The Grasshopper in the Tree

The men had climbed the cedars, and the giants looked up and saw them.

Twelve of them, sent up into Canaan to bring back word, and when they reached the hill country around Hebron and saw the Anakim, the giants who farmed it. The Talmud imagines this scene, staged to answer a question the spies’ report leaves hanging—why did they say they were like grasshoppers in the eyes of giants?

The giants were eating a mourners’ meal under the cedars, and the spies, seeing them, climbed up into the same trees and held still over their heads, until one of the mourners glanced up and remarked that there were creatures in the leaves the size of grasshoppers (Sotah 35a). The spies had gone up to take the measure of the land. From that height they came back with the measure of themselves.

The parashah named for that mission, Shlach (Numbers 13 through 15, “send”), breaks into pieces a reader struggles to hold in one hand. First the disaster: twelve scouts, forty days, a report that shatters the nation and buys it forty years in the desert, a year for every day. Then a quiet stretch of law about flour and oil and the first portion of the dough. And then, in the final paragraph, the commandment of tzitzit (the knotted fringes a Jew ties to the corners of a four-cornered garment), with its lone thread of tekhelet (sky-blue wool).

A catastrophe of seeing, a recipe for meal-offerings, a fringe.

The tradition transmits this as one parashah.

One word threads the entire scouting narrative. The verb is תור, latur, to scout, to range across a thing and bring back a verdict on it. Moses sends the men la-tur the land (Numbers 13:2, 13:17). They go up and they range over it, va-yaturu (13:21). They return mi-tur ha’aretz, from the scouting of the land (13:25). The lie they carry home is dibat ha’aretz asher taru otah, the slander of the land that they had scouted (13:32). The root does the work of the sin. Four chapters later, in the last verse of the tzitzit passage, that same rare root surfaces one final time, and now it is forbidden.

וְהָיָ֣ה לָכֶם֮ לְצִיצִת֒ וּרְאִיתֶ֣ם אֹת֗וֹ ... וְלֹֽא־תָת֜וּרוּ אַחֲרֵ֤י לְבַבְכֶם֙ וְאַחֲרֵ֣י עֵֽינֵיכֶ֔ם “And it shall be fringes for you, and you shall see it ... and you shall not scout after your heart and after your eyes” (Numbers 15:39).

Lo taturu. Do not scout. The verb the spies wore as a job title becomes the single thing the fringe is given to forbid. Rashi hears the echo and welds the two halves of the parashah shut. On lo taturu he writes:

כְּמוֹ “מִתּוּר הָאָרֶץ”; הַלֵּב וְהָעֵינַיִם הֵם מְרַגְּלִים לַגּוּף ... הָעַיִן רוֹאָה וְהַלֵּב חוֹמֵד וְהַגּוּף עוֹשֶׂה אֶת הָעֲבֵרָה “The same as ‘from the scouting of the land.’ The heart and the eyes are the spies of the body. The eye sees, the heart covets, and the body commits the sin” (Rashi on Numbers 15:39, citing Midrash Tanchuma).

The eyes are meraglim, “spies.”

The spies were never only the twelve men in the trees. The failure in Canaan was a failure of the organ each of us scouts with.

The cities are fortified, the inhabitants are strong, the produce is enormous. A bunch of grapes takes two men and a pole. All true. What is not true:

וַנְּהִ֤י בְעֵינֵ֙ינוּ֙ כַּֽחֲגָבִ֔ים וְכֵ֥ן הָיִ֖ינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶֽם “And we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes” (Numbers 13:33).

The second clause is a report filed from inside someone else’s head. Rav Mesharshia will not let it pass. Meraglim shakkarei havu, “the spies were liars,” he says: how could they know how they sat in the giants’ eyes? The Talmud’s own answer is the scene in the cedars. They had overheard it (Sotah 35a). A mourner glanced up and said he saw men like grasshoppers in the branches. But that is a remark about size, men who looked small high in the trees. What the spies carried home was a verdict about worth, that they were nothing in those eyes, vermin the land would spit out. The giants supplied the scale. The contempt the spies added themselves, and reported back as news. Even assuming the spies were right about the judgments of others—they did not have to accept that judgment. This was their error. Ironically, the error not of mis-seeing, but of accepting the mis-seeing of others as correct. In today’s parlance, of allowing themselves to be “gaslit.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist writing in occupied Paris in 1943, gave the manufacture its modern name. Le regard, the look.

A man kneels at a keyhole, absorbed, and is nobody in particular until he hears a footstep in the hall. In that instant he becomes a thing that is being seen, fixed and judged from outside, shrunk to an object in a stranger’s world. Sartre’s point is that the shrinking happens before any actual onlooker arrives. The footstep is enough. The eyes that diminish you are the ones you supply on the other person’s behalf. This is the spies’ whole catastrophe rendered in French. They did not measure the contempt of the Anakim. They generated it, seated it behind the giants’ eyes, and called it intelligence. Up in the cedars, when they overheard the funeral remark about grasshoppers, they were hearing the echo of their own report come back at them through the leaves.

They had manufactured under fear once already, and the man who climbed the mountain to plead for them knew it. Moses goes up to argue the sentence down, and the words he reaches for are not his own.

יְהֹוָ֗ה אֶ֤רֶךְ אַפַּ֙יִם֙ וְרַב־חֶ֔סֶד נֹשֵׂ֥א עָוֺ֖ן וָפָ֑שַׁע וְנַקֵּה֙ לֹ֣א יְנַקֶּ֔ה “The LORD, slow to anger and abounding in kindness, bearing iniquity and transgression, who does not wholly acquit” (Numbers 14:18).

They are the words the Holy One had spoken to him on the mountain after the golden calf, the formula of mercy given when the first frightened generation, watching its leader vanish into a cloud for forty days, cast an image of gold and bowed to it (Exodus 34:6-7). Moses pleads for the spies in the language of the calf because it is the same sin wearing new clothes. Twice now a nation barely out of Egypt grows afraid and answers the fear by manufacturing something to look at. At Sinai they could not hold an absent God in the mind, so they made a calf the eye could rest on. In Canaan they could not hold a promised land in the mind, so they made giants the eye could be crushed beneath.

And the giants they reached for were the Nephilim (Numbers 13:33), the one word the Torah otherwise saves for the doomed race of the world before the Flood (Genesis 6:4), so that the land of the promise came back described as that drowned world, too vast and too cursed for any covenant to hold. Both images were generated under fear and then believed harder than the God who was standing in the room. The grasshopper is the calf seen from the far side, the worshipper shrunk to an insect in front of the thing his own fear built.

A roving eye does not keep its findings. It transmits them. The Torah’s word for what the scouts brought home is dibah, slander, the contagious kind, the report that runs through a camp faster than any true thing can. By the next morning the whole nation is weeping in its tents.

Resh Lakish says the bearers of that slander died mita meshuna, a strange death (Sotah 35a). And the weeping itself was dated. Rabbah taught in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that the night the camp wept over the scouts’ report was the eve of the ninth of Av, and the Holy One said: you wept a weeping for nothing, so I will fix this night as a weeping for the generations (Sotah 35a). The destruction of both Temples is filed to the same date. A perception, transmitted on one night, spends its interest across every century that follows. As if the power to destroy the world, to bring back the time of the flood, is a function of how we see ourselves (or allow the perceptions of others to define us). The Jews, if you will, had internalized the anti-semitic gaze. This is the enduring reason the Temple is destroyed (and per the Midrash; the reason it remains unbuilt).

The fringe meets the eye on the eye’s own ground. It hands sight something to do. The calf was an image the hands made for the eye to rest on; tzitzit is an image given for the eye to rest on instead. U’r’item oto, “and you shall see it,” the same faculty pointed the other way. The mission had opened on the same word, u’r’item et ha’aretz, see the land (Numbers 13:18). Sight is commanded at both ends of the parashah, turned outward at the start and back at the close. The Talmud in Menachot builds the counter-motion station by station.

רְאִיָּה מְבִיאָה לִידֵי זְכִירָה, זְכִירָה מְבִיאָה לִידֵי עֲשִׂיָּה “Seeing brings one to remembering, and remembering brings one to doing” (Menachot 43b).

Lay the two threads side by side. The eye sees, the heart covets, the body sins. Seeing brings remembering, remembering brings doing. Three stations both times, the gaze, the inward turn, the deed, and the only variable is the direction the eye faces when it sets out. The scouting eye runs sight into appetite into transgression. The fringe-trained eye runs sight into memory into the commandments. Tzitzit adds no new information to the world. It reverses a current already flowing through the body.

And it gives the corrected eye somewhere to climb. The blue thread is dyed, at great cost, a single specific color, and Rabbi Meir explains the expense as an itinerary.

מִפְּנֵי שֶׁהַתְּכֵלֶת דּוֹמֶה לַיָּם, וְיָם דּוֹמֶה לָרָקִיעַ, וְרָקִיעַ לְכִסֵּא הַכָּבוֹד “Because tekhelet resembles the sea, and the sea resembles the sky, and the sky resembles the Throne of Glory” (Menachot 43b).

The scout climbs a cedar to look down and discovers a grasshopper. The one who looks at the fringe climbs a thread of wool from the sea to the sky to the Throne and discovers the size of the place he is standing in. Same vertical motion, same eye, opposite terminus. One ascent ends in self-contempt overheard in the leaves. The other ends at the seat of Glory. The whole distance between them is which way the eye was aimed when it left the ground.

The Sefat Emet locates the original wound one layer deeper than the eye, in the will behind it. Sending scouts was the people’s own idea before it was ever a command. Once the Holy One consented and made it a sending, the task changed under their feet. They were now shlichei mitzvah, emissaries of a commandment, and an emissary’s first move is to nullify his own wanting and carry only the one who sent him. Had they gone that way, he writes, the scouting itself would have come out good (Sefat Emet, Shlach, 5631). They scouted for themselves instead, and an eye that ranges on its own account will always, in the end, find the land eating its inhabitants and the watcher reduced to a bug. The fringe is the antidote priced to the disease. One fixed thread, tied where the will can see it, so the eye remembers whose errand it is on before it begins to range.

Underneath the two threads is a quarrel about the future. The ranging eye meets what is coming the way the spies met the land, as a thing to be sized up and feared, and fear keeps a law of its own. It cannot hold still on an open horizon. It wants an object, a definite shape to dread, and when the future hands it none it builds one. Heidegger, pulled two moods apart that wear the same face. Fear, Furcht, is always fear of some determinate thing, a drawn sword, a walled city, a giant. Dread, Angst, has no object at all; it opens onto the plain fact of a future no one can see in advance. Fear, he wrote, is dread that has fled into the world and clamped onto a thing. Unable to handle their angst, the people manufactured reasons to fear.

The spies were handed a future in its purest objectless form, and they could not bear it empty. So they filled it. A land that eats its inhabitants, giants left over from the world before the Flood, themselves as insects in the giants’ eyes. The Torah keeps one word for the refusal under all of it. Ad ana lo ya’aminu vi, how long will they have no faith in Me (Numbers 14:11). Faith is the stance toward a future that neither builds a monster to fear nor waits for a picture to trust. Idolatry fills the space with images and obsessions.

Tzitzit works on that stance, and it works through a memory aimed forward. U’r’item oto u’zechartem, you shall see it and remember, and the remembering runs past itself into the deed not yet done, va’asitem, and you shall do. The fringe gathers what has already happened and spends it on what has not. The last verse of the parashah says what there is to gather.

אֲנִ֞י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֗ם אֲשֶׁ֨ר הוֹצֵ֤אתִי אֶתְכֶם֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Numbers 15:41).

The going-out is the one thing this generation saw with its own eyes. The sea stood up on either side and they walked across on the dry floor of it. The fringe asks them to keep that seen thing in front of them so the unseen going-in turns bearable, to let the redemption at their backs stand surety for the one waiting on their children. Remember, so that you can go forward. An eye with the Exodus tied to the hem of its coat has no need to manufacture the land, because it no longer meets the future with empty hands.

The eve of the ninth of Av comes around again on the calendar every summer, the night that was set aside for weeping. On the corner of the garment hangs the other instrument, with one thread the color of the distance between the sea and the Throne, asking the eye to climb instead of range, to remember instead of covet, to see the thing in front of it without first deciding how small it makes the seer. To not let the gaze of our enemies define our self-perception. To be optimistic even when we don’t know what the future holds.

The grasshopper and the fringe hang at the same height. Yet in the tzitz, we find that the small, peripheral edge gives us the confidence—even as a small people, the tzitz of the world—to defeat giants.

Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Etz Hasadeh