This week’s parasha, Parashat Shelach, is one of the most dramatic and important in the Torah, and when it comes to the journey of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. To summarize: the Israelites have reached the point in their journey when they are about to enter the Promised Land. But before they do so, God instructs Moshe to send men to explore the land. Upon the spies’ return, ten of the twelve spies deliver a (mostly) scathing description of conditions in the land:

[…]

As a result of the ten spies’ report, panic breaks out amongst the Israelites, who go so far as to make plans to return to Egypt rather than perish in a vain attempt to conquer the land. In response, God decrees that the Israelites will wander in the desert for forty years until the men from the generation that left Egypt have all passed away, after which the Israelites will then be permitted to enter the land.

Within the Torah itself and throughout the centuries of rabbinic literature, the ten spies have served as among the worst villains in the Torah. Indeed, though the Torah mentions only that they were struck down by a plague, Rashi, quoting the midrash, adds a number of gruesome details, intended to emphasize the hideousness of their sin and the corresponding fitting punishment:

Others, often more modern commentators, insist that the sin of the spies was not slander, but rather a lack of confidence and faith in God and in the people. But reading this story in the twenty-first century, and particularly in 2024, an uncomfortable question arises: were the ten spies actually wrong?

Every year, the lists of those commemorated on Israel’s Memorial Day grow longer and longer, filled mainly with the names of young men and women killed in their prime. And since October 7 in particular, tens and thousands of people have been killed, displaced, and traumatized. Rashi himself even explains that when the spies declared

it was because they saw bodies being buried wherever they went. In light of Israeli history, and of the current war in particular, it is hard not to see what the spies themselves saw, and hear their words echoing through the centuries:

But what if we reconsidered the spies, and understood them not as deceitful villains but as offering an alternative way of entering the Promised Land? When Caleb, one of the spies who refuses to say anything negative about the land, attempts to calm the people, he says:

The spies’ response is telling:

The spies never say that the Israelites should not enter the land. Instead, they consistently emphasize and insist that the Israelites should not go to war against the people there.

In an alternative timeline, what would have happened if the Israelites as a whole were able to step back from the paradigm of war and violent conquest, and listen to what the spies were actually saying?

What if this moment was not a choice between war or nothing, but instead an opportunity to explore how to fulfill God’s promise and their destiny as a people in a way that emphasizes coexistence, and may be even peace.

If the Israelites could not shift the paradigm then, maybe it is up to us to try to shift it now.

Maybe it is time to listen to the spies.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------