Parashat Shelach

The Road to Israel – Trust in God or Trust in Man?

The foundation of modern Zionism – and its first critique – can be found in the middle of this week’s parashah. One small story challenges us to think about the friction between taking initiative and being impetuous. After our ancestors’ negative reaction to the reports of the spies, God decrees that they will have to wander in the wilderness for 40 years. A group – soon to be known as the ma’apilim – rises early the following morning, arms themselves, and declares “Hinenu” — “Here we are. We will go up to the place God promised.” Within six verses, not one of them is left alive, and the whole story is over. The Torah does not call them wicked. It does not mock them. Moshe had warned them; they went anyway. But the text leaves open a haunting question — were they role models or a cautionary tale?

The Satmar Rebbe saw the ma’apilim as a cautionary tale. Having rejected the Land when God offered it, they now tried to seize it when God has withdrawn the offer. They acted outside the moment of divine sanction and faced the consequences. They had courage, but their courage destroyed. The Rebbe projected this onto the modern Zionist movement and, by extension, aliyah (moving to Israel) recapitulates this sin: it is human will substituting itself for divine timing. Despite having survived the Holocaust, the Satmar Rebbe held firm to his reading of this saga. 

Rav Kook understood the tragedy of the ma’apilim differently — it flows from the original sin of the spies, not from an intrinsic wrongness in the impulse to ascend. The Jewish soul has a constitutive, ineradicable love for Eretz Yisrael. That love cannot simply be decreed away. The ma’apilim were erred in timing, but the desire to return to Israel was right. Rav Kook understood “now” as being the right time and the ma’apilim as the role-models to emulate. While he did not live to see the Holocaust nor the establishment of the State of Israel, he saw the moment as being divinely ordained. 

The Zionist movement felt so inspired by the spirit of the ma’apilim, that they gave that same title to the Jews who clandestinely made aliyah in violation of British Mandate law.  Israeli children learn about the ma’apilim as a courageous group who contributed to the building of the modern state, not as a biblical tale. Every generation has its moment of Hinenu — its impulse to charge the mountain after a great failure, to prove that we have not given up. We have had too many moments like this over the last couple of years. The Satmar Rebbe asks us: Are you sure God told you to go? Rav Kook asks us: Are you sure God told you to stay? May we have the wisdom to know the difference between the courage that builds and the courage that destroys — and the humility to keep asking which one we are practicing.

Shabbat Shalom.