The Grapes Were Real

On Wednesday evening in Rome I walked through the old Jewish Ghetto and ran into Ben Shapiro—though he had to have two bodyguards, we were basically doing the same thing.

The Ghetto is about five blocks of narrow streets along a bend of the Tiber. Today it has restaurants and gelato shops and a few synagogues and "stumble stones" throughout. We stayed the night in an Airbnb—an apartment that had been constructed several centuries earlier.

The neighborhood was beautiful. It was also the place where, in October 1943, the Nazis rounded up over a thousand Roman Jews and sent them to Auschwitz. Fewer than twenty came back.

My husband and I have been traveling through Europe for two weeks — Poland to Vienna to Venice to Rome to Rotterdam — and the pattern has been the same in every city. Beautiful buildings. Jewish names on plaques. Museums where there used to be people. In Vienna, the Jewish quarter has a memorial. In Venice, the original Ghetto is a stop on a walking tour. In Rome, the kosher restaurants are packed and the synagogue is an architectural wonder. The people are mostly gone. There are still fewer Jews on the planet than there were before the Shoah. That fact hits differently when you're eating cacio e pepe where many used to live.

The parsha this Shabbat is Shelach — "send" — and it contains one of the most famous intelligence failures in the Torah. God tells Moses to send scouts to check out the land of Canaan. Twelve go, one from each tribe. They travel for forty days. When they come back, the first part of their report is unanimous:

וַיְסַפְּרוּ־לוֹ֙ וַיֹּ֣אמְר֔וּ בָּ֕אנוּ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֣ר שְׁלַחְתָּ֑נוּ וְ֠גַ֠ם זָבַ֨ת חָלָ֥ב וּדְבַ֛שׁ הִ֖וא וְזֶה־פִּרְיָֽהּ׃

This is what they told him: “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.

— Bamidbar 13:27

The fruit, by the way, was staggering. A cluster of grapes so large it took two men to carry it on a pole. Pomegranates. Figs. The evidence of the land's goodness was physical, visible, right there in their hands.

And then the report splits. Ten of the twelve say: the people who live there are giants. The cities are fortified. We can't do it.

וְשָׁ֣ם רָאִ֗ינוּ אֶת־הַנְּפִילִ֛ים בְּנֵ֥י עֲנָ֖ק מִן־הַנְּפִלִ֑ים וַנְּהִ֤י בְעֵינֵ֙ינוּ֙ כַּֽחֲגָבִ֔ים וְכֵ֥ן הָיִ֖ינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶֽם׃

we saw the Nephilim there—the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”

— Bamidbar 13:33

The rabbis notice something painful in that second clause. "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves" — that's fear. Fear is human. But "and so we must have looked to them" — that's projection.

They had no idea how the Canaanites saw them. They took their own smallness and assumed the world agreed.

Caleb doesn't deny the giants. He doesn't pretend the cities aren't fortified. He reads the same evidence and reaches a different conclusion:

וַיַּ֧הַס כָּלֵ֛ב אֶת־הָעָ֖ם אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֗אמֶר עָלֹ֤ה נַעֲלֶה֙ וְיָרַ֣שְׁנוּ אֹתָ֔הּ כִּֽי־יָכ֥וֹל נוּכַ֖ל לָֽהּ׃

Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”

— Bamidbar 13:30

Same land. Same grapes. Same giants. Two reports. The difference is not in what they saw but in what they concluded from the seeing.

This week — the same week I was walking through ghetto streets turned gelato district — Israel's ongoing wartime baby boom continued to make headlines.

Despite rockets, reserve duty, and a multifront conflict, Israeli women have been having babies at rates not seen in years. A ten percent increase in births in late 2024 extended into 2025. The land that the ten spies described as one that "devours its inhabitants" is generating life faster than it has in a generation.

Somebody looked at the same map the pessimists looked at and chose to bring a child into it.

Since October 2023, more than fifty-three thousand Jews worldwide have made aliyah. Moved to Israel. During a war. My husband and I applied several months ago to join them. Of those that already made it? Over five hundred of them were doctors who left practices in North America, France, and South America to work in Israeli hospitals. At a conference in Paris in May, three hundred more European physicians explored the process. The modern Calebs don't deny the giants. They carry the grapes.

The parsha ends with something I didn't connect to the spies until recently. After the disaster — after the people panic, after God decrees forty years of wandering — the text gives a commandment that seems to arrive from nowhere. Tzitzit. Fringes. Tie them to the corners of your garments and look at them:

וְהָיָ֣ה לָכֶם֮ לְצִיצִת֒ וּרְאִיתֶ֣ם אֹת֗וֹ וּזְכַרְתֶּם֙ אֶת־כׇּל־מִצְוֺ֣ת יְהֹוָ֔ה וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָ֑ם וְלֹֽא־תָת֜וּרוּ אַחֲרֵ֤י לְבַבְכֶם֙ וְאַחֲרֵ֣י עֵֽינֵיכֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־אַתֶּ֥ם זֹנִ֖ים אַחֲרֵיהֶֽם׃

That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all GOD’s commandments and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your urge to stray.

— Bamidbar 15:39

The Hebrew does something the English can't. Lo taturu — "do not follow" — uses the same root as the word for what the spies did. Tur. To scout. To tour. To look around. The twelve scouts toured the land and ten of them saw wrong. Now God says: here is something to look at instead. Tie it to your clothes. Every morning, see it and remember. Don't let your eyes make you a grasshopper.

A parsha that opens with a failure of seeing closes with a commandment about seeing correctly. The spies had the evidence in their hands — grapes so heavy two men strained to lift them — and still came back afraid. The tzitzit are a permanent corrective, tied to the thing you're already wearing. You don't have to go looking. The reminder is right there, at the edge of your garment, every day.

Yesterday we came to Rotterdam for a friend's seventy-fifth birthday. Seventy-five years in a continent that tried to empty itself of our people, and here we are. There was cake. There were candles. The room was warm. Outside, Europe did what Europe does — carried on, largely unaware that anything remarkable was happening in this particular apartment.

Seventy-five years. The grapes were real.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham