Ups and Downs on the Way to Proper Peoplehood
by R. Gidon Rothstein
Parshat Shelach
The Difference Between Natural and Not
At the beginning of the parsha, Hashem tells Moshe to send spies to Israel, adding lecha, to you, making the phrase the unusual “send spies to/for you.” Among many discussions of the issue, Ha’amek Davar starts with the contrast between our parsha, where the initiative seems to come from Hashem, and when Moshe Rabbenu retells the story in Devarim, where he makes it seem it was the people’s idea.
He starts with Ramban’s view, there is an ordinary human need to spy out a target of conquest, to know the best means and paths of attack. The mission described in Devarim does not seek to know whether the land is good, Ramban pointed out, it asked for the best military routes and strategies.
Ramban is correct only if they are operating in a natural world, with God helping in the background. Had they been entering Israel with God’s direct Providence, as they have had until now, even Ramban’s spies would be superfluous. To Netziv, Hashem is pointing out they want to switch.
He thinks the last three stops on their travels, where they had complained and been punished immediately, had showed them what they considered a downside of such direct Providence. Unable or unwilling to bear the pressure, they chose to shift to a more natural existence, creating the need for spies.
He detects their right to choose in Moshe’s description of Hashem having spoken to them panim be-panim, literally face to face. Netziv says it also means God promised to deal with them the way they chose, the option of more and less direct providence, with each version’s advantages and dangers.
[On the other hand, he assumes Eldad and Medad’s prediction about Yehoshu’a being the one to lead the Jews into Israel was an inescapable prophecy, necessitated a switch to the natural course of events. It would take us too far afield to study here.]
Shelach lecha is Hashem saying to Moshe, fine, have it your way, alter course to a more background Providence, in which case spies are, indeed, the way to go.
Relevant Attributes Only
Doesn’t go well. After the Jews cry over the spies’ report, earning Hashem’s ire, Moshe prays on the people’s behalf, invoking some but not all of the Attributes of Mercy taught him at Sinai. Or HaChayim, among many, wonders about his choices. He spots the answer in Rosh Hashanah 17b’s elucidation of those Attributes.
The Gemara took the first two Attributes, Hashem’s four-letter Name said twice, to signal Hashem’s constancy, His being the same, as it were, before and after a Jew sins and repents. The Jews have already sinned, so the first four-letter Name is irrelevant, why Moshe only says “Hashem” once.
Moshe also doesn’t mention E-l, Rachum, or Chanun, the next three, because those are for where the only reason for mercy is God’s goodness, Or HaChayim says. He starts with Erech apayim, long to anger, because the Jews aren’t a lost cause, they have some or much good, they just also have some bad deserving immediate punishment.
Sanhedrin 111a thought a previous conversation taught Moshe to use Erech apayim here. When he had gone up to Heaven to receive the Torah, he saw Hashem writing Erech apayim, and reacted, that’s for the righteous. Hashem corrected him, even for evildoers. Now, Moshe used that for the people’s benefit, as Hashem intended.
Rav chessed, abundant in kindness, fits, too, because it speaks of a muddled judgment tipped towards kindness. Others, like Truth and Keeps Kindness for Thousands, were not relevant, where Nosei avon, bears sin, deliberate and rebellious, was. Not chata’ah, unwitting sin, because they knew what they were doing.
To litigate on behalf of a deliberately evildoing but not completely lost people, Moshe put forth the Attributes of Mercy that addressed that reality, says Or HaChayim.
Sforno’s Middah Ke-Negged Middah
In the details of the Jews’ punishment for crying at the false report of the spies, Sforno twice spots a direct reaction to specific wrongs. First, Hashem says the Jews will wander for forty years, yom la-shanah, a year per day, 14;34. I always thought it meant they had to bear a year of wandering for each day of the spies’ time in Israel, for no clear reason as to why a day should become a year.
Sforno solves the problem by saying it’s about Tish’a B’Av. The spies were gone for forty days, and the people cried about their report on the ninth of Av. Hashem wants them to experience 40 such ninths of Av (38 more). I think he means they are being punished for their crying, a crying built off of forty days of seeing Israel, so they need to experience their failure, their crying, forty times before they go in. A better link between action and punishment.
In verse 37, we are told the spies died in a magefah, a plague before God. Sforno connects it to their having called Israel a land that eats its inhabitants, to Sforno a claim Israel is full of plague. Hashem then hit them with that plague, the one they falsely accused the Land of foisting on its inhabitants.
He connects consequences to causes more closely than other readings I have seen.
Tzitzit and All the Mitzvot
Seeing tzitzit will remind a Jew of all the mitzvot of the Torah, the verse says, without explaining how. Kli Yakar offers two interesting options. His first requires two pieces of background, one better known than the other. Menachot 43b says techelet—the bluish string we are to include with the white ones, whose identity, thank God, seems to have been found in our times–is similar to the sea, the sea to the sky, the sky to the kisei ha-kavod, usually translated as Throne of Glory.
Kli Yakar doesn’t think the colors fully match they were similar, and similarity draws our attention; looking at techelet turns our attention to the sea, from there to the sky, etc. But so what?
The Sea and the Sky, Serving God in Fear and Love
He offers another Midrash to explain. Sifrei, also in Yalkut Ha’azinu 542, envisions Hashem having Moshe tell the people to look at the sky, which never changes its dimensions, never violates God’s order by, for example, the sun rising in the west. The Midrash quotes a verse to show the sky is happy to do it. The sea, too, sticks to the realms given it, showing its submission to a Greater Will, staying in its area out of yir’a, fear or awe [I think because waves crash against the beach, as if the sea would love to have more space]. If they do so, when they have no deep understanding, all the more should we, the Midrash says.
As we look at our techelet, Kli Yakar thinks the two sources teach us, we remember the sea, remember to serve God out of fear, instilling a deep care for and concern with not going wrong. From there, we move to thinking of the sky, serving out of love (a service Kli Yakar says will translate into enjoying the component actions of service, not only the avoidance of doing or going wrong).
From those two, we progress to thinking of God directly, fear and love reading us for the highest service. A process sparked by the techelet’s blue.
Mitzvot Bring on Mitzvot
Alternatively or perhaps additionally [I like that phrase], techelet actualizes Kohelet 9;8’s metaphor of clothing for our mitzvah observance. Most garments need many strings woven together, says Kli Yakar, but a “garment” for the soul can start with just one string, one mitzvah.
Avot 4;2 says mitzvah goreret mitzvah, one mitzvah causes another, a phrase Kli Yakar thinks indicates a covenant, something metaphysical, I think he means, where God has guaranteed that taking on one mitzvah will put us on a path to more. Adding to his claim, he says the one performance, since it has the potential to expand, counts as if the Jew has already fulfilled them all, at least in terms of the experience of seeing the techelet string.
The one string alerts us to the power of every mitzvah, any one of them able to move us from being spiritually bare to fully clothed, one bringing all, in potential.
Two ways the techelet starts us on the road to all the mitzvot, the “reminder” Kli Yakar takes the verse to intend.
Rashi on Stick Man
After the section on tzitzit, the parsha closes with one last story, 15;32, the people find a man gathering sticks on Shabbat. Rashi says this embarrasses us as a nation, our only having managed one Shabbat where all Jews observed properly. This fuels the tradition (based on two statements on Shabbat 118b) that if all Jews kept just one more Shabbat, Mashiach would come.
[I’m not sure we pay attention to this tradition’s assumption that after this man was caught and punished, the Jewish people still did not manage to fully observe Shabbat, all the rest of the time in the desert, other people failed to observe Shabbat properly].
I also am struck by how the blame is placed on the people as a whole. In a nation of 600,000 men, let alone women and children, one person “going rogue,” as it were, would not today be seen as revealing a flaw in the nation at large.
Rashi made a similar comment last parsha, that the Torah revealed a flaw in the nation in that they only observed one Pesach sacrifice/holiday in the desert. There, however, the whole nation did not act as it could have. Here, it’s one person whom they find and bring to justice. How does his wrongdoing reflect on all of the Jews?
Communal Standards Become Personal Standards
I think the question is the answer. A nation is characterized by each of its members (although more so by its larger groupings). A fully faithful nation would not have even one person who disregarded Shabbat. That any Jew could decide to violate it (perhaps especially because it was so new) reveals how well or poorly the nation had made Shabbat core to its identity. Were all Jews to have understood how essential it is to be ing Jewish, violating it would be unimaginable.
As John Donne wrote, Meditation XVII, No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
When the mekoshesh, the stick-gatherer, is caught, we are all caught; when one of us fails to keep Shabbat, it reflects on us all.
Ups and downs in the parsha, the national failure of the spies, Moshe saving us with judicious references to the Attributes, the spies themselves getting what they deserve, our being given the observance of tzitzit, a stepping-stone to greatness, where the mekoshesh is the first to show the road the other way, to death and ignominy.
Other Comments We Saw on This Parsha
Rashi, Bamidbar 13;2, Shelach
Ramban, Bamidbar 13;2 , Shelach
Emet Le-Ya’akov, Bamidbar 13;4, Ve-eleh shemot
Meshech Hochmah, Bamidbar 13;11, Le-mateh Yosef
Rashi, Bamidbar 13;15, Va-yikra Moshe
Onkelos, Bamidbar 13;19, ha-be-machanim im be-mivtzarim
Malbim, Bamidbar 13;21-2, Va-ya’alu
Rashi, Bamidbar 13;22, Va-yavo ad Chevron
Ramban, Bamidbar 13;32, Va-yotzi’u
Onkelos, Bamidbar 14;9, ki lachmenu hem
Ramban, Bamidbar 14;17, Ve-atah yigdal
R. Samson Raphael Hirsch,Bamidbar14;17, Ve-atah
Onkelos, Bamidbar 14;18, ve-nakei lo yenakeh
Rashi, Bamidbar 14;18, Ve-nakoh
Meshech Chochmah, Bamidbar 14;18, Ve-rav Chessed
Chatam Sofer, Bamidbar 14;20, Salachti kidvarecha
Onkelos, Bamidbar 14;33, ro’im
Onkelos, Bamidbar 14;34, tenu’ati
Meshech Hochmah, Bamidbar 15;13, Kol ha-ezrach
HaKetav VeHaKabbalah, Bamidbar 15;18, Ki tavo’u
Ibn Ezra, Bamidbar 15;38-39, Ve-asu lahem, ur’item oto
Rashi, Bamidbar 15;39, Ve-lo taturu