Menachem Mirski
Thoughts on parashat Sh’lach
The fate of human communities, including Jewish communities, is determined by many factors, objective – the historical, economic and social conditions in which people in a given era have to live, as well as subjective – e.g. specific decisions of community leaders or other individuals with power and influence on other people’s lives. The latter sometimes turn out to be crucial; it can determine the lives of many subsequent generations, therefore it is very important that human communities are led by reasonable, responsible and educated people.
Our Torah portion for this week tells us a story of 12 spies sent by Moses to investigate the Promised land before conquering it. They return forty days later, carrying a huge cluster of grapes, a pomegranate and a fig, to report on a lush and bountiful land. But ten of the spies warn that the inhabitants of the land are giants and warriors “more powerful than we”; only Caleb and Joshua insist that the land can be conquered, as it was commanded by God.
Our rabbis analyzed this story from many perspectives but the issue that attracted their special attention can be summarized in the following questions: What was the sin of the spies who were sent to investigate the promised land? What did the spies do so dreadfully wrong that it brought the punishment of additional forty years of life on the desert for all the Israelites, making many of them never see the Promised land? One of the answers suggested by our rabbis is that they presented their biased opinion about the land and the possibility of conquering it instead of giving a relatively unbiased factual account on what the Promised land was like. According to Ramban, their goal was to gather the information about the land mainly for logistic purposes, to be able to develop a good strategy to conquer it; this, according to Rashi, is expressed in the name of the parasha shelach lecha – “send out (the spies) for yourself”. But none of that happened and it even seems that these ten spies were on the side of all the complainers among the Israelites who constantly murmured against Moses and God and wanted to come back to Egypt. They did not really go to investigate the land; they went there to collect the information that would prove their narrative, to use contemporary language.
This answer seems quite clear and its message, unfortunately, is universal. Groupthink, especially if it is saturated with negativity, resistant to criticism and only aims to prove who is right, can bring disaster to the entire community. Murmuring, slander, false accusations, and various forms of lashon hara are particularly destructive, especially when they penetrate deeply into a community, creating a sense that everyone is in agreement on a given matter. Then, verifying these narratives becomes almost impossible – after all, no one will waste time to verify “obvious things” that are “commonly known”. A community that is affected by this type of ‘plague’ then finds itself on a slippery slope leading either to some tragedy or to its complete disintegration, in any case – to nothing good.
So let the story of two spies “outvoted” by ten, with the support of a group of “anonymous whisperers”, be a warning to us. It was this situation that condemned the Israelites to an additional 40 years of nomadic life in the desert. Therefore, we should always be skeptical towards the voice of the ‘anonymous crowd’, which is rarely an expression of anything other than cynical statements such as: I told you so, nothing can be done, as well as all kinds of expressions of resentment, insecurity or something even worse. So let’s try to avoid all this and let’s not let ourselves be guided by these voices and feelings.
Shabbat shalom!
Menachem Mirski
Leave a Reply