By now it should be clear that Bemidbar’s focus on the tribes highlights the nature of the book: that the Jews’ central task in the desert is the preparation for entry into the land. Yet, this very endeavor is undermined in the middle of the book. Thus, the volume that was to be the most “Zionist” of the Torah’s five books in the sense of bringing the Jews into the Promised Land ends up being the least Zionist.
The affair of the spies is a watershed, not only in the Torah but for Jewish history altogether. It marks a major turning point in the Jews’ relationship with God, severely altering their miraculous march to a utopian communion with Him. Instead, the Jewish future is all but destroyed when God allows the Jews to send a representative from each tribe to scout out the land. When they return, ten of the twelve give a discouraging account of what they saw, and when challenged by the other two conclude that conquering the land is simply out of reach.
It is the people’s acceptance of the majority opinion and their hysterical carryings-on, however, which signaled the actual turning point and in turn was considered the major sin. At that point, the die was cast – the state that the Jews would eventually create would be only a pale image of the original conception. The rabbis (Taanit 29a) expand this notion by suggesting that the people’s sin would make tragedy an intrinsic part of the Jewish experience. We will get back to this idea later in the chapter, but first we will try to get a better understanding of exactly what occurred.
In truth, there are many sins that occur in the book of Bemidbar, and were we just to look at the story of the spies without reading the drastic Divine response we might think that it isn’t any worse than many of the other sins in the desert – and certainly not more than that of the golden calf that occurred earlier on. We could go even further and justify the mission, given the permissible and even helpful use of spies in other similar situations.29See Ramban, Bemidbar 13:1, who essentially says as much. Citing the story of the spies that Yehoshua sent to Yericho (Yehoshua 2), he writes that the mission itself could have been entirely appropriate had it not been taken the wrong way and misused by the spies. Moreover, there are indications that the spies were men of outstanding character;30See Rashi, Bemidbar 3:3, based on Bemidbar Rabba 16:5. even without any textual clues, one would expect Moshe to be very particular about whom he would choose for this highly sensitive mission. So why did they blunder so greatly and subsequently drag others down with them so insistently?
One approach to the severity of this sin is looking at it from a cumulative perspective. Had it not been the straw that broke the camel’s back, we could acknowledge that the sin in question here was really not so cataclysmic.31This is buttressed by the language of God’s anger at the Jewish people: “Until when will this people anger Me and until when will they not believe in Me?” (Bemidbar 14:11), and even more so when He tells Moshe, “They have tried Me here ten times” (14:22). See R. Yitzchak Reggio, Biur Yashar, on the latter verse, who writes that the punishment was indeed cumulative. Although the Talmud (Arachin 15a) seems to reject such an understanding, it is likely that the rabbis are not rejecting it on the simple (peshat) level as much as suggesting an alternative, homiletical (derash) reading. It could have been almost negligible in and of itself had the Jews not been rebuked so many times previously for other misdeeds that betrayed a lack of trust in God. Such an approach would certainly take care of the issues raised above, and we could say that the great men sent on the scouting mission simply misunderstood their difficult charge and misread what they saw in the Holy Land. And once convinced of the truth of their conclusions, they did everything in their power to avert what they saw as an imminent disaster. Nothing terrible – but unfortunately, their missteps were committed at a time when God had run out of patience with the Jewish people.
It might be that simple, but still, such an approach does not leave us completely satisfied. The Torah dwells too much on the sin of the spies for us to believe that it was only coincidentally linked to the catastrophic events that follow (i.e., only the straw that broke the camel’s back). Likewise, Moshe refers back to it as being of particular gravity on more than one occasion.32Bemidbar 32:6–15; Devarim 1:22–2:1. Thus, most commentators do attach great significance to this sin, even if it seems dwarfed in theological severity by the golden calf. What these commentators still have to explain is that if it doesn’t have theological weight, then what is it that makes this sin so grievous? We will turn our attention to this question next.
The Desert Bubble
In order to better understand the sin of the spies, it is helpful to remember that the Jews did not engage in the purely upward ascent that we might expect to find in a journey to the Promised Land. Whatever conditions might have awaited the Jews in the Land of Israel had they not sinned, it was still not likely to be more spiritual and elevated than the direct and daily Divine support and contact that the Jews felt in the desert. Thus the journey “up” to the Holy Land was also a journey down from the very special space that was the wilderness.
On some level, the desert was akin to an ascetic religious order: kulo kodesh, entirely sacred. And that was precisely why it was meant to be only a temporary situation. The Jewish calling is to bring sanctity to the real world.33See Redeeming Relevance in Genesis, Chap. 5. Mission though it may be, however, it is certainly a more complicated and often less pleasant task than basking in God’s radiant proximity. Hence, one can certainly understand the ambivalence of the desert Jews’ having to give up their spiritual cocoon in order to take on the mission God wanted them to embark upon. In light of this, we can understand the latent unpopularity the spies’ mission engendered.
With the above in mind, we can differentiate between the sin of the spies and the Jewish people’s many earlier sins. Their previous transgressions had mostly been those of ambivalence toward the novel and rarified wilderness experience. They were unaccustomed to and clearly intimidated by the conditions of their Divine journey. The Jews didn’t know where to find water in the desert, so they complained. Instead of manna they wanted “real food,” so they complained.
Even the golden calf can be seen as a protest against the rigors of worshiping an overly elevated God, One too far removed from the tangible and corporeal idols that many had worshiped in Egypt. Although they did not expect to go back to idol worship in the Promised Land, still the Jews had good reason to expect a more physical worship of God, something that would align more with the agricultural existence soon to become central to their lives. In the Land of Israel, the Jewish people’s livelihood would depend on the normal functioning of the seasons as well as on the people’s gifts of thanks to God for a successful harvest via sacrifices and tithes. (Thus, Pesach was celebrated only once while the Jews were in the desert; there could be no Festival of Spring without something they could really call Spring.)
Yet, all of the nation’s early sins could be forgiven. Mortal, corporeal men and women can be expected to err, and within limits it can be tolerated. The incident of the spies, however, engendered a completely new and apparently more problematic ambivalence – not toward the rarified wilderness, but rather toward the earthly existence which would once again become their lot when they reached the Land of Israel. Simply put, the wilderness quickly grew on the Jews. Someone happy with or at least used to where he is will easily find fault with any new location, and in this the spies – and the Jews – were no different than anyone else.
The spies return with the message that the land cannot be conquered. Neither can it even be endured, in the miraculous event that the Jewish people are somehow able to acquire it. It is hence “better” to stay where they are, where there is nothing to conquer, nothing to plant, and no one to fight against. Unable to move forward, the children of Israel embody the perspective that they might just be better off simply not dealing with the rigors of earthly life.34A similar approach is taken by R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. See Likutei Sichot, vol. 9, parashat Shelach, where he writes that this notion predates him in Chassidic Thought. It appears that this idea is first mentioned by the first Lubavitcher Rebbe in his Likutei Torah. Such an approach calls to mind Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s rhetorical question (Berachot 35b): if people are busy all year round dealing with the physical rigors living off the land necessitates, what will be left over for the spiritual life? Is it really better to spend so much time and energy on matters that God has taken care of up until now?
From this angle, the subsequent call to return to Egypt (Bemidbar 14:3) could have been more like a chimera than anything else. Given that no one can return to the past, their call was a way of saying, “Let’s stay where we are.” Returning to Egypt was a way to express it without sounding ridiculous. Moreover, there is an aspect of Egypt mimicked by the desert experience – the lack of necessity to take care of one’s own needs.35I freely admit that this is a more countertextual understanding than I am usually comfortable with, and the reader who feels that the suggestion does violence to the text is certainly on firm ground. Yet, as when any classical commentator makes such a suggestion, it is the result of having a textual problem with no obvious and more textually sound solution. In this case, finding an explanation for the bizarre behavior of Jewish leaders and the catastrophic consequences of their foibles would remain a mystery unless we resort to the type of countertextual suggestion I am making here. In Egypt, the children of Israel were fed, protected, and housed by their masters; now they were fed, protected, and housed by their Master.
The spies play to the Jews’ fear of physical existence by emphasizing that they are speaking about that which most embodies physicality, ha’aretz, the land, repeating the word for effect (Bemidbar 12:32, “aretz” meaning both a specific land and the earth in general). Perhaps not understanding this, Yehoshua and Calev also repeat the word “ha’aretz” four times in the context of two verses (Bemidbar 13:7-8). Alternatively, the latter was part of an intentional counter-thesis that it was time for the Jews to grow up and face the new challenge squarely. In either case, it is no wonder that the people want to stone them – rather than soothing their fears, they emphasized them.
Though interesting, this approach is not without its problems. Most problematic is that it doesn’t really help us figure out what we originally set out to understand, which is what makes the sin of the spies so grievous. It is true that the people’s desire to stay in a sheltered, religious bubble was completely against God’s plan and wishes, but it is still hard to see this as worse than the sin of the golden calf. Let us then pursue another novel and perhaps even more unconventional approach.
Punishment and Crime
Usually, we attempt to better understand a crime based on its consequence. When a punishment is great, we assume that it indicates a very severe crime – all rational codes of law work around punishments that are commensurate with their respective crimes. As a result, we assume that due to the dire consequences, the spies’ crime must have been quite severe, and thus we continue our attempt to determine why that was the case. Although we usually find a correlation between punishment and crime for violating the tenets and admonitions of the Divine lawgiver, as we do with human law, we cannot necessarily assume it to always be true. With that in mind, we can seek other explanations for the relationship between the crime and the punishment in our story.
One way to solve our problem is to reverse the order of causality. We assume that punishment should be established according to a crime, and this is certainly the chronological sequence. However, it may be equally valid to look at the punishment as that which sometimes defines a crime. In other words, a severe punishment may simply be a statement of value that transforms what should on the face of it be a minor crime into something much more significant. Making an ado out of an event that is not particularly headline-grabbing retroactively transforms it. In and of itself, the spies’ crime may not be so weighty, but God needed to make the statement that the Land of Israel is of great weight. And one way of showing that the land has a special place in the Divine order is to give a severe punishment to those who treat the land lightly, even if they only do so in a modest way.
In human systems of law as well, a punishment may sometimes have less to do with the crime than the value a society would like to emphasize regarding certain individuals, objects, or institutions. For example, yelling at someone is generally not considered a crime. However, if the “someone” being yelled at is the king, it could easily result in the perpetrator’s death. Intrinsically, the crime of yelling is not great – if it is even a crime at all – but it is important for a nation to make a statement about its supreme leader. One could argue that this is really semantics and that in the end, the lawmakers have defined the crime as serious by making the punishment severe. While such an argument has its merits, it is not something universally accepted. Yet, regardless of our position on whether the seriousness of crime is something objective or whether it is determined by each society for itself, the present approach helps explain the significance of the punishment in the face of an ostensibly less serious crime.
Punishment and Process
So far we have used a fairly conventional definition of punishment. We tend to view it as an interruption in the normal course of affairs. From this perspective, then, it follows that if we do what is expected of us we need not anticipate any such unfortunate interruptions.
Thinking more critically, however, and knowing that we sometimes expect people (even ourselves) to behave inappropriately, we would expect punishment for a crime to be the normal course of affairs and thus not an interruption. The chastised would retroactively experience the punishment as an interruption only if he eventually lived up to the law-abiding standard that was beyond him when he sinned. In this case, reward and punishment can be understood as consequences of certain choices. The bad as well as the good choices we make create natural trajectories for our future, and will include a variety of rewards and punishments that come in their wake. And to the extent that we are aware of what we can expect, the shock of ensuing punishments – as well as the joy of ensuing rewards – becomes attenuated.
The notion of punishment and reward as consequences of a chosen behavior is rooted in the phenomena of the natural world. If someone does something positive and correct, it tends to be to his advantage, e.g., if someone sows, he will usually have food to reap. Refraining from something one knows is positive, however, carries the corresponding opportunity cost – in the above example, it can have disastrous consequences. Similarly, if one does something negative, it tends to be to his disadvantage: if he kicks a boulder, he will hurt his foot. Although we would generally expect a person to work in order to eat rather than to be stuck without food, or to avoid kicking a boulder rather than breaking his foot, we can’t necessarily speak about one event as normal and the other as abnormal. All we can say is that one is more likely to produce better results, and that one can be described as an alteration of the expected course.
In the case of the spies, what occurred was really the more expected outcome.36See R. S.D. Luzzato, Bemidbar 13:2, who writes that God had actually planned that the Jews would stay in the desert for forty years. It was truly difficult for the spies to understand how the Jews would survive and prosper in the land that they saw, unless God would constantly perform miracles for them – which they had good reason not to expect. After all, the Jews had been asked to take it on faith that things would somehow work out. Yet that very faith was undermined by the sending of the spies. The scouting mission itself created a paradox, in that the scouts were given a detailed and thought-out plan to analyze an entity that could be secured only by faith! Understanding their mission this way, it is no wonder they failed.37Yet, the fact that two of the spies met the test showed that it was humanly possible. Furthermore, significantly, the view was held by two individuals and not just one, demonstrating that it was not a completely exceptional feat. Still, the failure of their mission, which with our new perspective comes as no surprise, resulted in a very weighty consequence, to say the least. The difference between the Jews’ potential transition into the Land of Israel, led by Moshe and with original generation intact, and their actual transition is like the difference between night and day.38See Netziv’s introduction to Bemidbar in Ha’amek Davar.
The non-intuitive use of faith to physically conquer and settle the land turned out to be too much for the only generation that would even have a chance at this unusual endeavor. Yet, having been brought up on miracles, the children of Israel were also not able to adjust to the new, post-crime plan, which was to go through a slower, more gradual preparation toward the conquest and settlement of Canaan. This would be something for the next generation to accomplish. The generation that had seen constant, miraculous intervention in Egypt could not be the same one that would inherit the land with its own hands and with God only in the “background,” as it were. And once the desert generation showed itself incapable of conquering the land with faith, as would have been expected from a people who experienced so much Divine oversight, as well as unable to conquer the land with its own hands, there was no alternative but for it to die in the desert.
We can now understand that the “new” course of events of wandering in the desert for forty years that we generally see as a punishment was actually the natural trajectory and the most likely outcome of the spies’ mission. In that case, it is not that the crime was great in the sense of being a shock, but rather only that its “punishment” was very significant. And the unusually high stakes didn’t make the desirable outcome more expected and therefore any easier. As a consequence, what happened was truly in the realm of the tragic as opposed to the criminal.
A similar approach can be taken regarding the Tree of Good and Evil at the beginning of the book of Bereshit. Adam and Chava did what God expected them to do, even if it wasn’t the ideal that was set out in front of them.39R. Yitzchak Reggio, Bereshit 2:17, makes this very point. Once they pursued that course, many consequences followed which were quite far-reaching and tragic. Can we call this a severe punishment? We can, but again, the issue is simply that the stakes are great, not that this is a deviation from the expected trajectory.
Rabbi Akiva and Jewish History
Though very novel-sounding, the view just presented can be traced to R. Akiva. We should preface the following analysis by reminding the reader that R. Akiva was known for his mystical orientation. Hence, the perspective that we will now suggest requires looking at events from an alternative point of view.
When his colleagues questioned him for laughing when he saw foxes running over the destroyed Temple mount, R. Akiva answered that now that he saw this prophecy fulfilled, he no longer doubted that the prophecy of redemption would also be fulfilled (Makkot 24b). At face value, this statement is rather puzzling. How could one of the most dedicated Jews of all time doubt the words of our prophets? Eitz Yosef, a commentary on the Talmud, explains that R. Akiva was not expressing doubts about prophecy, but reminding himself and the others that the only way there could be redemption was if there was also destruction. Let us attempt to provide this with some elucidation.
Perhaps R. Akiva saw that already on their way out of Egypt, the Jews chose the more likely path of living within natural human history, as opposed to living supernatural lives that would have put them outside of history. They made this choice by sending out the spies, who according to the natural order of events would bring back an intimidating report about the Land of Israel. Once they did so, there could no longer be any supernatural shortcut to the final redemption. The more conventional road that was taken would necessarily be one of mistakes as well as corrections since such is the stuff of human existence, all the more so when it comes to nations. Mistakes and their correction imply some level of destruction, the only question being magnitude. Thus, the only way to accomplish the redemption would be by way of at least some destruction. And so the sages say that together with the crying over the spies’ report came the inevitability of crying for the generations associated with the destruction of the Temple (Taanit 29a).40 Such an approach is reminiscent of G.F.W. Hegel, who said that “change, while it imports dissolution, involves, at the same time, the rise of a new life – that while death is the issue of life, life is also the issue of death. . . . Spirit – consuming the envelope of its existence – does not merely pass into another envelope, nor rise re-juvenescent from the ashes of its previous form; it comes forth exalted, glorified, a purer spirit.” In the same vein, R. Baruch Epstein, in his Torah Temimah commentary, explains why our sages proclaim that, while most of God’s creations were only good, the creation of death was actually very good.
It could well be that this deeper understanding is exactly what R. Akiva was alluding to in his otherwise almost incomprehensible statement that had the first prophecy not been fulfilled, he was concerned that the second would also not be fulfilled; only in the destruction lay the actual seeds of redemption. Our tradition tells us that God sometimes does rescind negative prophecies, and so the prophecy of destruction did not have to be fulfilled.41See Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 10:4. But were it not to have been fulfilled, it would come at what R. Akiva knew would be an ultimately untenable price. He knew that the fulfillment of destruction was the only way to obtain the redemption that embodies the purpose of our national existence.
◆ ◆ ◆
In our own lives, we often make important decisions without realizing the full weight of their implications. We simply think of what follows as the “normal” trajectory. While psychologically sound, this attitude can easily allow us to miss out on the greatness that we can otherwise often attain. Had God simply allowed the spies’ report to unfurl without punishing them, the Jews would have wandered aimlessly in the desert, not able to go back to Egypt and not having the courage to march on into the Land of Israel. But they would not have realized that there had been a better choice. God’s punishment drove home the greatness they had chosen to forgo. True, the punishment was especially difficult for the generation involved, but it is still justified if it can have its appropriate impact on those who would come after it, shaking them out of a lethargy even more frightful than the original punishment.
At the end of the day, we need to understand that the natural trajectory is not all that we are capable of. Frequently, it is the appropriate track, but this should never be taken for granted. I cannot imagine much worse than discovering that we failed to change the world simply because we didn’t think it was a possibility.