The fear of freedom

The episode of the spies was one of the most tragic in the entire Torah. Who sent them and to what end is not entirely clear. In this week’s parsha, Shelach, the text says it was G-d who told Moshe to do so (Bamidbar 13:1-2). In Devarim (1:22), Moshe says it was the people who made the request.

Either way, the result was disaster. An entire generation was deprived of the chance to enter the Promised Land. The entry itself was delayed by forty years. According to the Sages, it cast its shadow long into the future.

Moshe had told the spies to go and see the land and bring back a report: Are the people many or few, strong or weak? Are the cities open or fortified? Is the soil fertile? They were also tasked with bringing back its fruit. The spies returned with a positive report about the land itself: “It is indeed flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.”

There then followed one of the most famous ‘buts’ in Jewish history: “But — the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of giants there” (Bamidbar 13:28).

Sensing that their words were demoralizing the people, Kalev, one of the spies, interrupted them with a message of reassurance: “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it!”

But the other spies insisted: “We cannot attack those people; they are stronger than we are … All the people we saw there are of great size … We seemed like grasshoppers” (Bamidbar 13:30–33). The next day, the people, persuaded that the challenge was beyond them, regretted that they had ever embarked on the Exodus and said, “Let us appoint a leader and go back to Egypt” (Bamidbar 14:4).

Thus far the narrative. However, it is difficult to understand. It was this that led the Lubavitcher Rebbe to give a radically revisionary interpretation of the episode. He asked the obvious: how could ten of the spies come back with a defeatist report? They had seen with their own eyes how G-d’s plagues brought the Egyptian empire to its knees. They had seen the Egyptian army and its chariots drown in the sea while the Israelites passed through on dry land. And Egypt was far stronger than the minor kingdoms they would have to confront in conquering the land.

What is more, they were entirely wrong about the people of the land. We discover this in the haftarah. When Yehoshua later sent spies to Yericho, the woman who sheltered them, Rachav, described what her people felt when they heard that that the Israelites were on their way:

“I know that the L-rd has given this land to you. A great fear of you has fallen on us … We have heard how the L-rd dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt … When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you” (Yehoshua 2:9-11).

The people of Yericho were not giants. They were as fearful of the Israelites as the Israelites were of them. The Israelites knew this; after the Splitting of the Sea, they sang: “The peoples have heard; they tremble … All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away; terror and dread fall upon them” (Shemot 15:14–16). Had they already forgotten?

Furthermore, continued the Rebbe, the spies were not plucked at random from the population. They were “men who were heads of the People of Israel.” They were leaders. They were not given lightly to fear.

The spies were not afraid of failure, the Rebbe said. What they were afraid of was success.

Never had a people lived so close to G-d. If they entered the land, their lifestyle of camping around the Mishkan, eating manna from heaven, living in continuous contact with the Shechinah would vanish. They would have to maintain an army, create an economy, farm the land, worry about the weather and crops, and all the other thousand distractions that come from living in the world. What would happen to their closeness to G-d?

Here, they could spend their entire lives learning Torah. There, they would be one more nation, with the same economic, social, and political problems that every other nation deals with.

They were afraid of success, and the change it would bring. They wanted to spend their lives as close to G-d as possible.

What they did not understand was that G-d seeks “a dwelling in the lower worlds.” While other religions seek to lift people to heaven, Judaism seeks to bring heaven down to earth.

Much of Torah is about things not conventionally seen as religious at all: labor relations, agriculture, welfare provisions, loans and debts, land ownership, and so on. It is not difficult to have an intense religious experience in the desert or at a monastic retreat. Most religions have holy places and holy people who live far removed from the stresses of everyday life.

But that is not the Jewish mission. G-d wanted the Israelites to create a model society where human beings were not treated as slaves, where rulers were not worshipped, where human dignity was respected, where no one was abandoned, no one was above the law, and no realm of life was a morality-free zone.

That requires a society, and a society needs a land. It requires an economy, an army, fields and flocks, labor and enterprise. All these, in Judaism, become ways of bringing the Shechinah into the shared spaces of our collective life.

The spies did not doubt that Israel could win its battles. Their concern was not physical but spiritual. They did not want to leave the wilderness. They did not want to become just another nation. They did not want to lose their unique relationship with G-d in the desert, far removed from civilization and its discontents. This was the mistake of deeply religious men — but it was a mistake.

But Torah is about the responsibilities of freedom. Judaism is not a religion of monastic retreat from the world. It is a religion of engagement with the world. G-d chose Israel to make His presence visible; therefore Israel must live in the world.

The Jewish people were not without ascetics. The Talmud speaks of R. Shimon bar Yochai living for thirteen years in a cave. Maimonides speaks of people who live as hermits in the desert to escape the corruptions of society. But these were the exceptions, not the rule. It is not the destiny of Israel to live as recluses.

The spies did not want to contaminate Judaism by bringing it into contact with the real world. They sought the eternal dependency of G-d’s protection and the endless embrace of His all-encompassing love.

There is something noble about this desire, but also something profoundly irresponsible. The spies demoralized the people and provoked the anger of G-d. The Jewish project — the Torah as the constitution of the Jewish nation under the sovereignty of G-d — is about building a society in the land of Israel that so honors human dignity and freedom that it will one day lead the world to say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Devarim 4:6).

The Jewish task is not to fear the real world, but to enter and transform it, healing some of its wounds and bringing to places often shrouded in darkness fragments of Divine light.