Topics in this digest: Shelach 5764
by Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
How many miracles do you have to see to believe? The generation that left
Egypt saw God strike Pharaoh with ten plagues. They saw God part the Red
Sea and drown the pursuing Egyptians in the deep waters. They saw God’s
awesome presence at Mt. Sinai. They saw a sign of God’s continuing
presence in the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night that rested over
their camp. They saw Moses bring water come from a rock. They were fed
mannah which fell from heaven, fresh and tasty every day.
Seeing all those miracles, you would think that when it was time to go to
Israel, they would have just been ready to go. But no. They needed to
send spies to check things out first. In this week’s parsha, God says if
you want to send spies, go ahead, send spies. Not only that, but in the
retelling of this story of the spies that appears in the book of
Deuteronomy, we are told that this idea of sending spies met with Moses’
approval.
The Slonimer rebbe teaches that Moses and the spies were working on
different wavelengths. The spies were assuming that all of the miracles
that had happened up until that point were somehow going to stop happening
as soon as they got to Israel. That instead of Israel being the place
where God’s presence would be most strongly felt and manifest, it would be
the opposite. The miracles would stop when they got to Israel.
Therefore, the spies felt they needed to understand the physical situation
in preparation for war. They could not rely on continued miracles from
God. Therefore, they wanted to know all the military details of the
place. How many men of fighting age, are the cities fortified, what kind
of weaponry, all the sorts of details a modern military intelligence
organization would concern itself with prior to an invasion.
But why would Moses approve of this? Surely Moses, on his higher
spiritual level, would know that the miracles would continue, that in fact
Israel is the land of miracles, of course if God wants to bring them into
Israel God would bring them into Israel. The Slonimer tells us that the
reason Moses approved of a spying mission was because he wanted to know
about the spiritual condition of the land, not the physical condition of
the land.
There is a teaching that in a righteous person the yetzer hara, the evil
inclination, is stronger than in ordinary people. The greater the person,
the greater the temptation to sin. There is a story brought in the Talmud
(Sukkah 52a) about how one time the great rabbi Abaye saw a student and a
woman walking off on a journey together. He said to himself, “I’ll follow
them to keep them from sinning,” and he followed them for a few miles
across the meadows. When they parted company, he heard them say, “our
company is pleasant, the way is long.” They were clearly quite friendly
with each other, yet behaved properly. Abaye felt great anguish—he said,
“if it was me, I could not have restrained myself from sinning with her!”
He was sitting and weeping in great anguish, when an old man came up to
him and told him, kol hagadol m’chavero, yetzro gadol hemenu, anyone who
is greater than his colleague, his evil inclination is also greater.
Moses figured this was true of countries as well. Since Israel is the
holiest of lands, it must mean that the sitra acha, the “other side,” is
also stronger there. So Moses’ interest was not in scoping out the
physical situation in the land; rather, he wanted to find out the
spiritual situation of the land. He wanted to understand what kind of
spiritual challenges the people of Israel were going to face when they
came into the land that God promised them. And in fact, the tradition
says that the people who resided there—Amalek in the Negev, the Hittites
and Jebusites and Amorites dwelling in the mountains, the Canaanites by
the sea and by the Jordan were all very spiritually impure and dangerous,
engaging in activities like offering their children to Molech a local god.
The Talmud in tractate Shabbat decrees that the land of Israel is pure,
and all other lands are impure. The Shulhan Arukh, the leading Jewish law
code, codifies this in Jewish law, and says in fact that Kohanim, the
priestly class, are not permitted to leave the Land of Israel unless it is
for some vitally important mitzvah.
What is it that makes Israel pure and other lands impure? The discussion
in the Talmud relates the issue to physical impurity of dead people.
There is no agreement as to why other places are impure and Israel is
pure; one argument is put forward that because of the flood in the days of
Noah, there were dead people all over the place, rendering every place
impure, except for the land of Israel, which one tradition says was not
effected by the flood.
The Zohar informs us that the spiritual status of a place is not so much a
function of the presence of unmarked graves as it is a function of the
deeds of the people who live there. The Zohar says “when Israel sinned
and defiled the land, they immediately forced the Shekhinah, as it were,
to leave her place, and she drew near to another place, and then the other
peoples began to rule, and permission to rule was granted them.” In other
words, the spiritual state of the land of Israel was wrapped up in the
deeds of the people who lived there. When they sinned, they exiled the
Divine Presence, and the land itself became defiled. The spiritual status
of the land depends on the activities of the residents.
So going back to this week’s Torah portion, the spies themselves were
seeking information on the physical conditions in Israel; Moses wanted
them to scout out the spiritual situation. I would suggest that today,
when our faith in God is nowhere near on the level of the generation who
left Egypt, when God appears to work His miracles more in secret, our
spies need to concern themselves with both the physical situation and the
spiritual situation.
If there is to be peace in the Middle East, we need to look beyond the
report that ten evil spies bring. We need to look beyond the physical
situation. We have to understand what is going on in the spiritual
domain.
If you look at Israel, the Palestinians, and the situation in Iraq
strictly through the physical lens you will be misled—only this time,
perhaps in the opposite way the spies of our parsha were misled. The
spies in our parsha erred in thinking that the opposition was stronger
then they really were. Hence they were disheartened from going into the
land. Our problem today is probably the opposite, the problem of hubris.
We count the numbers of guns, tanks, airplanes, and soldiers in uniform on
both sides, and would come to the conclusion that Israel should have no
problem being victorious over the Palestinians, and the US should have no
problem subduing Iraq.
A complete survey of the spiritual state of the Middle East would be a
fascinating enterprise, but obviously way beyond the scope of a Shabbos
morning sermon. But let’s take a look at some of the high points of
what’s the spiritual state of Israel/Palestine today.
The spiritual state in the PA territories is very dangerous indeed. If
you go to the web site for Al-Fatah, Arafat’s faction of the PLO, the very
first thing you see is Fatah’s symbol. Their symbol is a map of Palestine
behind crossed guns. The map of Palestine is not a map of what the
Palestinian Authority says is the goal of the PA: all of the West Bank and
Gaza, the 1967 ceasefire lines. Fatah’s map includes everything from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. There is no Israel on Fatah’s map.
Another PA web site shows much the same thing: on the home page of the
Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you see a map of all of Israel
plus the West Bank and Gaza in Palestinian colors. There is no Israel. A
poll taken about six months ago shows that 44% of Palestinians believe the
goal of the Intifada should continue to be “the liberation of historic
Palestine,” which is their phrase to describe the destruction of Israel.
Roughly the same percentage believe the goal is to end the occupation and
establish a Palestinian state according to UN Resolution 242.
On the other hand, if you go the Israeli government’s web site and look
for a map of Israel, what you find is a map that shows pre-1967 Israel in
one color, and the West Bank, Gaza, and even the Golan Heights in a
different color. Only about 20% of Israelis are opposed to the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
The greatest spiritual horror and abomination in greater Israel today is
the indoctrination of Palestinian youth. The Bible warns us against the
Canaanites who willingly offered their children to Molech. What is
happening in the West Bank and Gaza today is equally horrifying. We were
all shocked in March when saw photos of 16 year old Hussam Abdo standing,
looking terrified, with his hands on his head and an explosive belt around
his waist. Sadly, this was not an isolated incident.
In an op-ed piece that appeared in the Jerusalem Post and Canada’s
National Post back in January, Itamar Marcus and Barbara Cook quote female
suicide terrorist Reem Reyashi, videotaped just before she killed four
Israelis and herself in Gaza: "I always wanted to be the first woman who
sacrifices her life for Allah. My joy will be complete when my body parts
fly in all directions." Marcus and Cook continue, “What is surprising
about this horrific statement is that she put a positive value on her
dismemberment and death, distinct from her goal to kill others. She was
driven by her aspiration to achieve what the Palestinians call "shahada,"
death for Allah. She had two distinct goals: To kill and to be killed.
These independent objectives, both positive in her mind, were goals
greater than her obligations and emotional ties to her two children. This
aspiration to die, which contradicts the basic human instinct for
survival, is at the core of the suicide terrorism fervor. Only when this
death worship component is recognized as a basic tenet of Palestinian
belief will it be possible to understand the challenges Israel and the
world face from suicide terror.”
Listen again to that last sentence: “Only when this death worship
component is recognized as a basic tenet of Palestinian belief will it be
possible to understand the challenges Israel and the world face from
suicide terror.”
We need to understand the “spiritual landscape,” not just the physical
landscape. And the spiritual landscape is a bleak picture indeed. Nearly
half of the Palestinians do not believe that Israel has a right to exist
at all. Palestinian children are taught that the best thing they can do
is to offer themselves up as some kind of barbaric sacrifice killing
innocent people. In English, the PA denies that they encourage their
children to aspire to become suicide killers. But according to Palesinian
Media Watch, an organization that closely monitors Palestinian media, in
Arabic the PA continues to express pride in educating children to aspire
to Shahada, portraying it as a national achievement. The Director of the
Palestinian Children’s Aid Association candidly reiterated this PA
educational policy on PA TV. On PA TV Yasser Arafat said “dead
Palestinian children are the best message to the world.” Makes you wonder
about the world he lives in.
Peace in Israel will not come because we bomb and shoot the Palestinians
into submission. Yes, Israel needs to take harsh military measures to
defend herself. But Israel also needs to understand that those necessary
military actions are not the long term solution. It is not what is going
to lead to peace. An equally forceful battle needs to be waged on the
spiritual front, against those who deny Israel’s right to exist, and
against those who would convince children that death is better than life,
and that murder is a good deed.
That’s a battle that won’t be waged with guns. It will be waged with love
and a desire for peace and co-existence. The weapons in the battle are
words and ideas, and the battleground is in newspapers, radio and TV. The
path to progress in this battle is breaking bread together, not breaking
bones together.
I don’t know exactly how to win the spiritual battle. But I do know that
if we don’t follow Moses’ guidance and pay attention to the spiritual
landscape, we are going to be condemned to more than 40 years of wandering
in the desert like the spies who focused just on the physical.
Shabbat Shalom
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