Israel, Presidents and Spies
Sermon for Shlach Lecha 5782
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon
Leadership is a funny thing, especially in the Jewish world. Of course, leading a people known primarily for being stiff-necked and opinionated is no bargain—not that that applies to our congregation, of course, thank God. But nonetheless, there is a certain challenge inherent in trying to be even nominally in charge of any group of Jews, something like herding cats. To paraphrase what Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir supposedly once said to President Lyndon Johnson, it’s like being president of a group of presidents. Everyone in the group is pretty sure they know what to do and how to do it, and if you yourself have any inkling that you’ve got a better way, you’re probably deluded in every way: your Jewish constituents will happily tell you that your way is worse, not better, and besides, who would listen to you if you were right in the first place?
Not that I’ve had any experience with this, personally, of course…
I was thinking about Golda Meir a little this last week, because Israel is on my mind and in the news. I know that most of the focus this week has been on the US Supreme Court and its reversal of Roe v Wade, officially announced today after the decision was leaked a couple of weeks ago. And there has been news from the US Senate of compromise on the first national legislation to even attempt to address gun violence in 28 years. But I am a rabbi, this is a synagogue, and one other important event took place this week 7,500 miles away, and that too matters. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, Golda Meir.
Golda Meir, of course, is the now near-legendary Israeli Prime Minister who held office from 1969-1974. She was instrumental in bringing American Jewish support to the Yishuv, the pre-State Jewish settlement in British Mandatory Israel, and later in leading the country through dramatic and traumatic times. She is still the only woman Prime Minister of Israel—I don’t believe the US has had a woman president yet—and she said many things we still like to quote, from that one about presidents to more serious reflections, such as “There were be peace between Jews and Arabs when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us,” and “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive the Arabs for making our children kill their children.”
Golda Meir came up a few months ago when Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky was addressing the Knesset by video. Golda Meir was born in Kiev, Ukraine, when it was part of the Russian Czarist Empire, in 1898, and Zelensky quoted her saying, 'We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.'
I was thinking about this, but especially that quote about being the president of a country full of presidents, when I started to prepare my sermon for parshat Shlach Lecha this week. You see, in looking back to last year’s Shabbat Shlach Lecha, I discovered that exactly one Jewish year ago I was noting that Israel had a new government, the first one that didn’t include Bibi Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 12 years. As I said at the time, “The coalition that was agreed to at the very last hour—actually, the last half hour before the mandate to form a new government would have expired—is a remarkable and unwieldy amalgamation of parties across the entire Israeli political spectrum from the far right to the far left…
“What unites all of these most unlikely allies into one monumentally unlikely coalition government? Well, they all hate Bibi Netanyahu and want him out of the prime ministership. He has been there too long, betrayed far too many political promises to pretty much everyone in Israeli politics, and his corruption trials have hung over the head of the Israeli government literally for years. By my count, about 20 of the 61 seats in this coalition are held by people who used to support, or work for, Netanyhu and now hate his guts. Sometimes the personal transcends the political. And of course, all Israelis are heartily sick of national elections every six months for the past two years in which the composition of the Knesset is rearranged but nothing much changes.
“Still, this Israeli government is composed of super far right parties, very far left parties, Jews, Arabs, everybody, and it’s hard to envision how it can possibly work. If this happened in America, it would be like Bernie Sanders and Matt Gaetz in the same coalition government… with, say, Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Susan Collins and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez.
“In any case, I certainly wish the newly formed Israeli government luck; it will need it, even to hold together for long once Bibi isn’t there to band them all together against him.”
And then I predicted that if the government lasted longer than a year, well, we would all need to believe in miracles again. Which is again, a paraphrase of Golda Meir, who said, “In Israel, to be a realist, you need to believe in miracles.”
So guess what? The coalition government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennet lasted, well, just one week more than a year… I guess we all can agree on the miracle thing, right?
Actually, the government fell because of a stunningly cynical political manipulation by Bibi Netanyahu—why does that sound like such a low bar to achieve these days?—in which he persuaded his own Likud Party members to vote against a routine measure that they fully support politically and ideologically in order to force the coalition government to fall. It worked, the coalition government of Bennet is out, and the beat goes on.
Israel will now have a three-month respite while they prepare for elections around the High Holy Days, the fifth national election in three years. Ya’ir Lapid, the deputy Prime Minister will become caretaker Prime Minister; a takeh metziah as we say in Yiddish. And then, more elections, more politicking, and so on and so on. And the hyper-democracy of Israel continues.
You know, there are many places in the world with a deep deficit of credible democracy. Every single nation in the Arab world, for example, lacks democracy and representative government, plus Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba, much of Africa, and many other autocracies all around the globe. On the other hand, Israel seems to be positively addicted to elections of late, and sometimes you really do need a little stability.
But still, on the whole, Israel seems to continue to grow, develop, prosper and advance in nearly every way in spite of this trouble at the top. So… I suppose the good news is that Israel is basically doing just fine in spite of its election addiction issues, and the fact that a nation full of presidents, or prime ministers, is never going to be easy to manage. In fact, Israel is a fabulous place to visit, and our new plan is have our Beit Simcha trip to Israel in November of this year. I can’t wait!
Which reminds me of this week’s Torah portion, again, and espionage, the main subject of our parshah. I’m sure that there are all kinds of tests available today for determining who makes a good subject for intelligence work and who just can’t pull it off. In spite of the oft-repeated slander that the definition of an oxymoron is military intelligence, no doubt armed services and civilian agencies have lots of ways of figuring out who is good at this stuff and who isn’t.
In fact, this process goes back a very long way. There are actually a series of spy stories in the Bible, and there are different ways to determine the best kind of person to employ in this work. But when you are trying this out for the first time you are liable to make a few mistakes. And so it seems in our portion of Shlach Lecha.
The commandment given at the start of Shlach Lecha is purely practical. God commands Moses to send men to scout out the land of Canaan and see if it is suitable for the Israelites to invade and occupy. Each tribe is to be represented by one man, ish echad, and each of these is to be a prince of the people, a nasi. That creates a scout group of 12 men. Well, let’s be honest; these are not scouts, but in the classic use of the term, spies. A spying pack of 12 guys is sent, with some ceremony, to explore the land soon to be known as Israel.
I have always wondered about God’s thinking, and the methods God commands Moses to employ in our Torah portion. What is called for here is close scouting of an alien and enemy-filled land, a land flowing with milk and honey but also full of Canaanite tribes and towns and armies. Who is best suited to such a mission? What do you think of when you picture a spy?
If your beau ideal of a spy is James Bond or Mata Hari, glamorous, dramatic types, then this is the group for you. Twelve dashing young men, leaders of their people, princes of the blood, a virtual Rat Pack of glamorous types, an Ocean’s 12 of the best and brightest. These men—all men, naturally, in those days—are known by name and reputation. They are all from illustrious families and hold high office. These illustrious young gentlemen are no doubt feeling full of themselves for having been selected for this important mission. It’s all very exciting. What an opportunity! How thrilling!
Moses gives them instructions that are practical and thorough. “Go up and see the Negev Desert and the mountains, see what kind of country it is; Are the people strong or weak, few or many? Is the country they live in good or bad, are the cities open or fortified with walls? Is the land productive and rich, or is it barren and thin? Are there forests or not? Be sure to bring back some of its fruit.”
In other words, go and spy it all out, see if it is productive, and see if we can capture it. And this band of wealthy brothers sets off.
In retrospect, this wasn’t the ideal way to go about this task. Let’s see, we are trying to find out the truth about the country we are exploring, to ascertain its military strength, to see what it’s really like. And so, under God’s instruction, we send out one more than a football team full of prep-school guys from Ivy League colleges with titles and fancy clothes, and instruct them to bring back souvenirs. I’m sure none of the Canaanites noticed that group wandering around the land.
It’s like sending a pack of US Senators to secretly spy out an alien land. Actually, we do exactly that when we send those fact-finding missions overseas, the junkets our elected leaders are so fond of going on. Those kinds of missions do find out facts, but the facts they tend to find out are just exactly the facts that the people of the land want them to find out.
So it proves to be with these m’raglim, these spies. They learn the land is good, beautiful and productive but they also manage to be convinced that the Canaanite tribes, small enclaves of clans really, are some sort of giant set of military nation-states filled with mighty monsters and warriors. We should just leave them be, these princes of the people conclude; they are too many and too mighty for us! We felt like grasshoppers next to them!
The fascinating part of all this is the question of just why God chose to use the people who are designated as nasi, “raised up”, high and mighty for intelligence work. Because if you really want to find out just how a society works, and where the bodies are buried, the right way to do it is probably not to send an ostentatious group of fancy-pants officials to troupe about stealing grapes and gaping at the residents en masse. No, the right way to spy out a land is by sending an anonymous looking guy or two to wander around looking unimportant, talking to locals at bars and brothels, and finding out just what the people really are all about.
As it turns out, that’s just what Joshua himself does a generation later in the Haftarah we will chant tomorrow. The two spies Joshua chooses aren’t even named in the Bible, and they slip unannounced into the major city of their enemies and go directly to the house of Rahab the harlot. That’s how you find out the real facts about a country.
My good friend, the late Harold Bongarten, may his memory be a blessing, did exactly this kind of work during World War II, slipping behind German lines and pretending to be a returning soldier wandering around France. Harold was short, chubby, and charming, had a broad smile and a kind manner, and was easy to underestimate. He sent back a series of reports that helped the Allies know who to trust and who to arrest in each town as they recaptured it from the Nazis.
The lessons of this story of the spies are complex and rich. But surely one lesson is about how we must approach things ourselves as Jews. For the original m’raglim came to their mission with pride and arrogance. They were the princes of the people, after all. They had a high standing and knew the best way to do things. They probably never got their hands dirty. And, of course, they failed miserably. You know, everyone was literally a president…
In a way, when we Jews come to services, we are a little bit like the m’raglim, secure in our smarts, sure of our knowledge and status. That makes it a slightly unlikely that we can recognize the spiritual experiences available to us if we were just a little less full of ourselves.
Perhaps what God needs from us Jews is not the pedigrees of the elite, but the hearts of the humble. What Judaism, and Jewish community, requires is not the stature of the elect but the openness of the ordinary woman and man. What allows us to reach holiness is not superiority but sincerity.
If we approach God, our own promised land, as simple human beings, then the secret fastness of the divine spirit, the comfort and support that comes from God, will be revealed, and opened to us. And then our own mission, as Jews, will be fulfilled for everyone’s good.
May this become our will, and thus our blessing. Ken Yehi Ratson.