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June 15, 2001/Sivan 24, 5761, Vol. 53, No.37
For we shall surely overcome
Torah Study
RABBI BARTON LEE
Sh'lach L'cha/Numbers 13:1-15:41
This week's Torah portion, Sh'lach L'cha, perhaps the oldest spy story in history, begins with the wandering Israelites moving closer to the land of Israel and encamping in the wilderness of Paran. Moses sends 12 spies to scout the land, now in possession of the Caananites. When the scouts return, 10 spies advise against attack because the Caananites are powerful, their cities fortified.
One spy, Caleb, dissents and shouts above the others: "Let us by all means go up, ki yachol nuchal lah ("for we shall surely overcome it").
(Numbers 13:30)
The 10 spies retort that conquest is impossible: "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them."
(Numbers 13:33)
Despite Joshua and Caleb's calls for courage, the Israelite people give up, and for this they are punished with 40 more years of wandering in the wilderness until a new, confident generation would arise. Thus the first biblical spy story.
But biblical stories are more than just stories. Embedded within them are messages. Perhaps the most suggestive message in this story is the exaggerated report of the scouts: "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." When the spies report this, they reveal their perception of themselves.
Such a perception is deadly. When people view themselves as grasshoppers before a giant, they become passive, resigned to their lot. Without a grander vision of themselves, they cannot muster the energy to change the social evils in which they are mired.
A Hasidic commentator once observed that the worst part of our people's slavery in Egypt is that they came to think of themselves as slaves, seeing themselves in the image cast by their oppressors.
Struggles for freedom and justice cannot be won by people who view themselves as grasshoppers.
The most powerful words in the biblical spy story are those of Caleb: Ki yachol nuchal lah. These words can also be translated as "We Shall Overcome," the title of the signature song of the American civil rights movement. That song reminded those involved in the struggle that they were not grasshoppers but human beings, empowered to change age-old discrimination.
Ki yachol nuchal lah. These words were phrased differently by Theodor Herzl when he stated, "If you will it, it is no dream." Zionist organizers and pioneers, farmers and fighters, immigrants from one hundred countries, and refugees from the Holocaust: None of them saw themselves as grasshoppers. They had a collective confidence - a sense that they could "surely overcome it."
In a sermon, Rabbi Max Nussbaum taught that Caleb's words were a powerful antidote to people's tendency to see themselves as grasshoppers in their personal lives. Rabbi Nussbaum suggested that when we doubt ourselves, our strength, our talents, and our courage, we should repeat Caleb's words.
Caleb's words express faith that we are not grasshoppers but human beings created in God's image and that God is with us in our struggles to continuously improve as individuals and as nations. They also remind us that in our personal and communal struggles, we can draw on divine energy to lift us higher than we thought we could ever go. Ki yachol nuchal lah.
Barton Lee is the rabbi of the Hillel-Jewish Student Center and a faculty associate at Arizona State University. Torat Hayim, produced by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, is on the Internet at www.uahc.org/growth.
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