Parashat Sh’lach lecha
Shabbat shalom.
Our reading today, Sh’lach lecha (Numbers 13–15), tells the story of the spies Moses sent into Canaan to scout out the land and bring back reports about whether the Israelites could take it as their own as God had promised them. It would seem to be a straightforward story. The twelve spies came back and all but two of them reported that the residents and their cities were fearsome and that they, the spies, looked like grasshoppers at the feet of giants. Only two, Joshua and Caleb, counseled optimism, saying it was a land of “milk and honey,” meaning that it was agriculturally fertile and productive (think of cows and bees), and that the Israelites could conquer it. At hearing these reports, the people were terrified and wept about what would become of them.
What we are not reading today in this parasha is the next part, where God becomes angry that the ten spies dared to contradict his prophecy and that the people followed them. God decreed a terrible punishment: Of all those in the current generation, only Caleb and Joshua, the optimists, would be allowed to enter the Promised Land. All the others, including Moses, would die before that day. And this is why the Children of Israel had to spend the next thirty-plus years in the desert. All but two of them had to die first. It was God’s will.
Now let me tell you another story. There was a powerful leader who promised his people that they would also conquer a neighboring land, where their forefathers had lived and where the stories of their faith originated. He sent out spies. Most of them came back with reports that the plan was insane, that the people who lived there would resist and demolish the invaders. But a few of them, wishing to please the leader, said “no, it will be a cakewalk.” The leader decided that he would go with the optimistic reports and declared an invasion. It failed miserably. It demolished both the invaders and the land they tried to seize.
In this story, of course, the land is not Canaan, but Ukraine.
The parallels here are superficial but disturbing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting that the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites, who had suffered four hundred years of slavery and great deprivations and losses in the desert, can in any way be compared with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The circumstances were very different, and the results, too, were different. But still, the superficial parallelism of these two stories leaves us with some difficult questions.
Foremost among them is this: When is it appropriate, allowable, morally correct, and justifiable for one tribe or country to invade another, including the use of force? And if history is written by the victors, how can we know the truth that has been recorded in their annals, and not those of the vanquished?
One way to distinguish between moral and immoral seizure of land may be the means used. For example, well before God allowed them to enter Canaan, some of the Israelites mutinied, taking up arms and fighting bloody battles against the tribes occupying the land. It was a disaster. Only after cleansing themselves of a whole generation, the generation that had known Egypt and feared their future in another hostile land, were their children able to proceed.
(Parenthetically, here’s an interesting thought. When we say Kiddush and the words “Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim,´- in memory of the going out from Egypt — whose memory are we actually singing about? Is it the memory of those who actually went out, or the reconstructed memory of the next generations?)
Now, when it was finally time for the Israelites to enter the Promised Land, it is not reported whether they marched across the border in armed military formations, or as an ecstatic gaggle. The battle of Jericho was their first military engagement.
We do not know if there were any negotiations before the battle; probably not. What we believe about that battle, based on the annals of the victors as told in the book of Joshua, is that they marched around the city walls for six days making fearsome noise with trumpets and surrounded the city on the seventh, when the walls miraculously crumbled by Divine intervention, not human violence. God’s will.
But after that bloodless victory, as on other important occasions (see my drash on Pinchas), God commanded the Israelites to slaughter every living being in the city, including the farm animals, except for the family of the prostitute who had sheltered Israelite spies before the battle. This was also God’s will, as reported in the annals of the victors, in our own sacred texts.
Now, just wait a second. What are we, the generation of the grandchildren of the Holocaust, to make of the mass slaughter of innocents decreed by God on not one, but several occasions in our sacred narrative? Let’s go on.
Here, we moderns may well ask whether it was indeed God’s intervention that secured the great bloodless victory, or even more whether it was God’s will to commit the ensuing genocidal act, or whether, as historians seem to agree, it was all a made-up story of the later Judean Kingdom to justify the use of violence in its own affairs. In fact, there is no architectural evidence whatsoever of the event, which seems to live today only in the sands of memory.
Moving on. Eventually, after encountering armed resistance from the locals, the Israelites were able to settle peacefully in a piece of territory they could call their own. In part, this was because they were surrounded by weakened tribes often warring with themselves. When the powerful Philistines came along, that was a different matter, but according to legend it was settled with a slingshot and not a massacre.
These are all matters of Biblical and historical theory. But what troubles me about these stories, all of them, today, is what we see and hear taking place in the former Canaan, now the State of Israel and its Occupied Territories. These are some of the questions that trouble me today:
- Is it God’s will, as the new ultra-hardliners in the Israeli government — people who had been banned from previous governments for their advocacy of violence, would have us think — is it God’s will to deprive non-Jewish citizens, or perhaps more narrowly Muslims, of their civil and political rights?
- Is it God’s will to deny the right to live in Israel of people, like many in this congregation, who have embraced Judaism and love of Israel by choice by the authority of non-Orthodox Rabbis?
- Is it God’s will to eject Arabs from Israel entirely by redrawing its borders, as Israel’s new Foreign Minister has advocated, much as we do racist gerrymandering in this country?
Or, if these and other measures advocated by the new extremist right-wing government of Israel — which has given an entirely new meaning to the concept of Zionism — if these measures are not God’s will, what then are they? If they are concoctions of human will, wrapped up in the Divine presence, what can we say about them, and their motivation?
Returning to my earlier question: When is it moral, and when not, to wage war against another people, to take a land by violence, to deprive its residents of their rights as citizens and human beings, to oppress others in order to preserve one’s own privilege — not to mention committing genocide against an enemy? I offer a simple answer:
When the only justification for acts of violence and oppression by one people against another is God’s will, or in modern times the claims of one religion or ethnic group against another, there is no justification at all.
When its advocates, in the words of The Poet, say that “God’s on our side,” you can bet that God, like the Israelites in the desert, is weeping.
Ken y’hi ratzon.
June 8, 2023
