Sh'lach L'cha: Analyzing the Spies

Baruch atah Adonai
Eloheinu Melech ha-olam
asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav
v'tzivanu la'asok b'divrei Torah.

God instructs Moses to send men to scout the land, with each representing one tribe. Moses selects the scouts for the mission and gives them clear directions on their task. Reimagining the assignment as instructions to a group of students gives us a prompt that might look like this (adapted from Numbers 13:17-20):
Start going through the Negev and then into the hill country. When you get there, look around to see what kind of country it is. Answer the following questions:

1. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak?
2. Are the people who dwell in it few or many?
3. Is the country in which they dwell good or bad?
4. Is the soil rich or poor?
5. Is it wooded or not?

Extra Credit: Be sure to bring back some fruit from the land.
As an educator, I do have some concerns about questions that are all closed-ended and force the scouts into binary decisions, but it is clear that Moses is interested in getting very specific information about the land and the people who live there.
After 40 days, the scouts come back with their reports, which they present orally to Moses and Aaron - and the entire community:

• The land does flow with milk and honey (alternative answer to #3 and #4)
• And this is its fruit (bonus points)
• The people who inhabit the country are powerful (answering #1 and #2 together)
• And the cities are fortified (answer to #5; adapted from Number 13:27-29)

Caleb hushes the people and assures Moses that the Israelites will gain possession of the land and surely overcome its inhabitants. After this, 10 of the 12 scouts (all except Caleb and Joshua) depart from their factual reporting to negatively embellish the report:

• "The country we scouted devours its settlers" (Numbers 13:32)
• "All the people that we saw in it are men of great size" (Numbers 13:32)

And finally, moving completely away from an objective analysis, the scouts report "we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." (Numbers 13:33)
~Beth Ellen Young, Transforming Trauma

The spies, like Miriam, engage in the sin of slander. Instead of remembering Miriam's punishment for publicly criticizing Moses, the spies return from their journey and, immediately and publicly, speak slanderously about the Land of Israel. They tell the people: "It is a land that eats up its inhabitants," meaning that the land is difficult to farm, its soil is of poor quality, and its air is polluted, bringing ill health. For their deliberate slander of the land, they and the generation accepting their report are punished.
~Numbers Rabbah 16:2, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

The people have left Egypt with the promise of conquering the Land of Israel. This is their goal. The spies return and take advantage of the people's anticipation of their report to "discredit the entire enterprise." They conspire to convince the people that God is leading them not to a land of opportunity and plenty but to disaster. Reporting that the cities of the land are protected by high walls and guarded by powerful giants, they strike fear into the hearts of people. They destroy their dreams and willingness to go forward to conquer the land. Because the spies kill the hopes of their people, they and their generation are condemned to wander and die in the wilderness.
~Aaron Wildavsky, Moses as a Political Leader, pp. 114-118, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

The spies are pious and good and worry about the spiritual life of their people. However, they fear that the people will enter the Land of Israel and become so busy with materialistic concerns, with work, feeding their families, building their homes, creating entertainments for themselves, and caring for their communities that they will have "progressively less time and energy for the service of God." That is what they mean when they said "It is a land that eats up its inhabitants." Their sin is misleading the people and themselves with "their opinion... that spirituality flourishes best in seclusion and withdrawal." The spies "were wrong. The purpose of a life lived in Torah is not the elevation of the soul: it is the sanctification of the world... taking possession of the Land of Israel and making it a holy land."
~Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

Why did the spies, these leaders of their people, engage in such subversion? They were pleased with the status quo of the desert. They opposed change. Everything was provided: food, water, shelter. Life was good enough for them. They did not want to take on the burden of conquering the Promised Land nor the risk of losing the power and security they already possessed. That was their sin. They wanted to pull down the blinds on all the pain and sorrow of the world and live in the security of their own safe desert. They chose to subvert the dream of achieving the Promised Land, where justice, freedom, and peace would prevail for all.
~Rabbi Morris Adler (The Voice Still Speaks, pp. 301-305, as quoted in Fields, A Torah Commentary for our Times

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z"l Covenant & Conversation: Parshat Sh'lach: What Made Joshua and Caleb Different? (p.172)
People with the growth mindset do not fear failure. They relish challenges. They know that if they fail, they will try again until they succeed. It cannot be coincidence that the two people among the spies who had the growth mindset were also the two who were unafraid of the risks and trials of conquering the land. Nor can it be accidental that the ten others, all of whom carried the burden of people's expectations (as leaders, princes, men of high rank), were reluctant to do so.
If this analysis is correct, the story of the spies holds a significant message for us. G-d does not ask us to never fail. He asks of us that we give of our best. He lifts us when we fall and forgives us when we fail. All He asks in return is that we acknowledge our failures. This gives us the courage to take risks. That is what Joshua and Caleb knew, one through his name change, and the other through the experience of his ancestor, Judah.

But then we think about Joshua and Caleb. They're looking at the challenges. It's not like they don't understand. It's not as if they don't see. They see very clearly. But even with the challenges, they see possibility.
And we today need to find ourselves as disciples of Joshua and Caleb. Eyes wide open, hearts and heads wide open, seeing the challenges, the latest demographic survey, or the latest institutional challenge, but saying, in our own way, Alo Na'aleh. We can actually find our way forward by being bold, by being imaginative, by being smart.
~Rabbi Rick Jacobs, On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah - Sh'lach L'cha: Facing the Future

These scouts had experienced trauma. They were enslaved in Egypt, fled with the Egyptians on their heels, were led by a God that they could not see, and now they were being asked to give a calm and objective report about the possibility of conquering a new land. God seems to recognize, at least by the time the people are threatening to stone Joshua and Caleb for their faith in the Israelites' ability to conquer the land, that most of the people are responding with negative transformational strategies.
Consider this explanation of transformational coping after trauma, part of the theory:
Transformational coping comes with cognitive changes within our persona. When transformational coping is negative, one is likely to succumb to stress and revert to depression and worry. However, if the transformational coping is positive, it invites a surge of survival instincts, a higher level of recovery, and increased inner strength to sail through the adversity. (Schaefer & Moos, 1992)
~Beth Ellen Young, Transforming Trauma

Although the morality of conquest is an eternal question of human history, I wish to turn my attention to the classic rabbinic notion that the pessimistic scouts sinned by spreading rumors and panic. (See Gleanings, pages 1,116-1,117: "Slander" and "The Real Sin.") The Talmud (Ta'anit 29a) says that the Jewish people mourned an entire night and that the weeping was fated to echo throughout Jewish history—a crying and a weeping for future generations. As Roger Kamenetz writes in The Jew in the Lotus, page 5, "Nervous is my religion." The assumption here is that pessimism is wrong and optimism is right. The pessimists were sinners while the optimists were heroes, and these definitions were transmitted from one generation to the next.
My point is that all the scouts were right, not just the optimists Joshua and Caleb. Together the pessimists and optimists present the realistic picture of what Israel was facing: They were the first immigrants in our mythic history.
~RABBI BONNIE STEINBERG, Rethinking Immigration: Sh'lach L'cha, A Holistic Approach