Chasing the Biblical Spies Through Jewish History

In February of last year, The New York Times ran a piece titled “A Jewish Teacher Criticized Israel. She Was Fired.” The piece told the story of Jessie Sander, a young woman who was dismissed from a Reform temple’s religious school shortly after higher-ups discovered a blog post she had co-authored titled “israel [sic] Won’t Save Us: Moving Towards Liberation.” At the top of the NYT profile was a photo of Sander gazing stoically at the camera — a forceful reminder of the ability of photography to editorialize. 

Predictably, prominent Jewish voices weighed in for and against Sander. When stories like this emerge, we diligently divide ourselves up into tidy partisan camps. There were those that believed that Sander was rightfully dismissed for hateful anti-Jewish rhetoric, and those that claimed she was silenced for daring to speak out against Israel’s misdeeds. It hardly mattered to most people what, exactly, Sander had actually written. 

A look at Sander’s blog post, however, reveals that she was no casual critic of Israel. She accuses Israel of “genocide” and expresses her scorn for the Jewish state by writing its name with all lowercase letters. America and Palestine, for whatever reason, are deemed worthy of uppercase. To make sense of this story, details like this are important to note. 

Also worth noting is the epigraph Sander chose to head up her post. It comes from an anonymous Yiddish poem titled “Oh, You Pathetic Little Zionists” translated by Daniel Kahn in 1931; and it has the potential to clarify something about this controversy. It reads:

“You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the Diaspora
And fight for our liberation”

The words evoke a similar cri de cœur from the episode of the spies in the book of Numbers. In this story, Moses, at the instigation of God, appoints 12 spies—meraglim—including Caleb and Joshua, to scout out the promised land as a prelude to the Israelite conquest. When they return, however, they report that the land is full of formidable giants and that the Israelites would be decimated if they attempted to settle there.

Caleb and Joshua do what they can to convince the people otherwise, but the other ten spies go further stating, “It is a land that devours its inhabitants.” 

At this, the whole people break out into wailing and rail against Moses and Aaron saying, “Why is God taking us to that land to fall by the sword?” 

And so we have two stories of controversy. In both, the Jewish people finds itself divided over the matter of the land of Israel. One story is enshrined in the Torah, the other detailed in the New York Times. In one the people ask why they should enter a land that will devour them — a place where they will fall by the sword. In the other, a young anti-Zionist rebukes the idea that Israel “exists for the protection of the Jewish people.”

A third such story, preserved in the angry rallying cry of the Yiddish poem, comes from the century before the founding of the state of Israel.

The tale of the spies thus reveals itself to be a kind of Jewish archetype — one which echoes throughout Jewish history in ever new iterations with subtly evolving significance. 

Contemporary commentator Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg calls the book of Numbers the “narrative of a great failure.” After the report of the 10 spies, the Israelites lose the will to enter the land of Israel. Their punishment, as is often the case in the book of Numbers, is getting exactly what they asked for. God decrees that they will not enter the promised land. Instead, they will stay in the desert for 40 years until every one of them has died and a new generation has risen in their stead. “I will allow your children to enter,” says God. “They shall know the land that you have rejected. But your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness.” (13:31-32). 

 In this tragedy, it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The heroes are Caleb and Joshua, who remain faithful to God and the land. The villains are the 10 spies who bring an evil report of the land. 

For some contemporary Zionists, it’s tempting to impose this simple moral schema onto our contemporary discourse around Israel. Rabbi Norman Lamm, for instance, wrote in 1969 of “Jews against Jews,” who he characterized as the “meraglim type, the anti-Israel partisans.”

This is a rather easy comparison to make, but it is also cheap, untrue, and lacking in historical humility. The uncertainties of the past, for us, have become known history. Had Israel lost the War of Independence, however, we might be tempted in 2023 to make a different analogy, comparing the Zionists of that era to those Israelites who charged the land without being commanded, of whom Moses said, “This will not succeed.” 

Rather than using the story of the spies to castigate our ideological opponents, we should recognize that something much more profound is at work with this particular Biblical narrative. It represents a unique fractal of Jewish life — a foundational myth reenacted throughout Jewish history. In every generation, the land of Israel rises up before us as a mirror of our communal hopes and fears — a totem symbolizing the particular psychic material which we are, at any given time, processing as a people. 

In the original Torah narrative, the debate over the land of Israel is a debate about security. God has assured the Israelites that the land represents their deliverance, but the spies insist that they will die there — indeed, that they were actually safer in Egypt.

By the time “Oh, You Pathetic Little Zionists” was penned, this concern about security was still salient. After all, it was a time of great precariousness for European Jewry. Antisemitism was rampant and many sensed the great catastrophe that loomed on the horizon. Safety, however, was no longer the sole axis on which the controversy revolved. Also in question was the nature of Jewish identity. This can be heard in the double meaning of the phrase from the poem, to “die as a nation.” The line implies not only that Zionism will fail to assure Jewish safety, but also that statehood will betray the essence of what it means to be a Jew.

Surprisingly, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 has not exempted us from these debates. Ambivalence about the land still divides our communities, as controversies like the firing of Sander make clear. That said, our contemporary communal debates about Israel are different from those of our ancestors for the simple reason that Israel already exists. 

Unlike the Jews of Europe before 1948 or the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai, Israel is no mere hypothetical for us — it is an established fact. Considering this, the division of Jewish communities into pro-Israel and anti-Israel camps seems rather absurd.

So what is our contemporary reenactment of the spy narrative actually about? In 2023, the spies are not debating whether or not to settle Israel. Instead, they are debating how we discuss Israel — the contours and limits of acceptable discourse. 

So what is our contemporary reenactment of the spy narrative actually about? In 2023, the spies are not debating whether or not to settle Israel. Instead, they are debating how we discuss Israel — the contours and limits of acceptable discourse. 

Which is to say that the New York Times headline somewhat missed the point. Sander most likely wasn’t fired for “criticizing” Israel. As the article itself points out, “Debate over Israel, including sometimes strong criticism of its policies, is not unusual at synagogues in the United States, especially those that follow the Reform movement.” A more likely story is that she was fired for the particular ways in which she used language.

The story of the spies details the degradation of a shared discourse into meaninglessness and cruelty. The spies begin by telling harsh truths about the land. When this fails to completely persuade their audience, they resort to outright slander.

“It is a land that devours its inhabitants.” (13:32). 

According to the medieval commentator Ramban, it was this lie that put an end to any possible hope that the episode would have a good resolution.

Caleb and Joshua, however, are also guilty of misusing language. After the community begins to panic, they state that “the land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land.” (14:7). The words used here, “tov meod meod” or, literally, “very, very good,” evoke God’s appraisal of the world on the sixth day of creation: “tov meod,” or very good.

According to R. H. Blyth’s famous definition, sentimentality is loving something more than God does. In calling the land “tov meod meod,” Caleb and Joshua are becoming sentimental towards it. Their distortion does not warrant being called a sin, but it is nonetheless a distortion.

Ramban takes note of this. Caleb and Joshua were, he writes, seeking to counter the bad report given by the other ten spies. Hyperbole breeds hyperbole and discourses are created and distorted as people begin to define their positions in opposition to one another.

Before moving to Israel, I, like Jessie Sander, worked at a synagogue religious school in New York. On Israeli Independence Day, I printed maps of Israel for the children to color in. The maps I chose included a dotted line that separated “Israel proper” from the West Bank. I can’t remember if this was an ideological decision or not.

What I do remember is the uncharacteristic flash of fury that crossed the face of our hippie Reform rabbi principal when she saw the maps. “You don’t get to decide what’s part of Israel and what’s not,” she snapped at me. “Go print different maps.” I nodded and headed back up to the printer, feeling censored and disrespected. 

Years later, I can perhaps forgive her reaction. When there is so much slander and vitriol about Israel, Zionists may end up feeling beleaguered and defensive. The consequence, however, was that she created an environment in which honest, nuanced discussion about Israel was hushed. 

Environments like these have given rise to a new trope in Jewish life — that of the Jew who, after having been raised in an uncritically Zionist environment, is faced suddenly and shockingly with the “truth.” This trope is forcefully evoked in documentaries like “Israelism,” in which “two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the way Israel treats Palestinians.” As a result, “their lives take sharp left turns.” 

Writing about “Israelism” in this paper, David Suissa wrote that the film “ignores the great number of Jewish kids who never went to Jewish day schools but have been poisoned on Israel precisely by propaganda vehicles like ‘Israelism,’ not to mention BDS campaigns that routinely malign Israel as a genocidal, baby-killing apartheid regime.”

The thing is that there is truth to both of these stories. Some Jewish kids grow up in a world where Israel is indeed portrayed as a uniquely evil actor on the world stage — the principal villain in the epic of human history. Other Jewish kids grow up in a world where the only permitted comment about Israel is that it is “tov meod meod.” 

A few weeks ago, my partner, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, went around Jerusalem asking people on the street about their hopes and fears for Israel as part of a final school project. One Haredi man, when asked about his concerns about Israel, refused to answer. “We learn from the meraglim that it’s a sin to speak ill of the land.”

Ramban refuses to believe that the spies were punished for telling harsh truths. Rather, they were punished because their words had no constructive value. 

This is a possible, albeit puerile, takeaway from the story, but Ramban refuses to believe that the spies were punished for telling harsh truths.

Rather, they were punished because their words had no constructive value. They were supposed to come back with an honest appraisal of the challenges that the Israelites would face in the land, and they were supposed to deliver that information in a way that would inspire a readiness to confront those challenges, not a desire to flee from them. 

According to Ramban, the spies thus fundamentally misunderstood their task. At the very heart of their commission was the verb “to see.” “Go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country, and see what kind of country it is” (13:17-18). They were supposed to look at the land, which is to say, deal with it. This, I believe, is our mission today as well. 

Hyperbole and slander are merely two opposite ways of looking away. When we insist that everything is “tov meod meod,” or when we shout that it is “a land that devours its inhabitants,” we look away from Israel, rendering ourselves insensate to its unique challenges and opportunities. Like the spy episode itself, our discourse around Israel is becoming “the narrative of a great failure,” the story of a people divided and language which obfuscates rather than illuminates.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020).