The Grasshopper Complex

This week's parsha is Sh'lach. Forgive me, in advance, for running a bit of a continuation of last week's theme with this week's framing.

Moses sends twelve scouts into Canaan. Each of them is a leader of his tribe — people of standing, not prone to losing their nerve. They spend forty days in the land and return with a physical sample: a cluster of grapes so large that two men carry it between them on a pole. Then they give their report.

Ten of the twelve say it cannot be done. The cities are fortified and enormous. The people are giants. "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves," they tell Moses, "and so we must have looked to them." Numbers 13:33 — and those two clauses have lasted three thousand years because they describe something durable. The scouts are not wrong about the giants. Their intelligence is accurate. They read the data and reached a verdict: too small, stay put.

Caleb disagrees.

וַיַּ֧הַס כָּלֵ֛ב אֶת־הָעָ֖ם אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֗אמֶר עָלֹ֤ה נַעֲלֶה֙ וְיָרַ֣שְׁנוּ אֹתָ֔הּ כִּי־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

The first word is "וַיַּהַס" — he hushed them. Before he said a word about the land, he stilled the crowd. The grammar puts the silencing first. The panic had to stop before anything else could be heard.

Caleb worked with the same field intelligence the other scouts brought back — the giants, the fortifications, forty days of accurate observation. He reached a different conclusion anyway: "we shall surely overcome it." The Hebrew doubles the verb — יָכוֹל נוּכַל — the way biblical Hebrew presses emphasis when the speaker is not hedging. Definitely, absolutely, thoroughly able. Ten scouts read identical evidence and concluded the opposite.

Ten scouts. Two who said to go up. The vote was not close.

What I keep coming back to, reading this parsha, is that Caleb and Joshua had been in the same land, walked the same hills, looked at the same people. Same evidence, different place. The grasshopper complex lives alongside accurate information — that is what makes it difficult to argue against. The scouts could point to the giants. They were right about the giants. Accurate intelligence and a verdict of defeat coexist in the same report. Caleb read the same accurate intelligence and arrived somewhere else.

The families we talked about last week, in New Jersey and Toronto, have done the research and are still participating in the summer's aliyah wave. They know the housing market, the school enrollment process, the language question, the security situation. Their picture of Israel is not a soft-focus one that omits the difficult parts. They showed up to the pre-aliyah events and booked their flights because, for some people, a clear-eyed accounting of what is hard does not become a verdict to stay put.

We, though we started the process last year, are on their path with them. Our aliyah file has picked up steam and is moving again. We have hopes to make the move this summer — perhaps in the next few weeks. It's a logistical burden, but the spiritual and emotional benefits are huge [even if the tax benefits are overrated].

The parsha leaves something open. The Torah locates the punishment with precision. The scouts gave accurate intelligence. The covenant broke on what came next: the people wept through the night and concluded they would have been better off dying in Egypt. The community collapsed the data into a verdict of return. Caleb hushed his end of the crowd before that collapse could happen.

We are all, in our own ways, learning which of our concerns are the Caleb kind, drawn from the same accurate data as everyone else and arriving somewhere different, and which are the ten-scouts kind that look at the same accurate data and reach for Egypt.

The summer aliyah season is the busiest of the year because the school calendar cooperates, because families want to be settled before the High Holidays, because the logistics line up. The Calebs take preparation seriously. They read the same data everyone else reads and reach a different verdict.

The cluster of grapes is still so large it takes two people to carry it. The land is still what it is. And every year, people show up to the pre-aliyah events, quiet their own crowd, and say: we are definitely, absolutely able.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham