We're Still Here
The Sin of the Spies and the Song of the Dove
“Send men to scout (vayaturu) the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people...” (Numbers 13:2)
“That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of the LORD and observe them, so that you do not stray [lo taturu] after your heart and eyes in your impulsive urge.” (Numbers 15:39)
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of pruning is come, and the voice of the turtle-dove (kol tor) is heard in our land. (Song of Songs 2:12)
This week’s Torah reading, Shelach, describes the “sin” on account of which the people delay their entrance into the land by forty years. Commanded to bring an informative report, a survey, of the promised land, 10 of the 12 spies bring a dispiriting evaluation of their ability to enter, insisting that it is unconquerable. In so doing, they make a common and reasonable error, conflating “is” and “can,” fact and value, actuality and possibility. Instead of reporting on the land, they report on themselves. Instead of maintaining a scientific dispassion, the spies rush into politicizing their findings. Caleb, one of the dissenting spies, does not counter the consensus on the basis of fact, but on the basis of politics (“Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”). The question of what the land is like is no longer (if it ever was) the primary question. Instead, the question is solely whether one is pro- or anti- conquest.
One could argue that the spies err in sewing panic and despair, even though nothing they say descriptively about the land is false. Their presentation is biased in the wrong direction. On this view, the sin is not bias per se, but pessimism, disbelief in God’s promise. But one could alternatively argue that bias in the other, positive direction would also be a problem, as the commandment is not to report on one’s abilities, but on the land as such. If God has promised the people the land, it is just as faithless to posit that one has the ability to conquer it on account of one’s own relative strength as it is to insist that one cannot conquer it owing to one’s relative weakness. Why, then, bring a report at all—if, ultimately, entrance into the land is owed to divine help and not to human ingenuity?
Clearly, the whole episode is some kind of test, and some kind of lesson to us, the subsequent readers. Could it be that the Torah’s middle position is that we must affirm and celebrate human ingenuity while simultaneously recognizing our ultimate dependence on the divine? That we must simultaneously embrace the cold facts of everyday life and maintain faith that there is something more to life than what empiricism can offer? It is common that politically active people will focus on what ought to be done and discount any facts that might complicate their ideals. It is also common that politically inactive people who take a more analytical view of things will focus on data analysis, but be reluctant to weigh in on what ought to be done, given the data. Perhaps the Torah wants us to bridge this divide between the analyst who hates action and the pragmatist who hates facts. What if our faith were more credible the more we acknowledged the good reasons not to have it?
Last week I wrote about the “fleeting priests,” who do not own property and are removed from the people. Their task is difficult in the way that ascetics have it hard, but they are also spared the messiness of everydayness. The spies and the people, by contrast, are tasked with maintaining faith while engaged in pursuits that feel mundane. The spies are called m’raglim, which means ones who walk. In modern Hebrew, that same word can be heard in the Anglicized neologism, ragil, meaning “regular” or “ordinary.” That which we find on foot, and which we come to measure in the standardized form of the square foot, is a far step from the ethereal world of smoke, cloud pillars, sacrifice, divine apparitions. The juxtaposition of the Levites with the spies shows just how difficult it is to be “a nation of priests” when on the move, and confronted with real-world challenges. Faith is easy in the confines of the Temple and during exalted times of festival. Where is it in everyday life? We can’t answer it, but the fact that the priests were not assigned to spy out the land or conquer it raises the (Machiavellian) possibility that, were they to do so, they would have faired no better.
The Torah portion concludes with the mitzvah of tzitzit, the commandment to wear fringes on the corners of one’s garments as a reminder “not to stray.” The same word that describes the spies, “latur” is used, here, making explicit a connection between the “sin of the spies” and the commandment of the fringe. It’s as if to say that the fringes might have protected the spies from giving into pandemonium or else that, when we look at our own fringes, we should imagine ourselves as spies confronted with the same challenge as our ancestors—how do we live in a world that is fearsome without losing faith? The fringes are supposed to remind us of our obligation to a higher purpose, and in so doing they turn our own lives into a journey into the promised land. Will we fall short of our own micro promised lands because we, like our ancestors, allow facts and feelings to become inseparable? Or can we take a cool view of what is and then tell ourselves that present reality gets a vote on what might be, but not a veto?
The word for scouting, tur, shares letters and sounds in common with the word Torah, which means “instruction.” This word-play turns the episode of the spies and the commandment of tzitzit into a stand-in for a message about Torah itself. The Book is something that we can spy out—like the land—on the assumption that it is terrible, unwise, immoral, or else, that it is indeed a great text, but one that is simply too difficult to understand. On the other hand, the fact that the Torah places many real obstacles in our path should not deter us from believing that we might enter it, in spite of those obstacles, and in spite of our own deficiencies and limitations.
The arrogance of the scholar who thinks the Torah can be cracked or decoded by the right academic tools is the flip-side of the dubious novice for whom the Torah is a land inhabited by giants. The Torah as sacred text, like the land as promised land, can be obtained only when our exercise of human thought and technology are embedded in faith. The Torah tells us that this faith is hard to come by, even by people who witnessed tremendous miracles. It also tells us that it is a contrarian, and, often lonely, position. Would the spies have all come to the same conclusion if they were forced to write into a silent ballot, or does their socialization fortify a mob mentality? If faith is a private, individual, and individuating affair, but language, discourse, and reason, are a public mode of being, the challenge of maintaining faith in public, of maintaining individuality in a crowd, is all the more difficult.
The Torah tells us that “Caleb had another spirit” (ruach acheret) (14:24). Rashi, following the sages, suggests he had two spirits, one that followed the crowd and another that did not. While Ramban offers that Caleb changed his mind, or at least, maintained a distinction between his public image and his private thoughts (like the persecuted philosopher imagined by Leo Strauss). To the extent that Caleb is a model, he offers us the image of a split self, one caught between a desire and need to fit in and a desire and need to deviate for the sake of truth. For this attribute, he (along with Joshua) becomes one of the few witnesses blessed with the experience of both leaving Egypt and entering the Land.
We need tzitzit—everyday reminders, fringes—to help us remember that is and can are not the same, that consensus does not equal truth, that we can be critical voices in times of collective untruth.
In Song of Songs, the voice of the turtle-dove, the tor, is a sign of celebration and arrival. The same letters that spell spy and impulsive stray-er, tur, signify our potential to convert our would-be nay-saying reports into song. We are not free from gathering information, nor are we free from judging and evaluating it. Yet when we evaluate with faith and humility we bring the hum of the dove whose presence is a sign of a subsiding flood. If the first promised land was the dry land onto which Noah walked after the deluge, every subsequent promised land is the land whose habitation means the world was not/is not/will not be/ destroyed. We’re still here.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—Here’s a poem-meditation I wrote on straying.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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