tells us that Moses sent the spies not simply to “see” the land but to “search in her” (from the root tur). This verb, R. Leiner teaches, means “to gaze into the inward depths,” to quest for the hidden truth and not simply to take in outward impressions. (It is a rare verb in the Torah, found only in Numbers and once in Deuteronomy, almost exclusively referring to the work of the spies.) Looking only on the surface was an essential element in the spies’ failure.
It is crucial to clarify which model of “searching the depths” is intended here. For this metaphor could be employed in terms of conquest and violence. For example, one who is aware of something of value beneath the surface may demolish a mountain to search for gold, or plan a raid to steal hidden treasures. In contrast, the Izhbitser Rebbe is presenting a model of mutuality and love. The Izhbitzer evokes this by drawing upon a profoundly influential passage from the Zohar (II:99a), in which the inward depth of the Torah is compared to a princess in a tower. She reveals herself, sending out her searching gaze towards her potential lover outside. Such a gaze communicates not simply the raw fact of her existence but something of her inner desire and true being. The student of Torah who would respond to this call must also be willing to reveal inner secrets, to share their inner being with that of the Torah. Like a lover’s gaze, the gaze of one who is “searching the depths” in love conveys a willingness to be seen by, as well as a desire to see, the beloved.
Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav [d. 1810] powerfully offers another image of a loving request that communicates desire rather than violence and conquest. He teaches that the rock which Moses was instructed to speak to (in Numbers 20) represents the Heart of the Divine, and the flowing water he sought, the revelation of Torah. Rebbe Nachman compares Moses’ sinful act in striking the rock to one who seeks to “grab” Torah insights by force. By contrast, Moses was called upon to stand before the Divine Heart and pray, revealing himself in a devotional stance. (See Likkutei Moharan I, Lesson 20.)
Yet if the spies didn’t reveal themselves, is this not the very thing that spies can never do? Of course a spy attempts to avoid being seen—indeed at all costs, a spy must not be truly seen, that is, recognized as a spy. Perhaps the sin of the spies was rooted not only in their superficial seeing, but also in their unwillingness to be seen.
The spies’ mission operated on multiple levels. Yes, they were gathering pragmatic and strategic information about the land and the people who lived there—and for this they had to operate undercover. Yet on another level their job was to gaze upon the land of God’s promise, to meet the Divine gaze in this land that God’s eyes are always searching out. Their mission was to fill in the Divine promise, which the whole of Israel knew of, with specific visions and revelations, to communicate the wonder and possibilities by fleshing them out. It is here that they fell so short—as the Izhbitser Rebbe teaches, because they did not pray to God to open their eyes to see these wonders.
Rashi tells us that Caleb traveled to the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs in order to pray that he not be drawn into the approach of the majority of the spies. Caleb understood that their full mission required standing before God and revealing themselves in prayer. Only when one reveals oneself to God in prayer does the Torah—and the Torah hidden within the world, and particularly in the Land of Israel—reveal itself. “Open my eyes, and I will gaze upon the wonders of Your Torah.”
From Louise Lipsey
Challah Teaching
The word challah is taken directly from the Bible and means “offering.” It refers to the small portion of pre-baked dough that was given as a weekly Shabbat offering to the Kohanim, or priests, during the Temple period. This practice helped sustain the priests, who had no land of their own to farm. To commemorate this ancient law, a small portion of dough often symbolically continued to be separated after the destruction of the Temple. This small olive sized piece of dough is baked and then burnt to represent the destruction of the Temple. Before being thrown away, a special prayer is said.
During the period of the Temple, challot were used for the “Showbread” ritual. “And thou shalt take fine flour, and baked 12 cakes thereof; two tenths parts of an ephah shall be in one cake. And thou shalt set them in 2 rows, 6 in a row, upon the pure table before the Lord. And thou shalt put pure frankincense with each row, that it may be to the bread for a memorial-part, even an offering made by fire unto the Lord” (Leviticus 24:5-7).
Twelve (represented the 12 tribes of Israel) freshly baked breads were brought each Shabbat morning to the sanctuary, where they were displayed for a week on a special table. Frankincense burned continually over the showbreads, filling the sanctuary with the aroma of earth-sweetness. When the weekly transfer ceremony of the showbreads took place, the old breads were first covered with a blue and purple cloth. The blue symbolized the eternal heavens or spiritual life, and the purple the sea or physical aspects of life. The shape was originally round, but no configuration was ever prescribed. Rice, millet, and pea flours were not permitted, because they were considered to be inferior grains. The breads were, as they still continue to be, white and sweet.
The custom of braiding challah, dates back to the 15th century, primarily among Ashkenazi Jews. In some communities, the bread was called barches or berches, which closely resembles the Yiddish word broches (or Hebrew brachas), which means blessings. More often it is known by its Hebrew name, which is usually spelled challah or challes, hallah or hallot. Ashkenazi tradition regards challah as an absolute necessary for celebrating Shabbat, and if one is unable to afford wine and challah, one is expected to choose challah. Customarily two breads were placed on the Shabbat table. This is considered by many to be symbolic of the double portion of manna that fell each Friday for Shabbat during the Exodus wandering. (After manna fell, its seeds were ground and pounded into flour, and baked into cakes that tasted like wafers made with honey). Some people consider the poppy or sesame seeds that are often sprinkled upon challah before baking to be representative of manna.
There are various explanations given for challah covers, and their usual white color. White symbolizes purity and some believe it symbolizes the white color of the desert sands. An explanation for covering challah alludes to the covering of the showbreads in the Temple. A further explanation is the shielding of the challah during the Kiddush, since the challah is not honored first. In this allegory, “if we are so concerned about the feelings of inanimate objects, how much more then, should be we concerned about the feelings of people.” Another popular Shabbat allegory is the comparison of our home to the ancient Temple and our Shabbat table to an altar.
After blessing challot, in some traditions broken pieces of the bread are tossed around the table. Many Sephardic Jews consider this as a way to celebrate Shabbat with joy (and not one of condolence, where they place bread into the palms of mourners). Tossing bread, rather than passing it by hand, has also been considered by Ashkenazim as a reminder that bread comes from G-d, and not just from our hands.
Traditionally salt has commonly been connected with challot. Some consider salt to be a reminder of awareness and gratefulness, and others see it as symbolic of the covenant between G-d and Israel. “Never shall you suspend the salt covenant of your G-d…with all your offerings you shall offer salt.” Leviticus 2:13. There are some interesting customs centered around salt, with Sephardic Jews often dipping the pieces of bread into salt before tossing them. Iraqi Jews often place a salt container between the 2 or 4 breads they bless for Shabbat, and Yemenite Jews dip their pieces of bread into salt to ward off the “evil eye.”
The Shabbat and weekday breads of Sephardim are usually similar and probably more closely resemble ancient biblical breads. Generally, most are round and plain, though there is some regional variation, and the tradition of setting aside a small portion, called terumah, is observed. On holidays, Moroccan Jews sometimes mix almonds and rose water into their dough. Some Moroccan Jews also follow a kabbalistic ritual of using 12 small breads, though most use 2 breads. Between the Kiddush and ritual washing of the hands for the Hamotzi, Moroccans frequently eat fish, and also often fruits, vegetables, and other appetizers. One explanation for this has to do with the privilege of being able to say extra blessings. The custom of eating fish appears to have originated with Kabbalists. Found in the Zohar is: “Whoever eats fish on the Sabbath will be saved from judgment and punishment.” Another interpretation for serving fish on Shabbat, the 7th day of the week, is that the numerical letter value of dag, the Hebrew word for fish (daled, gimel), also equals 7.
Interesting, Syrian Jews used to abstain from eating bread on Friday. This deprivation was meant to increase the joy and taste of their special bread and foods for Shabbat. They flanked their Shabbat breads with fruit (from a tree) on one side and vegetables (from the earth) on the other side. Pieces of fresh parsley were then scattered on top. All of this was covered with a large cloth, with a branch of sweet myrtle placed in the center of the cover. Before blessing the breads, the head of the household would rub some of the myrtle leaves between his hands and bless this fragrance. While blessing the breads, he would cover the breads with all his fingers outstretched. He would then tear the breads into pieces, dip them into salt, and throw them around to each person. Following this, he would bless the fruit and vegetables.
Many Iranian Jews used a special baker, and the first breads removed from his oven for Shabbat, would be reserved for the families of the Kohanim. Children would weekly come to collect the breads for their families. When blessing two breads on Friday night, Iranian Jews would break off and bless a piece from the bottom bread. This piece represented night because it was closer to darkness. For the second meal on Saturday following morning services, a piece was broken off from the upper bread from a fresh pair of challot to bless. This piece from the top bread, which was closer to sunlight, was symbolic of the day. At the beginning of the third meal in mid afternoon, pieces from each of the pair of breads were broken off together and blessed. This combination of light and dark represented dusk.
Yemenite Jews would set two breads back to back directly on top of the tablecloth, with a small mound of salt placed directly on top of the breads, and a cloth placed over them. Some Yemenite Jews baked pita like breads in outdoor primitive ovens called mlawach. Others prepared a bread called saluf, which was made from wheat dough that they rolled out and slapped onto the inner sides of a hot oven wall, where it quickly browned. Yemenite Jews often baked additional breads for the poor. One woman recollected how her mother baked an additional 20 loaves that she gave away to 10 poor families each week. In Israel, there is a distinctive custom among Judeo-Spanish congregations of donating 2 breads to the poor each Friday.
Challot shapes may vary. Among Hasidim, the braided challah has evolved into a complex assortment of shapes. The most popular forms have been created from 3 to 7 or more strands of dough, with sometimes smaller twists superimposed upon larger ones. They may be either elongated, circular or wreathlike in shape, and vary from 1 to 3 feet in length. Very large challot are often referred to as koilitchen.
The idea of a crown shaped challah for Rosh Hashanah, originated in the Ukraine in the 18th century. The crown suggests the “King of Kings, who created the universe” It also signifies the universal hope for peace, goodness, and abundance, and was considered a mystic symbol for the unification of all existence. “The integration of the self through connection to G-d, for the gathering of a fragmented Jewish community, to become one, and for the convergence of a splintered world into global unity.” Another Rosh Hashanah challah is one shaped like a ladder or a round challah with a ladder on top, which is meant to help our prayers ascend to heaven.
A challah in the shape of a bird originated in 18th century Ukraine, for the pre-fast Yom Kippur meal. “May our sins be carried away by the bird, and may she fly with our prayers for salvation straight up to G-d.” Throughout 18th and 19th century persecutions, birds were a metaphorical image of a protecting and rescuing G-d: “As hovering birds, so will the Lord protect Jerusalem” Isaiah 31:5.
Spiral challah are another Rosh Hashannah shape that began in the Ukraine in the 18th century. These breads are sweet, with raisins or other dried fruit and a round form symbolizing universal peace, harmony, and prosperity. One Sephardi tradition adds anise seeds to the dough. Even chopped apples, which have been sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar have been added by some to help bring about a sweet year.
Freda Reider, in her delightful book “The Hallah Book,” describes a rich and imaginative assortment of additional challot shapes, many of which she herself created. Such challot include ones in the shape of a menorah, dreidel, magen david, the letter shin (symbolizing shalom or shekkinah), chamsa, hamantaschen, fish, dove of peace, etc. Freda also presents ideas and instructions for creating personalized challah covers.
No matter how a challah is shaped and served, the respect for challah and blessing for it remains the same.
From Chabad.org
The Separation of “Challah”
Got Dough?
I’ll bet you thought challah refers to the two braided loaves of bread reserved for Shabbat meals. It does. But challah is also the small chunk of dough we tear off and burn before baking any bread.
Originally, that dough was given to a kohen, a descendant of Aaron who served in the Temple. In Messianic times, we’ll reinstate this practice. Meanwhile, we need to burn that challah before we can eat the bread from which it was taken.
Taking challah tells us that whatever we are given is not for our use alone. If we have wisdom, money or good health, our first step is to put them towards a Divine purpose.
The mitzvah of separating challah applies to every Jew, man or woman. Traditionally, however, this has been one of the special mitzvahs entrusted to the Jewish woman. In her role as the akeret habayit (foundation of the home), the woman is entrusted with mitzvahsthat uplift and sanctify mundane activities, and nourish her family physically and spiritually.
What:
Challah is taken from wheat, rye, barley, oat or spelt batches that use at least 59 ounces of flour. If you use less than this but more than 43 ounces, take challah, but don’t recite the blessing.
The liquid you mix with the flour should contain water. If not, add a little water and then take challah with a blessing.
Cakes and cookies sometimes need challah taken, as well. If you’re planning to bake something with more than 10 cups of flour, check the rules here.
How:
After you knead the dough, before shaping it into loaves, place all your dough in a single pan or bowl and recite:
Blessed are You, L‑rd our G‑d, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to separate challah.
Separate a small piece (approx. one ounce) and say: “This is challah.”
Wrap the challah in foil and place it in the empty broiler or oven, or burn it by any other method.
From Wendy: This is the link to additional information from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dough_offering
From My Jewish Learning
The Perils of Groupthink
The story of the spies offers an object lesson in the importance of diversity — and the danger of homogeneity.
BY RABBI ASHER LOPATIN
Perhaps the most nagging question in this week’s parsha is: What went wrong?
Parashat Sh’lach tells the story of the spies who were dispatched by Moses to investigate the land of Israel prior to its capture by the Israelites. But the spies return with a report that frightens the people, who refuse to go forth and take the land as God had commanded.
In the version of the story related in Deuteronomy 1:22, the blame for the fiasco is put on the Israelites, who pressured Moses to send a group of spies to inspect the promised land instead of simply going in and conquering it. But in the version of the story related in Parashat Sh’lach, it is Moses who chooses the spies — all leaders of the people — and sends them on their mission.
So how did this hand-picked group of leaders go so bad, give up their faith in God, and pervert the will of the people? Moreover, how did the people, just months after building the Tabernacle and experiencing God’s presence in their midst, not to mention having not long before received the Torah (and a rebuke for building the Golden Calf), succumb so easily to the negative report of the spies?
There are philosophical, psychological and political answers to these questions, but they are not even hinted at in the text, which tells us only that God concludes that the people lack the faith necessary to enter the land. But that doesn’t quite make sense either, since several verses later the people appear to change their minds and decide they do want to enter the land after all. Yet by then it’s too late, and Moses tells the people not to attempt to conquer the land or they will be defeated miserably.
In both these instances, the people were unified in failing to heed God’s word. While it’s not clear from the Torah that God appreciated this particular display of national unity, the ancient rabbis clearly did. In the Talmud (Megilla 23b), we learn that a prayer quorum, or minyan, is constituted by ten people precisely because the ten spies in the story who gave a negative report were referred to as an “evil nation.” Just as the spies represented the entire unified Jewish nation, a minyan of ten also represents the unified Jewish nation. Though it’s a bit strange to think that the source for minyan comes from a group described as “evil,” the rabbis may have been tipping their hats to their sense of unity, even though here it resulted in tragedy.
In fact, the rabbinic admiration of unity can perhaps help us understand our original question, how this group of leaders erred so badly? Later in the parsha, after God tells the Israelites that on account of the sin of the spies they will not enter the land for 40 years, God comforts them by relating various laws pertaining to the land of Israel. In three verses in chapter 15, the Torah makes a point of equating the status of a stranger or convert with the natural born Israelite. Verse 14 makes the point most adamantly: “There shall be one law for you and for the resident stranger; it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the LORD.”
Why this sudden emphasis on the stranger? Perhaps the Torah is answering our nagging question – how could they? – by explaining that what we saw as the best of the Jews, their cohesion and unity, was really the very thing that got them in trouble. Until this last section of the parsha, there had been no mention of the stranger. Only representatives of the Twelve Tribes, born Israelites, were allowed to represent the people as spies. There were no strangers or converts or “others” in this group.
Yet that was precisely their downfall. God is telling the Israelites that when they get to the land they must make sure there are foreigners and converts in their midst, all abiding by the same law, a full part of society. With a diverse group residing together, the people will then be better insulated from the groupthink that gripped them in the sin of the spies. Diversity and difference is the key to the survival of our people; homogeneity is a recipe for its downfall.
In this context, it’s important to remember the last story in the Book of Leviticus, in which the son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man gets into a fight with a full-bred Israelite. The rabbis say that the fight arose after the half-Israelite was prevented from pitching his tent with the Tribe of Dan because his father was not a member of that tribe. Maybe had the tribe found a way to accept the stranger, it may have been the one to think differently and stand up to the spies. Instead, we get groupthink.
Parashat Sh’lach is a warning about the dangers of too much unity of thought. Let us work on bringing the stranger not only into the community, but into our thinking. Let us embrace difference in order to thrive as a people and thrive in the land.
From Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Fear of Freedom (Shelach Lecha 5779)
The episode of the spies was one of the most tragic in the entire Torah. Who sent them and to what end is not entirely clear. In this week’s parsha, the text says that it was God who told Moses to do so (Num. 13:1–2). In Deuteronomy (1:22), Moses says that it was the people who made the request. Either way, the result was disaster. An entire generation was deprived of the chance to enter the Promised Land. The entry itself was delayed by forty years. According to the Sages, it cast its shadow long into the future.[1]
Moses told the spies to go and see the land and bring back a report about it: Are the people many or few, strong or weak? What is the land itself like? Are the cities open or fortified? Is the soil fertile? They were also tasked with bringing back some of its fruit. The spies returned with a positive report about the land itself: “It is indeed flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit” There then followed one of the most famous ‘buts’ in Jewish history: “But – the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak [‘the giant’] there” (Num. 13:28).
Sensing that their words were demoralising the people, Caleb, one of the spies, interrupted with a message of reassurance: “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” However, the other spies insisted: “We cannot attack those people; they are stronger than we are.… All the people we saw there are of great size.… We seemed like grasshoppers…” (Num. 13:30–33). The next day, the people, persuaded that the challenge was completely beyond them, expressed regret that they had ever embarked on the Exodus and said, “Let us appoint a leader and go back to Egypt” (Num. 14:4).
Thus far the narrative. However, it is monumentally difficult to understand. It was this that led the Lubavitcher Rebbe to give a radically revisionary interpretation of the episode.[2] He asked the obvious question. How could ten of the spies come back with a defeatist report? They had seen with their own eyes how God had sent a series of plagues that brought Egypt, the strongest and longest-lived of all the empires of the ancient world, to its knees. They had seen the Egyptian army with its cutting-edge military technology, the horse-drawn chariot, drown in the sea while the Israelites passed through it on dry land. Egypt was far stronger than the Canaanites, Perizzites, Jebusites, and other minor kingdoms that they would have to confront in conquering the land. Nor was this an ancient memory. It had happened not much more than a year before.
What is more, they were entirely wrong about the people of the land. We discover this from the book of Joshua, in the passage read as the haftarah to Shelach Lecha. When Joshua sent spies to Jericho, the woman who sheltered them, Rahab, described for them what her people felt when they heard that that the Israelites were on their way:
I know that the Lord has given this land to you. A great fear of you has fallen on us…We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt.… When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below. (Josh. 2:9–11)
The people of Jericho were not giants. They were as fearful of the Israelites as the Israelites were of them. Nor was this something that was disclosed only later. The Israelites of Moses’ day had already sung in the Song at the Sea:
The peoples have heard; they tremble;
Pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;
Trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;
All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
Terror and dread fall upon them;
Because of the greatness of Your arm, they are still as a stone.
(Ex. 15:14–16)
How was it that they forgot what, not long before, they knew?
What is more, continued the Rebbe, the spies were not people plucked at random from among the population. The Torah states that they were “men who were heads of the People of Israel.” They were leaders. They were not people given lightly to fear. The questions are straightforward, but the answer the Rebbe gave was utterly unexpected. The spies were not afraid of failure, he said. They were afraid of success.
Never had a people lived so close to God.
If they entered the land, their lifestyle of camping around the Sanctuary, eating manna from heaven, living in continuous contact with the Shechinah would vanish. They would have to fight battles, maintain an army, create an economy, farm the land, worry about the weather and their crops, and all the other thousand distractions that come from living in the world. What would happen to their closeness to God? They would be preoccupied with mundane and material pursuits. Here they could spend their entire lives learning Torah, lit by the radiance of the Divine. There they would be one more nation in a world of nations with the same kind of economic, social, and political problems that every other nation has to deal with.
They were afraid of success, and the subsequent change it would bring about. They wanted to spend their lives in the closest possible proximity to God. What they did not understand was that God seeks, in the Midrashic phrase, “a dwelling in the lower worlds.”[3] One of the great differences between Judaism and other religions is that while others seek to lift people to heaven, Judaism seeks to bring heaven down to earth.
Much of Torah is about things not conventionally seen as religious at all: labour relations, agriculture, welfare provisions, loans and debts, land ownership, and so on. It is not difficult to have an intense religious experience in the desert, or in a monastic retreat, or in an ashram. Most religions have holy places and holy people who live far removed from the stresses and strains of everyday life. About this there is nothing unusual at all.
But that is not the Jewish project, the Jewish mission. God wanted the Israelites to create a model society where human beings were not treated as slaves, where rulers were not worshipped as demigods, where human dignity was respected, where law was impartially administered to rich and poor alike, where no one was destitute, no one was abandoned to isolation, no one was above the law, and no realm of life was a morality-free zone. That requires a society, and a society needs a land. It requires an economy, an army, fields and flocks, labour and enterprise. All these, in Judaism, become ways of bringing the Shechinah into the shared spaces of our collective life.
The spies did not doubt that Israel could win its battles with the inhabitants of the land. Their concern was not physical but spiritual. They did not want to leave the wilderness. They did not want to become just another nation among the nations of the earth. They did not want to lose their unique relationship with God in the reverberating silence of the desert, far removed from civilisation and its discontents. This was the mistake of deeply religious men – but it was a mistake.
Clearly this is not the plain sense of the narrative, but we should not dismiss it on that account. It is, as it were, a psychoanalytical reading of the unconscious mindset of the spies. They did not want to let go of the intimacy and innocence of the time-out-of-time and place-out-of-place that was the experience of the wilderness. Ultimately the spies feared freedom and its responsibilities.
But Torah is about the responsibilities of freedom. Judaism is not a religion of monastic retreat from the world. It is a religion of engagement with the world. God chose Israel to make His presence visible in the world. Therefore Israel must live in the world. The Jewish people were not without their desert-dwellers and ascetics. The Talmud speaks of R. Shimon b. Yochai living for thirteen years in a cave. When he emerged, he could not bear to see people engaged in such earthly pursuits as ploughing a field (Shabbat 33b). He held that engagement with the world was fundamentally incompatible with the heights of spirituality (Brachot 35b). But the mainstream held otherwise.[4] It maintained that “Torah study without an occupation will in the end fail and lead to sin” (Mishnah Avot 2:2).
Maimonides speaks of people who live as hermits in the desert to escape the corruptions of society.[5] But these were the exceptions, not the rule. It is not the destiny of Israel to live outside time and space as the world’s recluses. Far from being the supreme height of faith, such a fear of freedom and its responsibilities is, according to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the sin of the spies.
They did not want to contaminate Judaism by bringing it into contact with the real world. They sought the eternal dependency of God’s protection and the endless embrace of His all-encompassing love. There is something noble about this desire, but also something profoundly irresponsible. The spies demoralised the people and provoked the anger of God. The Jewish project – the Torah as the constitution of the Jewish nation under the sovereignty of God – is about building a society in the land of Israel that so honours human dignity and freedom that it will one day lead the world to say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Deut. 4:6).
The Jewish task is not to fear the real world but to enter and transform it, healing some of its wounds and bringing to places often shrouded in darkness fragments of Divine light.
Shabbat Shalom
[1] On the phrase, “the people wept that night” (Num. 14:1), the Talmud says that God vowed, “I will make this a day of weeping throughout the generations.” That day was Tisha B’Av, on which, in later centuries, the First and Second Temples were destroyed (Taanit 29a; Sota 35a).
[2] A translation can be found in Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Torah Studies, adapted by Jonathan Sacks (London: Lubavitch Foundation, 1986), 239–245.
[3] See Midrash Tanchuma, parshat Naso 16.
[4] Brachot 35b cites the view of R. Ishmael as evaluated by Abaye.
[5] Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot 6:1; Shemoneh Perakim, ch. 4.
From Rabbi David Kasher
THE GATHERER – Parshat Shelach
It only took one week.
From the day the Children of Israel were first given the Sabbath, they managed to observe just one day of rest together as a whole community. By Sabbath number two, it seems there were those who had already had enough. That’s what Rashi tells us at the end of this week’s parsha, when we read:
When the Children of Israel were in the wilderness, they came upon a man gathering twigs on the Sabbath day. (Numbers 15:32)
וַיִּהְיוּ בְנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, בַּמִּדְבָּר; וַיִּמְצְאוּ, אִישׁ מְקֹשֵׁשׁ עֵצִים–בְּיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת.
Why, Rashi wants to know, does the verse tell us it was when they “were in the wilderness”? Of course it was. Where else would they be? The answer, he suggests, is that it happened as soon as they were in the wilderness.
This is meant to indicate a shame to Israel, for they had only kept that first Sabbath, and then, on the second, this one came and desecrated it.
בגנותן של ישראל דבר הכתוב, שלא שמרו אלא שבת ראשונה, ובשניה בא זה וחללה
Not only that, says Rashi, but:
They warned him, but he still didn’t stop gathering – even though they had seen him and told him to stop.
שהתרו בו ולא הניח מלקושש אף משמצאוהו והתרו בו
Now, this was new to them, encountering someone who simply refused to keep the commandments. The people didn’t know how to to handle the situation. So they brought the gatherer before Moses and Aaron. But even Moses had no idea what to do. So they placed the man under guard, and turned to the ultimate authority for answers – the Almighty Judge.
And God did indeed have an answer for them. But it wasn’t a pleasant one:
The Eternal said to Moses, “This man shall be put to death: the whole community shall pelt him with stones him outside the camp.” (v. 35)
וַיֹּאמֶר ה אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, מוֹת יוּמַת הָאִישׁ; רָגוֹם אֹתוֹ בָאֲבָנִים כָּל-הָעֵדָה, מִחוּץ לַמַּחֲנֶה.
And that is just what they did.
Now, we know that the Torah has the death penalty. We’ve even seen it carried out once before, for a man who publicly cursed God. But why does the Torah go out of its way, now, to interrupt our story and give us another incident of stoning?
And then there is another, more serious narrative problem. This kind of gathering has actually happened before. It turns out the first Sabbath was not a complete success story either. When God first gave the commandment to rest on the Sabbath day, Moses specifically told the people, “Six days you shall gather [manna]; but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.” And yet:
On the seventh day, some of the people went out to gather, but they found nothing. (Exodus 16:27)
וַיְהִי בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי, יָצְאוּ מִן-הָעָם לִלְקֹט; וְלֹא, מָצָאוּ.
Well, there you have it! More gatherers! More Sabbath violators! Kill them all!!
Right, God?
But that’s not what God says at all:
The Eternal said to Moses, “How long will you men refuse to obey My commandments and My teachings? See that the Eternal has given you the Sabbath, and therefore gives you two days food on the sixth day. Let everyone rest: let no one leave his place on the seventh day.” So the people rested on the seventh day. (vv. 28-30)
וַיֹּאמֶר ה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה: עַד-אָנָה, מֵאַנְתֶּם, לִשְׁמֹר מִצְוֹתַי, וְתוֹרֹתָי. רְאוּ, כִּי-ה נָתַן לָכֶם הַשַּׁבָּת–עַל-כֵּן הוּא נֹתֵן לָכֶם בַּיּוֹם הַשִּׁשִּׁי, לֶחֶם יוֹמָיִם; שְׁבוּ אִישׁ תַּחְתָּיו, אַל-יֵצֵא אִישׁ מִמְּקֹמוֹ–בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי. לוַיִּשְׁבְּתוּ הָעָם, בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִעִי.
Well, this is different. God is upset, certainly – but there is no death penalty. In fact, there seems to be no punishment at all. Just a patient repetition of the rules. A teaching moment. And it works! The people then keep the Sabbath. So why does the same violation, just a week later, result in a public stoning?
Maybe God only gives one second chance. Maybe God is particularly upset because this was already explained. Maybe it is the sheer brazenness of this guy: they warned him, after all, and he didn’t seem to care. What is it? What is so terrible about the case of the Gatherer?
The answer may lie hidden in the language of that title itself: ‘The Gatherer.’ The word used in Hebrew is not the typical term for gathering used in the earlier story, but an unusual verb – mekoshesh (מקשש) – used specifically for collecting dead plant matter.
In fact, there is only one other time in the Torah when this verb is used – way back in the book of Exodus, when the Israelites are still slaves in Egypt. Moses has just begun the revolt against Pharaoh, and delivered his first “Let my people go” speech. And Pharaoh, incensed, decides to show Moses who’s boss, by increasing the people’s already backbreaking labor in the following manner:
Pharaoh charged the taskmasters and foremen of the people, saying, “You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making the bricks as you have been doing; let them go and gather – kosheshu (קששו) – their own straw.” (Exodus 5:6-7)
וַיְצַו פַּרְעֹה, בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא, אֶת-הַנֹּגְשִׂים בָּעָם, וְאֶת-שֹׁטְרָיו לֵאמֹר. לֹא תֹאסִפוּן לָתֵת תֶּבֶן לָעָם, לִלְבֹּן הַלְּבֵנִים–כִּתְמוֹל שִׁלְשֹׁם: הֵם, יֵלְכוּ, וְקֹשְׁשׁוּ לָהֶם, תֶּבֶן.
The people have to do the same amount of work they have hardly been able to keep up with, but now they have to gather the materials as well. In other words, Pharaoh is asking the impossible. He is pushing them beyond their limit.
This is the lowest moment in the history of the Egyptian slavery. This is the people at their most broken, most defeated.
And now, in these first weeks after liberation, along comes The Gatherer, and goes out gathering wood on the Sabbath, in just the same way that the slaves gathered straw in their darkest hour. That is, he chose an act that specifically recalled the labor one would most want to be freed from – as if to say, “even this I do not honor.” He meant not only show disregard for the Sabbath day itself, but also to deliberately dismiss the pain and suffering of his own people.
The Gatherer, then, was not just a sinner – he was a sort of nihilist, filled with hate for all things, and already willing to destroy this delicate new society. He did not just deny God; he denied also the meaning of human freedom.
For these are the two underlying principles of the Sabbath itself: a celebration of the Divine, and of humanity. We see these two layers indicated in the Torah’s two records of the Ten Commandments. In the Book of Exodus, at Mount Sinai, the Fourth Commandment looks like this:
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy… For in six days the Eternal made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Eternal blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it. (Exod. 20:7,10)
זָכוֹר אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת, לְקַדְּשׁוֹ… כִּי שֵׁשֶׁת-יָמִים עָשָׂה ה אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֶת-הַיָּם וְאֶת-כָּל-אֲשֶׁר-בָּם, וַיָּנַח, בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי; עַל-כֵּן, בֵּרַךְ ה אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת–וַיְקַדְּשֵׁהוּ.
But in the retelling of Revelation, in the Book of Deuteronomy, the same commandment has some distinct differences:
Guard the Sabbath day and keep it holy… Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Eternal, your God, freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Eternal, your God, has commanded you to keep the seventh day. (Deut. 5:12,15)
שָׁמוֹר אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת, לְקַדְּשׁוֹ… וְזָכַרְתָּ, כִּי עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, וַיֹּצִאֲךָ ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ מִשָּׁם, בְּיָד חֲזָקָה וּבִזְרֹעַ נְטוּיָה; עַל-כֵּן, צִוְּךָ ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, לַעֲשׂוֹת, אֶת-יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת.
The Sabbath is a recognition of God as the Creator. But the Sabbath is also a recognition of God the Liberator – Who hears the cries of the oppressed, and brings a redeemer to set them free.
The Gatherer broke the Sabbath, fundamentally rejecting God as the source of all existence. That, however, God can handle. God has forgiven gathering before, after all.
But the Gatherer also specifically broke the Sabbath with an action that made a mockery of human suffering. And that God will not abide.
If the Gatherer does not value human life, he has forfeited his own. Measure for measure.
As you have gathered sticks, we shall gather stones.
From My Jewish Learning
The Blue of the Ocean, the Sky and the Tzitzit
Our relationship with the Divine must also encompass a relationship with the world that surrounds us.
BY ELIZABETH RICHMAN
Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make tzitzit for themselves on the corners of their garments through all the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the tzitzit of each corner. That shall be your tzitzit; look at it and recall all of God’s commandments and observe them… Thus shall you be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God… (Numbers 15: 38-41).
Parashat Sh’lach concludes with these famous instructions to attach tzitzit (fringes) to the corners of our clothing as a reminder of and a directive to keep God’s commandments. The instruction of tzitzit is seen as a reminder of the entirety of religious practice. Our Sages believed that it was so important that they incorporated it verbatim into the Shema, one of the most central prayers in Judaism.
Blue Resembles…
The Rabbis wondered why God commanded the inclusion of one blue thread among the white threads of the tzitzit. Tractate Menahot of the Babylonian Talmud reports Rabbi Meir asking “Why is blue different from all other colors?” and then answering, “Because blue resembles the sea, and the sea resembles sky, and the sky resembles God’s Throne of Glory…as it is written: ‘Above the sky over their heads was the semblance of a throne, like sapphire in appearance…’”
In other words, Rabbi Meir hypothesizes that the blue thread in tzitzit is meant to guide its wearers through a chain of associations beginning with immediate visualization of tzitzit and ending with the expansiveness of God. But why didn’t Rabbi Meir simply say that the color blue reminds us of God’s throne? Why do we first need to think of the ocean and the sky?
Rabbi Meir is alluding to the intimate connection between our religious actions and the real world. Our relationship with the Divine must also encompass a relationship with the world that surrounds us: the ocean, the sky, and the rich variety of life that dwells in between. We must learn to truly see, and thereby to know, the full world that God has created, from the depths of the ocean to the heights of the sky and the vastness of earth.
A Reminder for Action
Indeed, we are not permitted to merely contemplate the world–we must be part of it. Immediately preceding Rabbi Meir’s comment, the Talmud asks why we are told to look at tzitzit and remember God’s commandments. The Talmud offers the answer that “seeing leads to remembering and remembering leads to doing.”
Seeing or reading about tzitzit is meant to remind us to act. This is true as much today as it was when these words were written. Perhaps thinking of the blue of the ocean and the sky can serve as a reminder to care for the earth and make choices that lead to sustainable development. Perhaps remembering those who inhabit the expanse of land between ocean and sky, and recalling our communal redemption story, should remind us of our obligation to build a world that honors the dignity and equality of all people.
We can see the earth differently by traveling and interacting with a diversity of people, visiting the developing world, or simply walking down the streets of our own cities, eyes wide open, speaking with those who need help. If we look carefully enough, what we see may remind us, like the Shema does, of our ancient and modern family stories.
Ours are stories about slavery, poverty, immigration, environmental degradation, suffering, and, in many cases, redemption. Our stories can help us to see the stories of others and to act in ways that will bring about redemptive endings. As the Rabbis imply in their teaching about tzitzit and its place in the Shema, when we look around we are challenged to make empathic connections between ourselves and the world around us. These connections obligate us to act.
The color blue that reminds us of ocean, sky, and God’s throne also reminds of this connection. The particular shade of blue to be used in tzitzit is called tekhelet. Ramban (Nahmanides) suggests that tekhelet was chosen because its spelling is very close to the word takhlit, which means purpose or goal.
The relationship between the two words summarizes the Talmud’s teaching on tzitzit. The purpose of our religious rituals is to truly see and engage with the world and its people. This engagement with the world leads us into relationship with the Divine. Only then, as the end of Parashat Sh’lach tells us, we will be holy to our God.
Provided by special arrangement with American Jewish World Service. To learn more, visit http://www.ajws.org.
From The Hebrew College
On Grasshoppers and Angels
By Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld
At the beginning of this week’s parsha, we encounter the Israelites in a moment of intense vulnerability and self-doubt.
The people have been wandering in the wilderness for over a year. So much is behind them: moments of miraculous rescue, relief, revelation; other moments of thirst, terror, and trembling; and always, the thin, almost imperceptible line between them.
What lies ahead is unknown. Guided on their journey by a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud by day, these ex-slaves – still strangers to their own new-found freedom – are commanded to follow a God they cannot see to a land they cannot imagine. It is not difficult to understand why they slip so easily, again and again, from faith into raw fear.
As our portion opens, Moses is commanded by God to send men to “scout out the land of Canaan” – which he does immediately, selecting twelves spies, a leader from each tribe, and sending them off with these instructions: “Go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor?”
All good questions. The spies spend forty days scouting out the land. When they return, they go directly to Moses and Aaron and, before the entire community, they make their report. It begins on a positive note. “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey.” But as they continue with a description of the people who inhabit the land, the message becomes more equivocal. “The people who inhabit the country are extremely powerful and the cities are fortified and very large.” A less glowing report, but still, a seemingly reasonable response to their assignment.
It is at this point that things begin to unravel. Caleb steps forward, offering words of encouragement and trying to stem the tide of panic rising among the people. But the other spies take on an even more ominous tone. Their message now turns from one that is tinged with fear to one that predicts certain failure. “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” And then, reaching fever pitch, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are giants. We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
It is an exquisite articulation of self-doubt: “Lo nuchal. We can’t do this.” And the ever-so-human projection of one’s own sense of inadequacy onto others: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
It is this statement that captures the attention of an extraordinarily poignant commentary from Midrash Tanchuma. “The Blessed Holy One said to the scouts: “You don’t know what you have just let your mouths utter. I am ready to put up with your saying, ‘We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves.’ But I do take offense at your asserting, ‘And so we must have looked to them.’ Could you possibly know how I made you appear in their eyes? How do you know but that in their eyes you were like angels?’”
In this brief imagined exchange between God and the scouts, the midrash underscores the insidious nature of self-doubt, the way we can mistake it for truth, the way it can indeed become “a land that devours its inhabitants.”
The antidote, the midrash insists, is cultivating the capacity to open up some space between our inner experience and outer reality. This is the vital, life-giving space of breath, hope, possibility. The voice of God is the voice that speaks to us, saying: I understand that you are afraid. I understand that you feel small. But take a minute. Leave room for the possibility that your fear is not the whole story. How do you know but that in their eyes you were like angels?
Perhaps the very end of this week’s portion – the mitzvah of tzitzit, of wearing fringes on the corners of our garments – can best be understood as a way of ritually enacting this very truth, a way of keeping open this dialogue with the divine voice in our own lives.
The word tzitzit, according to Rashi and other commentators, is related to the Hebrew word metzitz, or “to peer,” as in the verse from Song of Songs, “metzitz min hacharakim” – “peering through the latticework.”
We, who have a tendency to see ourselves as grasshoppers at times, need to be continually reminded to expand our vision and remember that we stand in every moment before a loving God. In those moments when self-doubt clouds or constricts our vision, we are asked to lift our eyes, to try to peer through the cracks in the walls we have built, and open ourselves to the possibility that we may be like angels in the eyes of an Other.
From Rabbi David Ingber
The Eyes Have It
https://soundcloud.com/romemu/the-eyes-have-it-shelach-lecha
From the Maqam Project
From Reb Shlomo
Retold by Reb Shalom Brodt
From Rivers of Blood to Rivers of Joy
And here is a heartbreaking, deep question. The spies had clear prophecy. They were all the greatest pupils of Moshe Rabbeinu. Why did they come back and say bad things about Israel? And also, Calev and Yehoshua, who gave them the strength to hold out? And there’s so many, so many Torahs. Let me share with you one.
The first thing is that the truth is–yes, they [the spies] had clear prophecy. You know what they saw? They saw rivers of blood coming out of Yerushalayim, flooding the whole world. They saw the destruction of the First Temple and they saw the destruction of the Second Temple. They saw Auschwitz; they saw Dachau. They saw the Six-Day War, they saw the Yom Kippur War, and, you know, they said, “Why do we need it? Let’s stay in the desert.” So they were right. The only thing is, they made one mistake. They didn’t realize that all this is only happening because of them. If they would come back and say good things, all the rivers of blood from Yerushalayim would be turned into rivers of joy.
You know how deep this is? Sometimes we see bad things in the world, we see terrible things in another human being …. but it’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. I mean, this is deeper than Yom Kippur–cuts right through you in a million ways.
But Yehoshua and Calev had holy eyes and were so pure they immediately saw the Gevaltige rivers of joy, so they said it’s a great Land. Every time we see only good in another person we are fixing the mistake of the spies, hastening the redemption; may it be quick in our days. Amen.
From Rabbi David Ingber
To Live our Lives Through our Own Eyes
http://soundcloud.com/romemu/shlach5772
Please click on the link to the sound file.
From Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan
Shlach
Overcoming Fear (5772/2012)
Parshat Shlach introduces some frightening mythical beings: the Anakites, giant people; and the Nefilim, disruptive princes who survived the great flood. When the Israelite scouts return from their tour of the Land, ten of them insist that a military campaign is impossible, because “all the people that we saw in the land are men of great size; we saw the Nefilim there – the Anakites are part of the Nefilim – and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” (Num 13:32-33)
But forty years later, the Israelites do wage war on Anakite kings and defeat them – most notably, as Moshe proudly reports, “King Og of Bashan…his bedstead, an iron bedstead…is nine cubits long and four cubits wide, by the standard cubit!” (Deut 3:11)
How do the Israelites succeed? Moshe suggests that the people learn to let go of their fear; after that, God delivers Og into their hands. Midrash explains how they let go: they find the strengths hidden within their limitations. So what if they are only grasshoppers compared to the other armies? Grasshoppers can, after all, mutate into locusts. “Og King of Bashan said, “I will go and uproot a hill and throw it upon the Israelites and kill them. He uprooted it and brought it along on his head. And the Holy One of Blessing brought locusts which bored through it.” (Talmud Berachot 45b)
When we become aware that fear prevents us from moving forward with something important, we can apply the lesson from the midrash. We can ask, “What am I afraid I cannot do? Does this fear come from any positive quality in me? If so, how can I use this good trait to move forward?”
From Rav DovBer Pinson
Parshas Sh’lach
Positive Vision
by Rav DovBer Pinson
In this week’s Torah portion Moshe/Moses sends the twelve scouts, the leaders of the tribes of Israel, to go from their encampment in the desert and observe the land of Israel.
The Torah reading begins with the words;“Hashem spoke to Moshe saying. Send out men…Ve’yasuru/ and they shall observe the Land…which I am giving to the children of Israel (13:1-2) Moshe instructs the spies to “see what the land is like” (13:18)
Their task is to see the land.
The common misconception is that they were told to be spies. But looking at the verse carefully, they were not sent to spy and figure out the best possible way to conquer the land, they were merely asked to observe.
Moshe sends them to see the land, on a deeper level, not only to see for themselves the goodness of the land, but to actually effect through their seeing, a positive elevation of the land. In this way they would ‘acquire’ the land, it would become theirs and transformed into a holy land.
The ancient philosophers argued about how we see things. There are two major theories: in order to see something, the light from the object comes toward us and we receive it, or, our eyes emit the ‘light’ of vision, which goes out to meet objects.
Today, empirical evidence proves that sense-objects are received in your brain. As you look at something, for example, the words on this screen, rays of light pass from the screen to your eyes, and these register as an inverted image of the page in your retina. Light-sensitive cells then cause impulses to pass through your optic nerve, leading to complex electrochemical patterns in your brain, which you finally interpret as a page with words on it. This is a one-way path, from the object to the subject.
One thing still remains a mystery in this process. Why do we see the image of the page in front of us ‘outside’ of us, when the image is actually appearing within us, or within our brain?
If one were perceiving accurately, perhaps it would be more natural to say, ‘I am seeing a page in my mind,’ rather than ‘I am seeing a page two feet away from my face.’ Only our projection of the image outward onto an assumed ‘outside’ world makes objects appear outside of ourselves.
Therefore, in a sense, while light is received by our eyes and nervous system, we can also argue that we project or ‘emit’ the light of vision outward. Our minds extend to the outside world, so-to-speak.
Taking this idea further, we enter the realm of basic quantum theory, in which the observer is understood to affect the observed. Biologists and theorists discuss another mystery: some people can accurately sense when an unseen person is staring at them. Here, not only does a ‘seer’ affect the seen, but a ‘seer’ ‘out there’ can seem to affect us ‘in here’. This is the amazing power of ‘seeing’.
According to the deep teachings of Torah, the way we see affects the things we are viewing. For example, someone with pure intention creates a positive energy when looking at something, and the opposite holds true as well. Our vision emits subtle vibrations into the universe and towards the object/person we are viewing.
Coming back to the story of the twelve scouts and its unfortunate ending, we find that ten of the twelve scouts failed in their mission. They returned with a negative report; “And there we saw the giants…and we were in our own eyes as grasshoppers, and so were we in their eyes.” (13:33)
They had no real way of knowing how they were perceived in the eyes of the natives, however, since in their own view they were unfit and not ready to enter the land, they therefore assumed that that was the reality, the natives were ‘giants’ and they were mere ‘grasshoppers.’ They looked from a perspective of negativity, not wanting and desiring to enter the land, and therefore the land was negative and impossible to enter and inhabit.
We don’t see things the way they are, rather, we perceive things the way we are.
The ten spies were pessimistic about entering the land of Israel. They had other motives, wishing to remain spiritually sheltered in the desert and led by Moshe and therefore went in with a negative and self-defeating attitude, and created a negative reality for themselves and the people.
In contrast, the other two spies, Yehoshua and Kalev, understood the inherent benefit of inhabiting the land of Israel and appreciated it as the gift that it was. They were passionate and excited about Israel and so, even though the land they observed was the same as the other scouts, the land they ‘saw’ was completely different. The message they came back with was, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” (13:30)
This created a reality in which they truly were able to conquer. In fact, it was Yehoshua, the scout who saw the land in a positive light, who was empowered to finally lead the nation into their land.
Energy of the Week
Positive Vision
This week’s energy imbues us with the ability to see positively all the events and people we come in contact with.
We can choose the things we see. If we understand deeply that what we see is a reflection of who we are and how we are choosing to perceive, we can then choose to perceive in a positive and uplifting manner.
When we immediately see something as negative, we need to go back into ourselves, where the light is being absorbed, and change the refraction. If we can imagine something as being wonderful and positive, we can see it that way, and when we see it that way – it becomes that way.
We must be careful how we view things, or interpret them, as our very ‘seeing’ affects the quality of that thing.
When we view an event or a person in a positive light, we actually create positive energy which changes the very nature of that event or person.
Be conscious that when you see something deeply, it becomes a part of you, and thereby choose to create a better reality for yourself with positive vision.
From Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan
Spirit of the Dog: Parsha Shlach 2011
Calev, Loyal Scout
Shlach means “Send!” Moshe sends 12 scouts to tour and analyze the land of Canaan and analyze it from lifestyle and strategic points of view. Can it support a mixed agricultural lifestyle? How difficult would it be for an army to enter?
All the scouts report that the land is agriculturally abundant, yielding giant grapes. But ten of the scouts also report that no army could enter be because the farmers are also giants. The assembled crowd hears the report, panics, and moves to attack Moshe for exposing them to danger. Calev leaps forward and says, “But we can do it!”
Who is Calev? If you remove the vowels from under the letters of his name and read it in a familiar way, you will read kelev, Dog. We know that dogs can be very brave out of loyalty to a master. Torah also suggests that dogs are spiritually and emotionally attuned to their surroundings, as it reports that dogs kept their silence on the night of the tenth plague.
If you replace the vowels under the letters of Calev’s name and read it aloud, you will notice it literally means “like a heart,” or, in Biblical Hebrew, “like a mind.” As a mob forms, Calev keeps his focus and thinks clearly. He is attuned to the well-being of his leader Moshe, and he encourages the people to take heart.
If you imagine that the names of the twelve scouts were the formal leadership names they chose, you can see that Calev chose his own name intentionally. Under stress, he brought forward the best qualities of the animal that inspired him.
From Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan
LOCUSTS AND GRASSHOPPERS: BIBLICAL POWER ANIMALS
WHY PAY ATTENTION TO LOCUSTS AND GRASSHOPPERS?
Animal characters in Hebrew Bible are never random. The authors know their biology. And they know their ecology. And they assume that you do too. So if you know how an animal lives, then you can understand its role in a story, and you can deeply receive the story’s spiritual message.
Today’s animal is…the grasshopper. A strong supporting character throughout Hebrew Bible.
ISAIAH INVOKES GRASSHOPPERS…ALSO KNOWN AS LOCUSTS
The Prophet Isaiah says, “Don’t you get it? God dwells above the circle of the earth, and those who dwell on earth are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40: 21-22).
From the human perspective, grasshoppers are really small. About the size of an adult’s thumb. From this human perspective, Isaiah reminds us that God is infinitely creative, powerful, everlasting, energetic, and wise – while we are only kinda sorta a little bit creative and wise, with a little bit of power and a little bit of energy.
But from the grasshopper’s perspective, a grasshopper is not small at all. It’s just the right size. The right size to inspect grassy grains, to see how plants grow, and decide what to eat. And the right size to launch a leap with a height 10x the grasshopper’s length…and a distance 20x the grasshopper’s length. The grasshopper is just the right size to vault up…and catch a glimpse of heaven as it travels. Isaiah wants us to know that we may be small, but we can glimpse the infinity of God. Just like the grasshopper!
GRASSHOPPERS CARRY SPARKS OF DIVINITY
Isaiah’s poetic Hebrew gives us two hints of the grasshopper’s spirituality. Two hints that the grasshopper holds a little spark of the essence of God. Isaiah uses the same word to talk about how God lives, and how the grasshopper lives. God yoshev, dwells, above the earth, and the grasshopper is among the earth’s in-dwellers, yoshveiha. Both God and the grasshopper “dwell.”
Isaiah also draws a connection between where God lives and the word for “grasshopper.” God dwells above the chug, the circle, of planet earth, and earth-dwellers are like chagavim, the grasshoppers. Can you hear the alliteration? Yoshev, yoshveiha; Chug, chagavim. A grasshopper may look small to us, but God’s life and the grasshopper’s life are connected.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE GRASSHOPPERS
Isaiah presses this message because misunderstanding a grasshopper’s power can have terrible consequences. As it does in this story from the Book of Numbers (Num. 13:1-14:39). The Israelites are camped in the wilderness, somewhere between Egypt and Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey. God says to Moses, “Get yourself twelve scouts. Twelve distinguished people with good leadership qualities. Send them to scout out this land of Canaan where you’ll be living. You can hear straight from them what kind of a land it is.”
Moses appoints the scouts, and sends them out. Forty days later, the scouts come back. They report to Moses in front of all the people. They say: “This is indeed a land flowing with milk and honey. Just look at these grapes and pomegranates and figs we brought back! They’re gigantic! But so are the people. Next to them, we looked to ourselves like grasshoppers.”
As soon as the people hear the word “grasshoppers,” they start yelling and crying. They become terrified. They rail against Moses and Aaron. “Why did God bring us to the wilderness just to kill us!?! We might as well die right here and now!”
And God says, “You know, you’re right. You are not ready to enter the land. You’ll get your wish to die in the wilderness. When the next generation grows up, they’ll have the opportunity to enter the land flowing with milk and honey.”
WHEN GRASSHOPPERS BECOME LOCUSTS
Why do the people become afraid as soon as they hear “we looked to ourselves like grasshoppers”? Because they are thinking only of how small the grasshopper’s body is. They’ve forgotten about the grasshopper’s extraordinary jump, and the glimpses it gets of heaven every time it jumps.
And they’ve forgotten one more important thing about grasshoppers. They’ve forgotten about grasshopper transformation. When a big group of grasshoppers get together, their bodies and their minds change. They become migratory locusts.
For years, modern biologists tried to identify the baby form of a migratory locust. But they couldn’t find any babies – until entomologist Boris Uvarov figured it out in the early 20th century. When desert drought gets extreme, and only a few tiny patches of moist grass can be found, grasshoppers congregate there. When the area gets so crowded that the grasshoppers can’t move without rubbing up against one another, their brain chemistry literally changes. Their serotonin levels rise. Their bodies harden. They eat more. Mate more. Develop a group mind. And they fly off together, a billion strong, in search of food. Once they’ve swarmed, nothing can stand in their way. Your field becomes their lunch. Their dinner. And their breakfast.
BIBLICAL LOCUSTS ARE MISSION SPECIALISTS
In Hebrew Bible, locust swarms are God’s armies. Their deployment is never random. Locusts are mission specialists. Sometimes people forget that a creative, energetic, and wise God dwells above the chug, the circle of the earth. That’s when the locusts, the community of chagavim, grasshoppers, show up.
They visit Pharaoh in the Exodus story. Pharaoh is not a fan of inclusive community. He feels terribly threatened by immigrants. Especially the numerous Israelites. So he oppresses them, enslaves them, kills them. God sends a message, “Let my people go.” Pharaoh ignores God and ignores God’s message. So God sends a giant community, a swarm of locusts, to strip Pharaoh’s fields. Pharaoh doesn’t get it, but his advisors do. They say, “Let the people go, so they can worship their God!”
LOCUSTS: A POWERFUL COMMUNITY
Locusts visit the Israelites in the time of the prophet Joel. Years of abundant harvest have destroyed Joel’s community. Agribusiness has created huge divisions between exploitive landowners and desperate day laborers. Rich and poor alike have forgotten that their number one religious responsibility is to look out for the welfare of others. So, God sends a giant community, a swarm of locusts, to remind them. When the locusts consume the fields, the prophet Joel sees the power of their community. And he calls his people into community to start over together (Joel 1-4).
And now you see, that Isaiah’s little reference to the grasshopper is not little at all. Isaiah hints at the locusts. He hints at Pharaoh, at Joel, at the power of inclusive community. After mentioning the grasshopper, Isaiah continues. “God brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, when God blows upon them, and they wither. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? The One who brings out their host and counts them, calling them all by name. Because God is great in strength, mighty in power, not one fails to show up.” (Isaiah 40:23-26)
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ISAIAH’S GRASSHOPPERS?
Isaiah just about says that we are the grasshoppers. We’re tiny, in the grand scheme of creation. Sometimes we get lost in our solitary concerns. But when times get tough, we glimpse a different spiritual possibility. We gather into community to support one another. In community, we become strong, we find a political voice, and we inspire other communities.
Isaiah speaks to the community of Judeans returning from exile in 530 BCE. Today, our communities include synagogues, mosques, churches and temples. They can include networks of spiritual groups across traditions. When our connections are strong, no one can divide us for political gain.
From Rabbi James Stone Goodman
Send Somebody, part 1 2011
Send him send him send me –
What did we know
that another ten did not?
Was it safe?
I don’t know.
The other ten were certain
There are giants in the Land –
Scared the hell out of us.
One took a side trip
prayed on the graves of his ancestors
and from that drew strength to be optimistic –
Now we are optimists, he said.
What’s an optimist? I asked.
One who fails with enthusiasm –
I told my children this
and instructed them to tell their children
etcetera etcetera –
far into the future
until there came a generation
that spoke only dark words.
Send Somebody, part 2
In the generation of dark words
we started over –
it was not unexpected
but we didn’t prepare enough to avoid it entirely.
A lady stuck her head outside the second floor window –
What’re you boys looking for? The Land?
It’s yours, the hearts of all the people have melted.
Have you seen the blue?
A thread of blue
to look and remember
the blue comes up once every seventy years –
until recently.
Nowadays I carry it around in my bag.
A minority story saves us
a thread of blue reminds us now and again
of the essential:
There were twelve
ten were full of it
one of them laid flat out on the graves of the ancestors
got strong there
brought another one in –
From the future we prefer
the minority report
because
it’s true.
jsg, usa
From Rabbi Miles Krassen
Parsha Shelakh-Lekha, 5770
Question: In regards to the Shelakh-Lekha parsha, it opens with, “The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people; send one man from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among them.’ So Moses, by the LORD’s command, sent them out from the wilderness of Paran, all the men being leaders of the Israelites. And these were their names…” (Be-Midbar, 13:1-4). It then goes directly into the names and the tribal relevance, the list of which is part of the beginning of this parsha. I intuit there is information here with how we may relate to this on another level, perhaps even with how we may navigate through the sefirot with this list. It appears that these names and the related tribes are symbols and keys, but what are they symbols of, if that is even the case? How do we relate to this teaching that is coming through here as hasidim? Please clarify.
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: This is a good question.
One thing I would want to say as an important principle is there are a lot of sources for decoding but, one thing I would say as a general principle is there is a way in which the microcosm and the macrocosm are related. And so, a lot of the things that we get in Tanakh and in the Torah are the map of the macrocosm and the kind of information that we need to get is how that map applies to each person as a microcosm. The land of Israel is a kind of model for understanding the disparate parts of both the macrocosm and the microcosm. So, one of the things that we have to do is first of all take a look at the map and see where each tribe is located.
Question: How do you mean? Which map are we looking at?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: The map of how the land of Israel was physically divided. That’s the macrocosm. And so the principle is first you have to have a map, a model of the totality and, even beyond that, there is more than one level because the land of Israel itself represents the model of conscious energy that is working to accomplish the Ge’ulah, the redemption, which is ultimately a macrocosmic redemption, meaning that its interest is in the entire world although it is expressed kiveyachol, locally. I’m reminded of Reb Zalman who loves to say, “Act locally and think globally,” and in a way that is what kind of map this is: locally this is sort of where you work in these places and there is a different energy in each part of the land of Israel that’s apportioned to a particular tribe.
So let’s say there are three levels, the first of which is the macro-macrocosm, for which, there are actually more levels than this. We’re just looking at three as a way of simplifying the example. For example, someone like Gurdjieff tried to map out these levels with the various octaves and different planets. The point being these maps and models can be made to be universal and global, galactic even; these models can go out and out and out, but the main focus for us is Gaia, is the Earth.
Question: So the micro-macrocosm would be the first level, so to speak? This being the physical land of Israel and then the macrocosm of the land of Israel is Gaia, our manifest world…?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: Right. And there’s a macro even for that map of the land of Israel, to be even more specific. The land of Israel can be a micro in relation to an even bigger macro and all of these levels of micro and macro are analogous to a particular relationship to a related macro and micro sphere, which can be extended out infinitely
Question: So these maps of micro in relation to a macro is reflective of the way the Etz Chayim works? We’re talking about a model quite similar to the Etz Chayim?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: That’s right. The thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that the maps are just like a yardstick: the yardstick gives you markings that are dynamic and relative that is a usable range, but we can’t measure the whole macro-world with a yardstick. But, you can move the yardstick, for example, when you get to the end of what appears measurable, you can bump up or adjust the yardstick to measure further out, so to speak. But if you have a yardstick, you then have a way to measure what appears from one’s distinct perspective top and bottom, the left and the right, and all the six directions the Sefer Yetzirah talk about. But people often think that the yardstick is the totality whereas in actuality it’s only a movable and relative means to measure where one is in the various worlds as we do not know what the limits are.
Question: The yardstick, then, implies that we’re measuring something we recognize and, the fact of the matter is that this yardstick grows, so to speak, as we grow and further explore the dimensions the Sefer Yetzirah teaches about, all the while further increasing the size of our map?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: Yes, that’s right. This process extends and can expand infinitely.
Question: And so this relates to our ancestral tribes…
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: …because they are part of the map. Each tribe is given a spot, a particular domain within the land of Israel. So, to be able to decode the information, the first thing you need to do is get a map of the land of Israel, of where the tribes are within the land of Israel. You can get such a map, for example, in Aryeh Kaplan’s Chumash translation, “The Living Torah.” Then you can clearly see where each tribe is located and everything has meaning in terms of the model. So once you have the clarity of the map, then you can transfer the information from the macro of the land of Israel to the micro of the individual human being.
Let’s say that as an individual human being, you are an analogue of the land of Israel if you are engaged in the Jewish tradition. By engaging the tradition you are in effect saying you’re using this particular map and this model in order to understand yourself in the universe. So first you have to see where it is in the land of Israel to understand what part of your person, what part of your body, and what part of your neshamah is governed by which particular tribe. This is called K’lal Yisrael, being a complete Israel, Israel in totality and some of the secrets in the decoding. If we’re going to look into the decoding, we can find it in the blessings that Yaakov, that Jacob gives to each of the tribes. Before his death he calls all of the tribes in and each one receives a specific blessing. There’s the information relevant to what the function is of how each one is different from another and what their function is and so forth.
The Nesi’im is one of the terms used…there is the Nasi, which is usually translated, “the prince,” or “chieftain” or something like that, but what it really means is something like what we saw in the parsha from two weeks ago, which is parshat Naso’, it means “lifting up.” What is the active agent that lifts up the function of each tribe? Then, to understand that you have to go to the specific names, for example, the Nesi’im of this particular tribe is so and so and so and so. And generally, because of the letters in Hebrew all represent specific building blocks or types of energy, according to the Sefer Yetzirah, there is an encoded message in the very name, for example, of each of these tribes. Further, for example in Naso’ last week, a lot of the parsha talks about the Gershuney, the sub-tribe whose name comes from Gershon, which is an aspect of the Levites. The name Gershon has within it the root Gimel-Reish-Shen, which means Geyrush, “driven out,” or “separated.” So this is a particular family in the macro of the people of Israel. To complete this example of a specific name, this name represents that element within us which has a tendency to fall out and which has to be lifted up. So in the torah of Naso’, one aspect is that it’s about raising up the name of Gershon, this being the element which gets separated. What is the element that gets separated? It is the heart, it’s what comes in the middle as when we generally get stuck, very often we’re in binary form.
Binary form for us means we’re somewhat split between a mind and a body and we have trouble keeping the two integrated together and this is really what dualism is: when we function as a conscious mind separate from a body, when the body appears to be doing one thing and the mind is somewhere else. But then there is the piece that comes between.
The Torah is basically dialectical and the dialectical principle is basically in threes, it’s in triads. There’s a version, for example, of this that also appears in Gurdjieff’s work. He talks very specifically about triads. Gurdjieff didn’t get this out of the blue! The Torah is really based on triads; there’s a whole midrash that says, ‘the three-part Torah (Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim) was given to the three-part people (Kohen, Levi, Yisrael) by the Third Born (Moshe) on the third day of the third month,’ to get across to us that we need triads. Dyads are good but if we don’t have the piece in the middle then they pull each other apart. The middle is where the Gershuneys function; the part that has to be lifted up is the heart that connects the head—that integrates the head—with the body.
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Question: In looking deeper into this parsha, can we apply the concept of triads and the reminder to go back and explore the macrocosm of Israel? And as we explore the macrocosm and then are led to the microcosm that is us as individuals, but also globally…what is the triad that is being formed here? How do we increasingly stay connected with our tribes of Israel as taught in the Torah, both as individuals and communities?
Answer, Reb Moshe Aharon: As you said, the tribe is very important here because, even though the yardstick could be extended infinitely, for us there are basically three main levels that we need to be cognizant of, which is our own individual self as the micro-microcosm. But we, as the micro-microcosm, in order to have power, in order to have meaning, we have to have the macrocosm that gives the micro its relative map and it is this map that gives meaning. The map that is giving us meaning is K’lal Yisrael. So we’re participating both as an analogue of the land of Israel and its divisions and also as an analogue to the tribes of Israel, which is like body and neshamah. But in order for this practice to have power, then we have to see that our map is itself a micro and its power comes from and is vested in its analogue, which is something much greater. And this is why it’s important for us to keep, stay with, and use our tradition, to relate to it and to draw power from it but also to draw the power from beyond our macro, because power is ultimately infinite, but practically speaking it gets exhausted if it’s not renewed. So every macro is a micro in relation to something else and we need a macro for our macro and that’s the triad for us. So it becomes the mediating point between something that is bigger and higher than it is and by doing so it can pass on to us, through its unique model, the energies that will be conducive to transformation on our personal, micro-level.
What I learn from Reb Sholom’s comment (above) is a reminder of how much our spiritual practice as Jews is about engaging in the day-to-day material world around us.
The land of Yisrael — literally “wrestling with God” — is a metaphor for the whole world, this world of stuff in which we find ourselves. As human beings, we are here on two levels. The first is to “plough, plant, sow and reap.” The second is, while we’re doing all this, to draw down the light from above and lift up the sparks from below. What an awesome mission! May be blessed to strengthen each other along the way.
From Academy for Jewish Religion/CA
Parshat Shelach
Torah Reading for Week of May 30 – June 5, 2010
“The Challenge of the Spies”
by Tamar Frankiel, PhD
AJR, CA Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Comparative Religion
This parsha opens with the story of the sin of the spies, which led to forty years of wandering in the wilderness. This event carries echoes of the worst previous sin, that of the golden calf a year before. In each, G-d threatened to destroy the Jewish people; in each, resolution came from Moshe’s recitation of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, the only two times that recitation occurs in the Torah. In addition, the “murmurings” against Moshe in last week’s parsha remind us of the times a year before that the people had also complained for lack of food and water.
With these parallels between the two times of complaining, the two great sins, and their resolution, the Torah seems to invite comparison and contrast. What can we learn from this?
The apparent failure of Moshe to return from the mountaintop led to the crisis of the calf. In a state of panic that turned into mania, the people created a substitute that they could worship. At the sin of the spies, leadership was again the issue in a different way: ten of the spies questioned and rebelled against him.
As Nechama Liebowitz points out, those spies gave three different reports. To Moshe they said, “We came into the Land . . . it does flow with milk and honey; nevertheless the people are fierce. . . and the cities strongly fortified.” When Caleb urged preparation for immediate conquest, they told him, “We are not able to go against the people; they are stronger than we.” Then, when they spoke to the rest of Bnei Yisrael, they said, “The land . . . eats up its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of great size.” The three different stories reveal the spies’ own internal conflict. They report to Moshe with reasonable accuracy. To their colleague, they challenge his assessment. To the people, they exaggerate in order to turn everyone against the project, and against Moshe. After the murmurings and complaints of the previous parsha, this was not a difficult job.
With the golden calf incident, the people just had to sit and wait; but like anxious children, they could not tolerate the anxiety. At the time of the spies, they had been confronted with adult responsibility. G-d was asking them to get moving – go into the world, take responsibility for their mission, and defeat all obstacles. For this, the people were far less ready than Moshe thought. G-d too was disappointed.
Yet this is human nature. Most of us know that feeling – the moment when we are called to do what we said we would do, and we suddenly fear we’re not ready. Our stomach clenches, our knees shake, we feel a chill. Sometimes we overcome our doubt and march ahead. At other times, we back off, look for an escape, make excuses, or find someone to blame for setting an impossible task.
How do we cope with fear and anxiety, the sense of falling apart in the face of enormous challenges? The end of the parsha contains an answer symbolically, in the mitzvah of tzitzit, which we also recite daily as the third paragraph of the Shema. The tzitzit are four strands, folded and tied in a very specific way. If you have ever tied tzitzit, you know it takes patience and attention, but the strands then form a very strong bond. The tzitzit themselves proclaim: when you feel your life is disintegrating under the challenges you face, you can tie it back together. The mitzvah is to look, to see into reality rather than feed off our fears; to remember, calling to mind all the service we do for G-d; and to be mindful also of our ultimate purpose, to be holy to your G-d.
This essay is in honor of the bar mitzvah parsha of our son Yaakov Asher, born 21 Sivan.
From Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
Five Cities of Refuge
The Nephilim, these Goliaths who inhabit the Promised Land are already mentioned back in Genesis 6:4. There we learn that in those primordial times “the Nephilim were then on earth.” This account is so long ago, at the beginning of Genesis, because it is also deep within the childhood memory of every human being. Now there was a time when real giants prowled the land and we felt like grasshoppers. It is an indelible, if repressed, unonconscious memory in each of us. Contrary to the intended effect of nursery pastel colors and soft lullabies, this was frequently not a time of abiding personal security. Who could relax with giants everywhere?
Taking possession of the Land of Canaan may therefore also be a metaphor for returning to the scene of one’s childhood–now prepared to stand one’s own against its inhabitants, to conquer it for oneself. It is going back to when you were a child among huge people. If you were lucky, they were kind and loving, but even if they were, the thought must have crossed every child’s mind: If those guys ever get mad at me, I’m toast. So, to be able to stand toe-to-toe with them, now that you’re grown up yourself, must surely be one of the great joys of coming of age.
Menahem Mendl Morgenstern of Kotzk says that it’s all right to say you feel like a grasshopper in your own eyes– that means you’re alert–but when you start guessing what you look like to someone else, you’ve given them permission to define you, so you’re still a child. For this reason, Caleb, who refused to let anyone else define him, is a man and, along with Joshua, was one of the only two men of the wilderness generation to live to enter the Promised Land. But that’s another story.
From Chabad.org
It is a land that consumes its inhabitants (13:32)
What was the reason that the Spies, who were leaders of Israel and men of lofty stature, did not want to enter the Land?
The explanation of the matter is as follows:
A great majority of the physical mitzvot can be implemented only in the Land of Israel, especially the agricultural laws and the laws of the offerings brought to the Holy Temple… The Spies, who were on a most lofty spiritual level, did not wish to lower themselves to the level of physical action, preferring to remain in the desert, where they received all their needs from above, and related to G-d by means of the loftier levels of thought and speech (i.e., study of Torah and prayer). They desired to draw down all the Divine emanations into the “Land of Israel” that exists in the realm of Malchut, the world of Divine speech, where there also is a “Jerusalem” and a “Holy Temple.” Regarding the physical Land of Israel, they said: “It is a land that consumes its inhabitants”–if the Divine light were to be drawn down into the physical world, our entire existence would be nullified.
But Joshua and Caleb said, “The Land is very, very good.” It is specifically in the Land of Israel down below, and specifically by means of the mitzvot implemented by physical action, that the truly infinite light of G-d is drawn down–a light that includes both the spiritual and the material, which is why it is “very, very” good.
(Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi)
—————————————————————————————————-
And they found a man gathering sticks (15:32)
The gatherer was Tzelaphchad (whose daughters petitioned Moses to receive his share in the Land–cf. Numbers 27)… this is Rabbi Akiva’s view. Said Rabbi Judah ben Beteira to him: “Akiva! In either case you will be called to task. If you are right, the Torah shielded him, while you reveal him! And if not, you cast a stigma upon a righteous man.”
(Talmud, Shabbat 96b)
—————————————————————————————————
And it shall be to you as fringes; and you shall see it (15:39)
Said Rabbi Meir: it does not say, “and you shall see them,” but “and you shall see Him” (the Hebrew Otto, also translates as “him”). This teaches that every one who fulfills the mitzvah of tzitzit, it is as if he has greeted the face of the Divine Presence. For the blue thread resembles the sea, the sea resembles grasses, grasses resemble the sky, and the sky resembles the Divine throne.
(Jerusalem Talmud, Berachot 1:2)
From Rav Kook
Shlach: The Third Passage of Shema
Every evening and morning, we say the Shema, Judaism’s supreme declaration of monotheistic faith. In the first passage, we accept upon ourselves the yoke of God’s sovereignty. And in the second, we accept God’s commandments.
Six Themes
Interestingly, the Sages added a third paragraph to the Shema — the passage commanding us to wear tzitzit (tassels) on the corners of our garments (Num. 15:37-41). Why did they decide to add this particular paragraph, out of the entire Torah, to the central prayer of Judaism?
The Talmud (Berachot 13) explains that the passage of tzitzit contains not one, but six major themes:
•The mitzvah of wearing tzitzit on our garments;
•The Exodus (“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt”);
•Accepting the mitzvot (“You will thus remember and keep all of My commandments”);
•Resisting heresy (“You will not stray after your hearts”);
•Refraining from immoral and sinful thoughts (“and after your eyes”);
•Eschewing idolatry (“which have led you astray”).
Is there a common motif to these six themes? And secondly, while most are indeed fundamental concepts of Judaism, what is so special about the mitzvah of tzitzit, more than the other 612 commandments?
Spiritual Focus
This mitzvah in fact does contain a fundamental message. It touches on the basic issues of life: how do we realize our spiritual potential? How can we truly fulfill ourselves as human beings?
As Maimonides wryly noted, the philosophers composed numerous volumes and entire libraries trying to answer these questions. Despite their efforts, they failed to exhaust the topic. The Talmudic sages, on the other hand, succeeded in encompassing the issue by revealing its essence in one pithy statement: “Let all your deeds be for the sake of Heaven” (Avot 2:12).
Human perfection is attained by establishing a worthwhile spiritual goal for all of our efforts and activities in life. Once we have set our spiritual focus, we need to direct all of our aspirations, wants and actions according to that objective. Then we will be complete in all aspects and levels of our existence.
This is the message of tzitzit. The sky-blue techelet thread reminds us of the heavens and the Throne of Glory. The soul’s external expressions — character traits, emotions and actions — are like a garment worn on the outside, over the body. We need to connect all of these outer manifestations to our inner spiritual goal, our tachlit, in the same way that we tie our outer clothes with the special thread of techelet.
The Exodus from Egyptian bondage expands on this theme. We are no longer slaves, subjected to physical and moral repression. A slave cannot set goals for his life and actions — they are not under his control. God liberated us from slavery, giving us the freedom to elevate ourselves and to aspire towards our spiritual calling.
The acceptance of practical mitzvot continues the same message. All of our detailed actions should connect with our overall objective. Thus, we attain completion in all aspects of our existence: our intellect, emotions and conduct.
Avoiding the Pitfalls
The first three themes in the passage of tzitzit teach us how to fulfill the maxim, “All of your deeds should be for the sake of heaven.” The second three themes deal with three interrelated obstacles to this guideline.
The first pitfall is heresy. The fear of all-inclusive commitment, the desire to avoid moral responsibilities, can lead to denial of God or His Oneness. The path of heresy means abandoning elevated goals and rejecting ethical aspirations. Without a comprehensive objective and direction, the soul naturally seeks some other occupation. Lacking an overriding goal, the soul is tossed and flung like a stick in the sea, pulled by any internal or external lure. This leads to the second pitfall: attraction to base and corrupt actions.
In the end, however, a self-indulgent lifestyle leaves the soul with feelings of horrible emptiness. The soul recognizes that a life without meaning is a contradiction to its very essence. But since it has already lost its rational beacon by rejecting the light of truth, the soul seeks purpose and meaning in foreign fields. It tries to find spiritual sustenance in broken cisterns, the foundations of idolatry.
Thus, we see that this short passage includes the fundamental themes of Judaism. It describes that which gives our lives meaning and direction, and the major obstacles that can lead the soul astray. It is a fitting conclusion to our acceptance of God’s kingship in the Shema prayer.
(adapted from Ein Eyah vol. I, pp. 70-71)
Copyright © 2006 by Chanan Morrison
~ Rabbi Shefa Gold’s Torah Journeys ~
Shelach Lekha
(Send for Yourself)
NUMBERS 13:1 – 15:41
This Torah portion tells the story of the spies that are sent forth to survey the Land of Canaan in preparation for its conquest. They return with a mixed message. The Land is superb but too well-fortified to be conquered. Moses is bitterly disappointed with their fearful report and so decides that the people must wander another 40 years (until the generation of slavery has died out) before they can enter the Land.
Shelach Lekha concludes with the instruction to wear fringes of blue as reminders of holiness.
THE BLESSING
GOD SAYS TO MOSES: “Shelach Lekha” (send for yourself) spies to scout out the Land. The spies sent by Moses return both enraptured by the land and terrified at the prospect of making their permanent home in that elevated state of consciousness.
So too, this portion blesses us with a mission: Spy out the Land of our Inheritance, taste the milk and honey that flows from the Land of Promise, and let that taste guide us on your journey. The blessing we receive is a glimpse. What we do with that glimpse becomes the challenge.
Over a lifetime we are given glimpses, flashes, and hints that open our awareness to the Reality of paradise and unity that underlies this world of constant flux. We are graced with a timeless moment in which the infinite is revealed as the source of our finite world. We are sent to that land of expanded consciousness through imagination, practice and grace. We return from this taste of enlightenment either empowered to receive and integrate the supreme blessing into our lives, or completely terrorized by the incomprehensible immensity of what we feel is beyond our grasp.
“The land eats up its inhabitants,” report the spies. And they are correct. The small ego-driven separate self cannot survive in the pure air of that land. The “I” will be dissolved, called beyond itself, merging with the beauty and the mystery of that place.
The spies return from their mission divided.
AFTER A PEAK EXPERIENCE, we return to our life shaken. Whatever negativity is in us, born of grief or conditioning, is still there. Yet some part of us remembers that immensity, that taste of the infinite… or tries to remember.
That is our work: to remember what we have glimpsed and to plant the glimpse like a seed in the soil of our lives.
Shelach Lekha blesses us with both the mitzvah of remembering and a technology for fulfilling that mitzvah. We are instructed to put “tzitzit” (fringes) on the corners of our garments and to place at each corner a thread of the purest blue. Looking upon that color we will be reminded of the Sea, and the Sea will remind us of the Heavens, and the Heavens will remind us of the Throne of Glory that we glimpsed in a moment of clarity.1
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE
THE BLESSING WE RECEIVE IS A GLIMPSE. What we do with that glimpse becomes the challenge.
When I was in my twenties, I read Be Here Now by Ram Dass and I thought, “How simple! And how wonderful! That is how I will live my life.”
And then I had a dream. The dream gave me a glimpse into the state of consciousness that I was asking for – one of complete openness and presence. The dream showed me just a few minutes of that state. I saw the brilliance of every color, the symphony in every sound; each breath was breathed as a miracle; each moment held a lifetime of experience. I woke up totally overwhelmed… and sobered.
I knew for sure that I was not ready to enter the Land. I understood how naïve I had been to think I could attain that state without preparation. And I began to get a sense of the work that would have to be done in the wilderness during the next 40 years. I would need to build the strength of the container that might receive my inheritance: the fullness, the richness, the beauty, the mystery of each moment.
WE GLIMPSE THE PROMISED LAND, the place that is flowing with milk and honey, and then must return to the wilderness of our lives. This circuitous journey sets up a tension within us. We know the taste of perfection and yet the urge to reach for it calls us to battle again and again. We know that beneath the mask of suffering, there is grace. We have seen the light that is imprisoned within the shell of the world, the shell whose stubborn opacity shields us from the power of the truth within. The memory of our glimpse fuels our journey and keeps us from succumbing to the illusion and tyranny of this-is-all-there-is physical reality. That memory guides us through the wilderness.
SHELACH LEKHA GIVES ME THIS SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE: to remember what I have glimpsed and to plant the glimpse, like a seed, in the soil of my life. And Shelach Lekha warns me that if I deny that glimpse – if I doubt- its validity – then I will be denied entrance to the Land of Promise – the state of consciousness that witnesses Divine Presence filling the whole world. To plant the seed of that glimpse requires that I acknowledge and celebrate it, and that I nurture its growth with my loving attention.
1Talmud Menachot 43b
For Guidelines for Practice please click link to website.
http://www.rabbishefagold.com/shelach-lekha/
Excerpt from my book, Holy Beggars: A Journey from Haight Street to Jerusalem.
CHAPTER 22 – TZITZIT
April 1, 1969 – Oakland, California
© 2010 Aryae Coopersmith
I’m standing naked in a long straight line with 200 other naked young men. We’re at the
Armed Forces Examining and Induction Station in Oakland. There’s an orange stripe on
the gunmetal gray floor, and we’re all facing the stripe, with the other guys to our right
and our left. Following orders, we each have our clothes folded in a bundle and placed on
the floor to the left of where we’re standing….
Actually I’m not completely naked. I’m wearing my kippah on my head, and my tzitzit,
which is the fringed undergarment worn by religious Jewish men. To get an idea of what
it looks like, picture a piece of thin white cloth with a silk texture, about six feet long and
two feet wide, with a slit in the middle for the head to go through. It has little stripes
embroidered along its length. At each corner there is a set of white strings that are tied in
a series of complex knots, which leave the ends of the strings to hang in fringes. There
are 613 knots in the tzitzit, which stand for the 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the
Torah.
Here’s how Shlomo taught us about tzitzit. The word mitzvah is much deeper than
commandment. The Hebrew root is tzav, which means to tie, to connect. A mitzvah is
action in this world, right action that connects us to our deepest truth, and to God.
Shlomo said, why are the knots of the tzitzit tied to the corners? What is it about corners?
The Torah says, don’t be led by the impulses, the lusts and fears of your heart and your
eyes, which will get you lost; when you see the tzitzit, remember all My mitzvot and do
them. When we say those words in the morning prayers, we hold onto the tzitzit. So
Shlomo says, when do we most need something to hold onto? It’s when we’re backed
into a corner. It’s when I’m trapped and have no where to go; when I can’t find a way
out. That’s when I need to let go of my own eyes and heart and mind, and hold onto
God’s.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention, besides the tzitzit, I have my guitar strapped over
my shoulder, and I’m holding a stack of antiwar pamphlets from the American Friends
Service Committee.
To find out what comes next, you can read the whole chapter — Holy Beggars, Chapter 22: Tsitzit