Walk past some of the most famous college campuses in America and you’ll see libraries containing centuries of accumulated thought. Red brick paths worn smooth by generations of footsteps. Places that helped shape not only the American story, but in many ways the modern world itself.
At the entrance to Harvard Yard stands Dexter Gate. Above it is inscribed a simple charge: “Enter to grow in wisdom.”
It is difficult to imagine a more noble aspiration. To learn. To grow. To encounter ideas larger than yourself. To leave wiser than when you arrived. And yet many of us will pass by these institutions carrying a complicated mixture of admiration and disappointment. The past several years have profoundly altered the way many Americans — and certainly many Jews — view elite universities. Institutions once imagined as beacons of intellectual courage have appeared confused, hesitant and remarkably incapable of producing the moral clarity they exist to cultivate.
How does that happen?
How do institutions filled with intelligence fail to produce wisdom?
How do communities blessed with talent fail to produce leadership?
How do good people lose faith in their ability to shape the future – how do they fail to show up for history, precisely when it seems to need them the most?
Perhaps the question is older than we think. It may even lie at the heart of one of the greatest national disappointments in Jewish history, found in this week’s parsha: the tragedy of the Meraglim — the spies.
Parshat Shelach opens with extraordinary promise. The Jewish people stand at the threshold of destiny. They have emerged from the crucible of bondage, heard the voice of God at Sinai, and now find themselves just days away from the fulfillment of centuries-old promises first made to Avraham. As the Rav notes in last week’s parsha, it is difficult not to become swept up in the excitement of Moshe’s words to Jethro:
Come with us.
History is about to unfold, and there is a place for you within it.
One can sense how painful it must have been for Moshe to record himself saying those words at the end of his life. Near everyone in the “us” he was referencing with such eagerness and anticipation would die in the desert. They would never cross the Jordan. Neither would he.
The tragedy of the Meraglim is not merely a story of failure. It is a story about one of the deepest convictions of Jewish life. One that declares that not only will redemption come, not only does history have direction, but that every individual is invited to participate in it, destiny is something each of us is asked to build toward.
This is a story of when that conviction begins to unravel.
Moshe sends 12 representatives to survey the land. No ordinary men, but princes of Israel. The best and brightest of their generation. These were men who had experienced miracles first hand. Nobody had received a more privileged education. No one knew more intimately what God was capable of. If anyone should have succeeded, it was them.
And yet they return with a report so devastating that it plunges an entire nation into despair.
The obvious question is not why they were afraid, but how they could have been. After watching the sea split, sustenance rain down from the skies, clouds of glory flatten their enemies, how could the words “it’s impossible” even leave their lips?
Again we are left wondering how the most privileged of educations could fail to cultivate the courage and clarity of purpose that it is designed to produce. The Zohar suggests that the spies feared losing their positions of leadership once Jewish life reorganized itself around the new realities that sovereignty would demand. It was this fear that inspired their misdirected report.
Yet these men were certainly not power-hungry autocrats. We are told that they are listed in order of greatness and Joshua is fifth. Joshua and Caleb both need special segulot to protect themselves from whatever human impulse was compelling enough to inspire this disastrous but apparently deeply human misimpression.
No, the Zohar must be identifying something subtler that they were afraid of losing than mere authority. Because now everything was about to change. The desert required one kind of leadership. A sovereign nation would require another. These were not cowards or men of little faith. Rather, they were men who could no longer imagine themselves inside the next chapter of the story.
Across the Jordan lay something enormous.
Israel was not merely a land, a military challenge or political transition, but the possibility of Jewish history becoming larger than anything they had previously imagined. And it would demand responsibility on a scale they had never known.
Manna would be exchanged for agriculture and its ensuing complications. Heavenly clouds of glory would be replaced by human armies that would forever redefine what it would mean to sacrifice, to fight for something, to create a destiny with one’s own two hands and the indescribable inestimable costs of it all.
The tragedy of the Meraglim was not that they encountered giants, it was that in the face of giants, they felt small. When man feels small in the presence of something great, he responds in one of two ways. Either he grows to meet it, or he cuts it down to match his lowest expectations of himself. Eretz Yisrael represented a destiny too large for their imagination.
A future too demanding.
A mission too consequential.
And so they begin searching for guarantees. Explanations as to why they will never succeed. All in an attempt to reduce the size of the future to something that felt manageable. To turn destiny into something that no longer required transformation.
But Jewish history has never worked that way.
God does not usually reveal the entire path before asking us to begin walking it. Avraham leaves home before being told where he is going. Nachshon steps into the sea before it splits. The generation of the desert is asked to cross a river before they know how the conquest will unfold.
The Meraglim are one of the first people in Jewish history to stand before the promise of redemption and ask whether it is realistic.
Whether it is practical.
Whether it is worth attempting.
Whether they belong there at all.
But they are certainly not the last. Who among us has not experienced it? Whenever a demand or a goal exposes the distance between who we are and who we could become, we are experts at explaining why the dream is unrealistic. Why the goal is naïve or the responsibility belongs to someone else.
Why history is asking too much of us.
Perhaps this is why Israel provokes such powerful reactions around the world.
For the Meraglim, Eretz Yisrael represented a future too large for their imagination. Responsibilities they did not yet know how to bear. A destiny that demanded they become more than they presently were. And for many people today, Israel continues to represent something similarly unsettling.
The return of an ancient people to history.
The persistence of a civilization that refused to disappear.
The possibility that ideals can become realities.
Like the spies, many encounter something larger than themselves and immediately begin cutting it down to size. They insist it is illegitimate. Impossible. Unworthy. A mistake. Because it is often easier to diminish a great project than to confront what it asks of us.
But this temptation is not limited to antizionists or university campuses.
The Meraglim are not merely a story about other people.
They are a story about us. Every one of us has moments when we stand before a future that feels larger than we are. A community that needs leadership. A calling that asks us to risk failure. A responsibility we secretly hope someone else will assume.
The Meraglim are not merely a story about other people. They are a story about us. Every one of us has moments when we stand before a future that feels larger than we are. A community that needs leadership. A calling that asks us to risk failure. A responsibility we secretly hope someone else will assume.
We tell ourselves we are being realistic. We call it caution or pragmatism. But often we are merely shrinking the dream to match our fears instead of enlarging ourselves to meet it. The question raised by the spies is not merely whether we believe in the future but whether we are willing to become the kind of people that future requires.
The Meraglim allow doubts in themselves to become doubts in God’s plan. Instead of asking, “What must we become?” they asked whether they could become it at all. Instead of asking, “What is needed from us here?” they asked whether they belonged in the first place. The distinction irreparably changed the course of Jewish history.
But not everyone in the story sees it this way.
The Parsha opens with the words “shlach lecha anashim” which the midrash teaches us defines the spies as men – anashim, as opposed to women. This, the Kli Yakar suggests, was their first mistake. If Moshe wanted spies who would see only the beauty and promise in the land of Israel, well then he should have sent women, whose unfailing chibat haaretz would have ensured a positive report.
Throughout Jewish history women repeatedly demonstrated a remarkable ability to remain attached to the future even when the present offers little evidence for hope. Wives and mothers in Egypt, bnot yisrael with the Golden Calf, and again with bnot tzlofchad — all insist upon their place within a future everyone had yet to see. Joshua and Caleb are also able to perceive rightly. What binds these two groups, perhaps not coincidentally, is that they are both inextricably linked with representations of the moon.
Tradition associates women with the holiday of Rosh Chodesh. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tosafot suggests that Bnei Yisrael are “monin lalevnana” – we count the calendar in accordance with the moon for this very reason.
Every month the moon disappears. For a brief moment, the sky offers no evidence the light will return. And yet it is that moment at which Jews declare a new month. Not when the light is taken for granted, and tomorrow inevitable – but precisely when it is not. We sanctify the moon at the point of greatest uncertainty and darkness because we know that the absence of light is not the absence of a Divine destiny or a grand plan.
The Gemara in Bava Basra also compares Moshe to the sun and Joshua to the moon, who ostensibly would not shine as bright. Indeed, the sun may generate light. But it is the moon that receives it, reflects it and carries it into darkness.
Moshe would give us Torah, but Joshua would carry it across the Jordan and into the rest of destiny.
Moshe would reveal eternal truths, but Joshua would be the one to teach a nation how to build a future with them.
In the land of Israel, in all of the uncertainty and broadness it represents, it will be the sun that stands still for Joshua. Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlap writes that human potential expands in proportion to the greatness of the future one is willing to imagine.
The Meraglim believed the mission needed to be cut down to size, and failed to envision a version of themselves that could be as big as the future demanded. But Joshua understood that great missions do not sit and wait for great people to receive them. It is often the reverse – that it is the great missions that create the great people.
Judaism has always been a civilization built on potential. Because Jews have never waited for certainty before investing in the future.
Naaseh vNishma.
We participate, build, and commit first. We know that the light comes afterward.
The Meraglim incorrectly understood their mission to be to evaluate if they were meant to enter the land at all. But that question had already been answered. God, History, the covenant had all answered it. The only remaining question was how.
How would they get there?
How would they grow into the people capable of inheriting it?
Joshua understood this. That is why when he later sends spies, he is already preparing the nation to cross the Jordan before they return. The Jewish people have never survived because we knew exactly what the future would look like. But because we never doubted that we had a place within it. And perhaps that distinction matters now more than ever.
One of the great temptations of modern life is to retreat into smaller and smaller stories. To define ourselves primarily through our faction, our social circle, our political tribe.
In America today, many people have stopped believing in the American story altogether. They invest in their camp, their coalition, their community, but no longer in the larger project that binds them together. The same danger exists within the Jewish world.
In America today, many people have stopped believing in the American story altogether. They invest in their camp, their coalition, their community, but no longer in the larger project that binds them together. The same danger exists within the Jewish world.
Faced with rising antisemitism, uncertainty and division, many Jews find themselves asking whether they still have a future in America. Others ask whether there is a future for the Jewish people at all. But these kinds of questions are at worst destructive and at best a waste of precious time.
For nearly 4,000 years, Jews have survived because we refused to surrender our place in the story. Thus the secret of national survival is perhaps the same as the secret of leadership: to look at an uncertain future and understand that the question was never whether there would be a place for you within it. But what you were prepared to contribute when you got there.
In many ways, the American story was built by people who thought similarly. The Founding Fathers did not launch a revolution because success was guaranteed. The odds were absurd. They faced the most powerful empire on earth. But they did not waste time asking whether they had a role in the story of America. They were too busy creating one, and with it, changing the world forever.
That is the challenge of the Meraglim, of citizenship and of history. To stop standing outside the story evaluating its chances of success. To stop asking whether there will be a future or whether you belong in it. And instead to ask the questions Joshua asked:
How do I help build it?
How do I prepare myself for it?
How do I become large enough to meet it?
The inscription on the Dexter Gate at the entrance to Harvard says: “Enter to grow in wisdom.” But there’s another inscription on the back: “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.”
The front of the gate speaks about knowledge. The back speaks about responsibility. The front asks what you understand. The back asks what you will do.
The Meraglim entered seeking wisdom. Joshua departed prepared to serve.
The Meraglim asked whether. Joshua asked how. And that made all the difference.
Adina Feldman is a Straus Scholar at Yeshiva University.
