Decide and accept the Final Invitation to the Ultimate Promise

Wow!  Once again, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sack’s commentary on this week’s Parashah Shelach switched on the stage flood lights on the platform of my mind.  No humiliation in admitting that until now I have not caught onto or analyzed the 10 – 2 division recorded in this week’s Bible portion of the 12 Spies and their reports, as being a metaphor of the approaching Final Redemption. After reading Rabbi Sack’s Parashat commentary it now appears to fit in with the concept of the 2-House Restoration fulfillment which is now unfolding before us in these End Times.  After all, the book of Daniel ch 12 informs us clearly that the Prophecies shall be sealed “until the End Time when knowledge about them will increase”.  Hence the great lack of insight that this Parashat commentary refers to.  It is this lack of insight and understanding which is so greatly hampering the progress towards Final Redemption, i.e. to bring about the reconciliation between the opposing factions amongst G-d’s People.  Without this peaceful regathering and re-uniting of G-d’s People there can be no Final Redemption, no establishment of the Universal Kingdom of HaShem, no “Coming of a Mashiach”. The foundations of this Kingdom shall be Peace, unity and Wisdom – not division and sectarian strife.

The guidelines that will be provided in our response and remarks to this commentary are presented as thought provokers, suggestions. Rather than claiming a rigid, inflexible interpretation, we set an open agenda for additional and even alternative discussion on applying of these Scriptural mind seeds– not argumentative refute please.  It is time for open-minded peace seeking communication irrespective of religious differences.

Significantly, the 2 ‘approving spies’ were:

• Yoshuah – from the Tribe of Ephraim, and
• Caleb – from the Tribe of Judah.

This already sets a confirmation of the metaphorical hint at the 2-House Reconciliatory Redemption that we are now approaching in Time

NOW! – for the main thread; on to Rabbi Sack’s enlightening review on Parashat Shelach:

 

What is going on?

Shelach Lecha 5780; By Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks;  aish.com

Parashat Shelach         Numbers 13,1-15,41
Haftarah Shelach        Joshua 2,1-24

DISCLAIMER – the authors and promoters of the articles and videos that we place here are mostly not connected in any way to KOL HATOR and may well not share our views and interpretations. We do however thank them for their insight and pointers that confirm our understanding and often broaden our insight.

In March 2020, whilst launching a new book,[1] I took part in a BBC radio programme along with Mervyn King, who had been governor of the Bank of England at the time of the financial crash of 2008. He, together with the economist John Kay, had also brought out a new book, Radical Uncertainty: decision-making for an unknowable future.[2]

The coronavirus pandemic was just beginning to make itself felt in Britain, and it had the effect of making both of our books relevant in a way that neither of us could have predicted. Mine is about the precarious balance between the “I” and the “we”: individualism versus the common good. Theirs is about how to make decisions when you cannot tell what the future holds.

The modern response to this latter question has been to hone and refine predictive techniques using mathematical modelling. The trouble is that mathematical models work in a relatively abstract, delimited, quantifiable world and cannot deal with the messy, unpredictable character of reality. They don’t and cannot consider what Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns” and Nicholas Taleb termed “black swans” – things that no one expected but that change the environment. We live in a world of radical uncertainty.

Accordingly, they propose a different approach. In any critical situation, ask: “What is happening?” They quote Richard Rumelt: “A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.”[3] Narrative plays a major role in making good decisions in an uncertain world. We need to ask: of what story is this a part?

Neither Rumelt nor King and Kay quote Amy Chua, but her book Political Tribes is a classic account of failing to understand the situation.[4] Chapter by chapter she documents American foreign policy disasters from Vietnam to Iraq because policy-makers did not comprehend tribal societies. You cannot use war to turn them into liberal democracies. Fail to understand this and you will waste many years, trillions of dollars, and tens of thousands of lives.

It might seem odd to suggest that a book by two contemporary economists holds the clue to unravelling the mystery of the spies in our parsha. But it does.

We think we know the story. Moses sent twelve spies to spy out the land. Ten of them came back with a negative report. The land is good, but unconquerable. The people are strong, the cities impregnable, the inhabitants are giants and we are grasshoppers. Only two of the men, Joshua and Caleb, took a different view. We can win. The land is good. God is on our side. With His help, we cannot fail.

On this reading, Joshua and Caleb had faith, courage and confidence, while the other ten did not. But this is hard to understand. The ten – not just Joshua and Caleb – knew that God was with them. He had crushed Egypt. The Israelites had just defeated the Amalekites. How could these ten – leaders, princes – not know that they could defeat the inhabitants of the land?

What if the story were not this at all? What if it was not about faith, confidence, or courage. What if it was about “What is going on?” – understanding the situation and what happens when you don’t. The Torah tells us that this is the correct reading, and it signals it in a most striking way.

Biblical Hebrew has two verbs that mean “to spy”: lachpor and leragel (from which we get the word meraglim, “spies”). Neither of these words appear in our parsha. That is the point. Instead, no less than twelve times, we encounter the rare verb, la-tur. It was revived in modern Hebrew and means (and sounds like) “to tour.” Tayar is a tourist. There is all the difference in the world between a tourist and a spy.

Malbim explains the difference simply. Latur means to seek out the good. That is what tourists do. They go to the beautiful, the majestic, the inspiring. They don’t spend their time trying to find out what is bad. Lachpor and leragel are the opposite. They are about searching out a place’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. That is what spying is about. The exclusive use of the verb latur in our parsha – repeated twelve times – is there to tell us that the twelve men were not sent to spy. But only two of them understood this.

Almost forty years later, when Moses retells the episode in Devarim 1:22-24, he does use the verbs lachpor and leragel. In Genesis 42, when the brothers come before Joseph in Egypt to buy food, he accuses them of being meraglim, “spies”, a word that appears seven times in that one chapter. He also defines what it is to be a spy: “You have come to see the nakedness of the land” (i.e. where it is undefended).

The reason ten of the twelve men came back with a negative report is not because they lacked courage or confidence or faith. It was because they completely misunderstood their mission. They thought they had been sent to be spies. But the Torah never uses the word “spy” in our chapter. The ten simply did not understand what was going on.

They believed it was their role to find out the “nakedness” of the land, where it was vulnerable, where its defences could be overcome. They looked and could not find. The people were strong, and the cities impregnable. The bad news about the land was that there was not enough bad news to make it weak and thus conquerable. They thought their task was to be spies and they did their job. They were honest and open. They reported what they had seen. Based on the intelligence they had gathered, they advised the people not to attack – not now, and not from here.

Their mistake was that they were not meant to be spies. They were told latur, not lachpor or leragel. Their job was to tour, explore, travel, see what the land was like and report back. They were to see what was good about the land, not what was bad. So, if they were not meant to be spies, what was the purpose of this mission?

I suggest that the answer is to be found in a passage in the Talmud[5] that states: it is forbidden for a man to marry a woman without seeing her first. The reason? Were he to marry without having seen her first, he might, when he does see her, find he is not attracted to her. Tensions will inevitably arise. Hence the idea: first see, then love.

The same applies to a marriage between a people and its land. The Israelites were travelling to the country promised to their ancestors. But none of them had ever seen it. How then could they be expected to muster the energies necessary to fight the battles involved in conquering the land? They were about to marry a land they had not seen. They had no idea what they were fighting for.

The twelve were sent latur: to explore and report on the good things of the land so that the people would know it was worth fighting for. Their task was to tour and explore, not spy and decry. But only two of them, Joshua and Caleb, listened carefully and understood what their mission was: to be the eyes of the congregation, letting them know the beauty and goodness of what lay ahead, the land that had been their destiny since the days of their ancestor Abraham.

The Israelites at that stage did not need spies. As Moses said many years later: “You did not trust in the Lord your God, who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go” (Deut. 1:32-33). God was going to show them where to go and where to attack.

The people needed something else entirely. Moses had told them that the land was good. It was “flowing with milk and honey.” But Moses had never seen the land. Why should they believe him? They needed the independent testimony of eyewitnesses. That was the mission of the twelve. And in fact, all twelve fulfilled that mission. When they returned, the first thing they said was: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit” (Num. 13:27). But because ten of them thought their task was to be spies, they went on to say that the conquest was impossible, and from then on, tragedy was inevitable.

The difference between the ten and Joshua and Caleb is not that the latter had the faith, courage and confidence the former did not. It is that they understood the story; the ten did not.

I find it fascinating that a leading economist and a former Governor of the Bank of England should argue for the importance of narrative when it comes to decision-making under conditions of radical uncertainty. Yet that is the profound truth in our parsha.

Ten of the twelve men thought they were part of a story of espionage. The result was that they looked for the wrong things, came to the wrong conclusion, demoralised the people, destroyed the hope of an entire generation, and will eternally be remembered as responsible for one of the worst failures in Jewish history.

Read Amy Chua’s Political Tribes, mentioned earlier, and you will discover a very similar analysis of America’s devastating failures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.[6]

I write these words while the Coronavirus pandemic is at its height. Has anyone yet identified the narrative of which it and we are a part? I believe that the story we tell affects the decisions we make. Get the story wrong and we can rob an entire generation of their future. Get it right, as did Joshua and Caleb, and we can achieve greatness.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks

 

[1] Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Hodder, 2020.
[2] John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty, Bridge Street, 2020. I referred to this book in Covenant and Conversation Emor.
[3] Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Crown Business, 2011, 79.
[4] Amy Chua, Political Tribes, Penguin, 2018.
[5] Kiddushin 41a.
[6] A more positive example would be to contrast the Marshall Plan after World War 2 with the punitive provisions of the Treaty of Versailles after World War 1. These were the result of two different narratives: victors punishing the vanquished, and victors helping both sides to rebuild.

 

KOL HATOR Commentary

Then guidelines that will be provided in this response and remarks to this commentary are presented as thought provokers, suggestions. Rather than claiming a rigid, inflexible interpretation, we set an open agenda for additional and even alternative discussion on applying of these Scriptural mind seeds– not argumentative refute please.  It is time for open-minded peace seeking communication irrespective of religious differences.

Significantly, the 2 ‘approving spies’ were:

• Yoshuah – from the Tribe of Ephraim, and
• Caleb – from the Tribe of Judah.

This already sets a confirmation of the metaphorical hint at the 2-House Reconciliatory Redemption that we are now approaching in Time. Our recent Parashat guideline chain of understanding and application to our Time has been:

• Our release from Egypt (exile) – after we have accepted the Divine Invitation and joined the 20% of the nation which moved OUT and ON to the Promised land (Full Redemption).
• Our Wilderness hesitation, looking back while struggling forward to the Entry of the Final Goal – which is probably specifying the Place that we are now finding ourselves at this Time.

Forwards, march!

With this week’s Parashah we find ourselves in the time of the “12 Spies” – checking the Final Entry. And the report, coming from “the Two” sides (10 and 2 sectors), with yet another devastating result: i.e. postponement of the Entry due to the hesitancy and the ‘crying’ raised amongst us by the report of the 10-group; with a shattering annual Reminder by HaShem: “I will give you something to cry about!”- the 15^th of Av

May we at this Time of Final fulfillment use this opportunity to now make the correct decisions? May we all join the 2 Spies’ positive Faith decisions and take the corrective measures to:

• ‘Go Forward’ and unite the Family of Israel,
• accept the Divine Offer for forming and becoming His ‘Servant – His Light unto the nations’,
• render ourselves available for being sealed in the ‘New Covenant’ which will exalt us to ‘ruling status’ with Him in His Universal Kingdom.

This is a fitting spot to enter again the sharing call from our heart:

ELI, ELI (MY G-D, MY G-D!)

 “How long, my G-d?
will you still have to wait
on Thy People to wake
and conform to Thy Will?
You urge us to build
a Temple to hold
Your Presence, we’re told
when Your Promise unfolds.”

You can listen to the accompanying music rendering by OvadYah on his guitar, in a recording done on the spur of the moment on his cell phone:

(MP3): HOW LONG, ELI

 

ADDITIONAL  SOURCES OF INFO AND INSPIRATION

• For further promotions of the KOL HATOR Awakening Call for Judah to reconsider their restricting of sharing the Torah with the entire World, ref. to the Face Book Page of ‘Kol Hator’.
• Use the Web Site Internal \search Engine. Type your key Search Words into the Search Window at the top, right side, of each web Page on this Site. Or use the Search Widow by clicking on ‘Q’ above the Menu on the KHT Web Pages.
• Scroll down further to ‘RELATED Posts” for suggested rlated Study Topics. Such links to related studies appear at the bottom of every KHT Web Page.