A message from Rabbi
Eliezer Ben Yehuda
Lakeland Florida

Shabbat Shlakh Lekha

This week's Torah portion is Shlakh lekha, from Numbers 13 to the 15:41 -- the name means "send for yourself." It tells the story of the spies that Moses sent soon after the experience at Sinai, when the Children of Israel heard God speak to them and saw the smoke and the fire and the trembling ground beneath their feet. The Torah was given fifty days after exodus, and was followed by the time Moshe spent on Mount Sinai, the trial and tribulations of the Golden Calf, and the building of the Tabernacle. In last week's portion we read about the dedication of the first sanctuary of our people. That must have taken place on or around the time of Shavu'ot -- marking a year since the giving of God's Torah. We know that the spies came back on the ninth of Av, and that they were gone for forty days. It must have taken a few days to choose the spies, -- and they left, counting back from the ninth of Av, on the twenty-eighth of Sivan. That is a mere three weeks after the time of the dedication of the Holy Tabernacle, on the anniversary of the giving of the Torah.

It is fitting that on this day, when Moses sent men, "every one of them a prince," -- which means a leader in Israel, we here at Temple Emanuel will invest the power of leadership in a new board of directors and officers. These are our princes, our leaders and elders, knights of our small "nation" of the Temple Emanuel of Lakeland people. These are to be our role models, our knights in shining armor. Yes, KNIGHTS -- who posseess the following:

        KNowledge

             Inspiration

               Generosity

                 Humility

                   Trust and of course

                      Sanctity

With these they can truly serve with distinction and achieve new standards of community involvement. We wish them all Godspeed!

Adi Sharon waves his mutilated hand after being liberated

Shlakh 5761

This week's Torah portion, still in the book of Numbers, is called "Shlakh lekha" and tells the story of the spies. It is a sad and tragic story which I am sure you know well. Still, allow me to recap it: God commanded Moshe to "Send out men for yourself that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel.’ Of every tribe of their father shall you send a man, every one a prince among them. And Moses by the commandment of the Lord sent them from the wilderness of Paran; all those men were chiefs of the people of Israel." [Numbers 13:1-3] These spies did, in fact, get chosen, and they went up to the land, and return to report, "We came to the land where you sent us, and surely it flows with milk and honey; and this is its fruit. Nevertheless the people, who live in the land, are strong, and the cities are walled, and very great; and moreover we saw the children of Anak there. The Amalekites live in the land of the Negev; and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, live in the mountains; and the Canaanites live by the sea, and by the side of the Jordan." [Num. 13:27-29] This report frightens the people, who "lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night." [Num. 14:1]

Jewish tradition tells us that God was so upset by the faithless behavior of the Israelites that he said, "they cry through the night - I shall give them good reason to cry on this night..." The date of that event was the ninth of the eleventh month - Tish’a b’av! The date has become the "disaster day" of the Jewish people on which, again and again we were beaten by our enemies and by nature, to suffer mourning and devastation.

This story is repeated in Deuteronomy in a slightly different scenario. "And you came near me every one of you, and said, We will send men before us, and they shall search us out the land, and bring us word again by which way we must go up, and to what cities we shall come. And the saying pleased me well; and I took twelve men of you, one from each tribe; And they turned and went up into the mountain, and came to the valley of Eshkol, and searched it out. And they took of the fruit of the land in their hands, and brought it down to us, and brought us word again, and said, It is a good land which the Lord our God does give us. However you would not go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God; And you murmured in your tents, and said, Because the Lord hated us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Where shall we go? our brothers have discouraged our heart, saying, The people are greater and taller than we; the cities are great and fortified up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakim there." [Deu. 1:22-28]

Now, how are the two stories different, and what do we learn from the differences? In the desert, Numbers reports that God commanded Moshe to send the men; in the second telling, Deuteronomy, it specifically says that the "people" came to Moshe with the idea - and he approved of it. There is no mention of any consultation with God! In the desert, Numbers gives us a qualification for the choice of men, "Of every tribe of their father shall you send a man, every one a prince among them" - in the second telling, Deuteronomy, there are no preconditions on who should go. Further, what happened next is told quite differently. In the desert, Numbers reports, "And Moses by the commandment of the Lord sent them from the wilderness of Paran; all those men were chiefs of the people of Israel" And in Deuteronomy it says "And the saying pleased me well; and I took twelve men of you, one from each tribe; And they turned and went up into the mountain..."

We now face a number of questions: Whose idea was it, who was supposed to go, and who went – and, most important, what was the purpose for which they went? Oh, yes, there is also a question of conflict in the text - which is the true story, the one in Numbers or the one in Deuteronomy?

I would like to suggest to you that both are true - and that they are merely presented from different points of view. The last, Deuteronomy, is the historical report of the event from the experience of the children of Israel. The report in Numbers is the telling of the event from the experience of Moshe and the divine guidance of God Almighty. In other words, I believe it was ‘the crowd’ that had the idea to send the men - not God. I would further like to suggest to you that the crowd wanted these men who go up to "search out" the land for them, or as the Hebrew text says, to ‘dig out’ the land - to get to the "deep down and dirty" and bring back the report from the roots up.

The text we read in the Torah this Shabbat tells an entirely different story, and in my opinion is greatly misunderstood, mostly because of a pivotal word - wedded to a syntax that renders the meaning we traditionally take for this telling. Let us look at the text under a magnifying glass: Historically speaking, ‘the crowd’ came to Moshe and suggested sending the men to ‘dig out’ the information. Moshe did not wish to have any more conflict with the people, but before agreeing, he asked God. God responded with the words we read this week, which are not a command by any means, nor even a suggestion, but possibly a warning!

The Hebrew says, "Va’ydaber Adona’y el Moshe lemor – The Lord spoke to Moshe saying – Shlakh lekha anashim – Send out men for yourself..." God did not command (that would have been va’ytzave) Moshe, he was merely speaking with him, and he said, ‘you have come to me with this suggestion; I don’t need anyone to dig out the land. I know full well all about the land, for it is my land – I made it and I own it – but if you want to do it, do so for yourself.’

The key to understanding the whole passage is the next word – "ve’yatooroo!" We think, we postulate that it means ‘they will spy out.’ In actuality, it is much closer to the English word ‘tour’ - meaning to explore, probe, prospect or simply sample. There is also a negative meaning to ‘toor’ – "And it shall be to you for a fringe, that you may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them; velo tatooroo akharey levavkhem v’akharey eyneykhem... – and that you stray not after your own heart and your own eyes, which incline you to go astray;" [15:39] This word, "tatooroo," which is from the same root as the word we are investigating, is translated "you stray not!"

So we are not talking about spies, we are talking about tourists. Tourists are notorious despoilers from antiquity. They come to the land to satisfy their curiosity, to be entertained. Human nature being what it is, we are more often entertained by perversion than by the normal and the mundane. That is why the circus has wild animals, a source of danger, and freaks, a source of revulsion at the freak and thankfulness at our own "normal" condition.

So God says to Moshe, ‘even if you send the finest of men, "every one a prince among them," they will end up looking for, and finding the beasts and the freaks, the difficult and the destructive. God took the Israelites out of Egypt, against all odds. No spy would have given them half a chance to successfully depart their bondage. He split the sea for them, something no oceanographer of conjurer would have thought possible, and at that point he had prepared to help them take the land of Canaan, which He had promised to their patriarchs. The spies were a ploy of ‘the crowd,’ yet another attempt to wrest control from Moshe – and put doubts in the hearts of the people. Moshe should not have sent them, he should have had faith in an all knowing God who does not delegate investigating conditions for fulfilment of His promises to a mob of small minded and faithless people.

Had Moshe accepted his God given responsibility and not succumbed to appeasing the people – the entire history of the Jewish people, and conceivably of humanity, would have been different. A pivotal moment in history, teaching us the great responsibility we have to live by God’s teaching, to fulfill His mitzvot and bring about His sovereignty.

Amen

Shlakh lekha 5763

This week's Torah portion, from the book of Devarim, Numbers, Chapter 13:1 to 15:41 is called Shlakh lekha, which means "send for yourself." It tells the "story of the spies." This sad and tragic story is well known. Let me summarize it briefly: God commands Moshe to "Send out men for yourself that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel.' Of every tribe of their father shall you send a man, every one a ruler among them." [Numbers 13:1-2] The men came back with a report, "We came to the land where you sent us, and surely it flows with milk and honey." [Ibid. 13:27] Well, so far, so good, as we say. But now they change their report and their demeanor and continue, "We are not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we." [Ibid. 13:31] So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, "The land, through which we have gone to spy, is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the Nefilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nefilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight." [Ibid. 13:32,33]
The reaction of the Israelites was swift, and one may well say, based on their behavior since they left Egypt, quite predictable: "the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night. And all the people of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron; and the whole congregation said to them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this wilderness! And why has the Lord brought us to this land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? were it not better for us to return into Egypt? And they said one to another, Let us choose a chief, and let us return to Egypt." [Ibid. 14:1-4]
Jewish tradition deals far more harshly with the spies and those who listened to them than with the other great "sinners" of the Torah – those worshippers of the Golden Calf immediately after the revelation at Sinai. Midrashic tradition insists that the day when the spies returned with their ill-fated report was none other than Tisha B'Av, the date on which both of our Holy Temples were subsequently destroyed, and throughout the ages we have had many tragic events occur. That date is truly "a date that lives in infamy!"
Why should this be the case? Is God a little too harsh on these men, and on those who heard their report? The great sages of Israel, throughout the ages, again and again examined this issue, and again and again they came to the conclusion that God is just and merciful -- and that we are the transgressors, the sinners.
The spies were chosen as the top men in their tribes, as the Torah tells us, "every one a ruler among them" and as such, they had an obligation to steer the people right. Instead they chose to report that the people are not up to the task of conquering the land. Bur more than that – they scared the people right out of their wits – like someone yelling "fire! FIRE!" in a crowded theater, at the peak of a suspenseful film. Of course the people were frightened and they panicked. The recently freed slaves, long on suffering and short on faith and experience, lost what little self-confidence they had. And it was this loss of confidence that doomed them – as it did the Jewish people in many other times, on many other "Tisha B'Av" occasions. The failure of the spies is a shortcoming in responsible leadership – which is a by-product of poor education. The men may have been princes, but they would never become kings, for they lacked the quality of sovereignty. That quality was once explained by Napoleon Bonapart, when he was asked (in his peak of winning to be sure) for his formula for success – "l'audace, toujour l'audace!"
The generation of the spies faced decisions that bore great danger and imposed weighty demands to achieve a revolution of mammoth proportions by the will of the Lord and under His guidance. They were removed from Egypt to be given a new and enlightened way of life, to inherit a land made desolate by people who did not heed the word of God and who were regurgitated by the very earth they dwelt on. It was Israel's destiny to liberate the land and turn it into a land flowing with milk and honey.
Yet the spies despised the gift of God, and doubted His ability to "deliver" on His promise. The Israelites proved that the leaves on a tree cannot differ from its stock and limbs. Lacking audacity, they fell away from grace, and it became impossible for them to fulfill their destiny.
What was true some thirty five hundred years ago is just as true today. The great United States could not hold a line in a very small confrontation in Beirut a few years ago - because we did not have the strength of our convictions. We failed to rescue our diplomats in Teheran, and we took both casualties and calumny in Africa, in the Kosovo conflict, and even within the boundaries of the United States when we were attacked by the terrorists on September 11.
When we gird ourselves to the task, however, and when we listen to our "spies" (read experts) when they give their learned and confident report, we are capable of anything. We cleared the rubble of the twin towers and the pentagon in record time, we liberated the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, and we shall persevere against all who wish to enslave us, or worse, wipe us out. We must all learn to see the future in nothing less than these terms. We must realize that each generation faces its own Promised Land - occupied by giants and fortified cities. "Taking the land" is not, in any generation, a piece of cake. If the land (the spiritual and geographical inheritance marked out for you by God) is worth taking, it will require courage.
"Hakol beyad shama'yim, milvad yir'at shama'yim – all is in the hands of Heaven except for the reverence of Heaven." God has a master plan – but he has given man free will, and we can – and often do – actually act against His master plan. This does not cancel God's plan – but it sure can delay it! God's miracles work with and through the acts of mankind. There is always a choice to make – there is always an alternate course of action! You can listen to the spies and lose heart, or you can gird yourself to the task, take courage, and overcome the handicap of your leaders' lack of faith. Let us keep faith with our men at the front, and not fall into disunion about our "overseas adventures." As our Torah teaches us, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live" [Deu. 30:19] Amen