Parashat Shelah I: Of Grasshoppers and Giants

Riddle: What do Bob the Builder and Calev ben Yefuneh from this week’s parsha have in common? Answer: They both say: “Can we do it? Yes, we can!”

This week’s parsha, Shelah, tells the story of the 12 meraglim -- scouts who were sent by Moshe from the desert to survey the land of Israel in preparation for the people’s entrance. 10 of the scouts came back saying, “We can’t do it. We won’t be able to conquer the land.” They reported that the land does indeed produce incredible fruit (one bunch of grapes can be carried only by two people using a pole!), but that efes, “no matter” (Numbers 13:28), because the land’s inhabitants are giants, and their cities are well-fortified. The other 2 scouts, Calev and Yehoshua, were steadfast and confident, arguing that since God is with the people of Israel, they will succeed in conquering this great land. They said: “We can surely do it,” which in Hebrew sounds like a double can-do -- yakhol nukhal lah (13:30).

Why were Calev and Yehoshua so confident and positive, while the other 10 spies so hopeless and negative? What made Calev and Yehoshua see the challenge of the conquest of the land as an exciting opportunity to be seized, and the 10 spies see it as an impossible task, doomed to failure?

The 10 spies were intimidated by the largeness of everything they saw – the fruit, the fortifications, and most especially the people. All that largeness made them feel small, like “grasshoppers" (13:33), they say, like efes, zero. Why did they feel so small? Because they were evaluating everything on a purely physical basis, by size and strength. If that is all that a human being is, then indeed, the Israelites were doomed to failure, doomed to the ultimate end of all things physical -- death.

But Calev and Yehoshua understood that a human being is made up of more than flesh and blood. They say, Hashem itanu, “God is with us” (14:9). Perhaps what they mean is not just that God Himself is with the people, but also that God is inside all of us, that we all have a divine spirit, a special ruah. Yehoshua himself in fact carries God’s name inside of his own, having had his named transformed from Hoshea to Yehoshua through the addition of a yod from God’s name (13:16). And God says of Calev that he has a ruah aheret, “a special spirit” (14:24). These two felt that any task could be accomplished with the help of God and His spirit. They understood that it is this divine ruah which changes the equation, allows the weak to defeat the strong, the few to defeat the many. What is there in this world to be intimidated by when one has one’s eye on God?

If we are only flesh and blood, as the 10 spies feared, then we will inevitably feel small, and death is our end, towards which we crawl on the ground, like grasshoppers. The punishment of death in the desert for the 10 spies and their generation was thus a fitting one. But if we are more than flesh and bones, if we also have a divine ruah, as Calev and Yehoshua believed, then we can do greater things than even Bob the Builder; reaching up to the sky to assert our connection to the Eternal One, we can conquer giants.