Reb Barry's Dvar Torah Shelach 5765

Shelach 5765
by Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff

Shelach l’cha anashim, send for yourself men, that they may spy the land of Canaan.

Twelve spies, a leader from each tribe, were sent to spy out the land. The Torah tells us they were given very specific instructions: to see the land, what it is, the people who live in it, whether they are strong or weak, few or many, whether the land is good or bad, what cities they live in, whether the land is fat or lean. Moses charges the spies v’hitchazaktem, to be strong, to be courageous.

The Kotzker rebbe, a great 19th century chassid, brings a startling commentary on this passage: he says what Moses was commanding is as follows: “report on the goodness of the land”—even if you find it bad. “Report on how fat the land is”—even if you find it lean. The Kotzker says it’s not enough to look at the land of Israel with a usual sort of looking—the truth is deeper than that. The spies were charged with being brave and courageous—because the land of Israel requires that you be strong. If you have a fallen spirit you won’t succeed in holding the land.

What report did the spies come back with?

When they came back with their report, all twelve seem to agree on the facts: the land flows with milk and honey, it has great fruit. The people there are strong, the cities are walled. The children of Anak (giants) as well as Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Canaanites live there.

As Andrew pointed out, there was a big disagreement among the 12 regarding how to interpret those facts. As soon as the facts were reported, Joshua and Calev said “let’s go take the land! We can do it!” The other ten dissented, and said “forget it, they are way too strong for us, we’ll never succeed in conquering this land.”

In other words, the disagreement between the ten spies who said “forget it” and the two spies who said “let’s go” was not over the facts on the ground. They all saw the same facts. Where they disagreed was over the interpretation of the facts.

It’s like the story that’s told about how back in the early 1950's a large chain of shoe stores decided to expand overseas, and to seek new markets in Africa. They sent two of their salesman to explore the prospects of business in the remote villages across the Dark Continent. After just one week, they received a cable from the first salesman: "I am returning at once. No hope for business. Nobody here wears shoes!" They did not hear from the second salesman for four weeks. Then one day an urgent cable arrived. "Send 15,000 pairs of shoes at once! I have leased space in five locations. Will open chain of stores. This place is filled with opportunity. Nobody has shoes!"

Same facts—no one there wears shoes. But what’s the truth about the market potential?

The ten spies who said “forget it!” presented information that was accurate. But was it the truth?

When I served in the US Army, I was in the Army Security Agency, working in military intelligence. So I have a little bit of first hand knowledge about how the intelligence business works. The real world is very similar to what happens in this week’s Torah portion. We collect a vast amount of information, most of it pretty accurate. Where we have real problems is in figuring out what’s the “truth.”

In the lead up to the war to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, there was a lot of information presented about weapons of mass destruction. After a most intensive hunt it became apparent that Saddam did NOT have such weapons in his possession.

The world of intelligence is very much a cat and mouse game. Opposing sides are continually trying to trick each other and to mislead each other—sometimes to appear less capable than they really are, sometimes to appear more capable.

It seems like Saddam Hussein had denied having weapons of mass destruction in a way that was designed to make people think that he actually did have weapons of mass destruction. He denied having them, but then put a lot of restrictions on people looking for them—certainly something that would make you suspicious. I suspect the CIA basically fell for Saddam’s ruse, and expected to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction: which they did, even if it was a little skimpy, and that bit of evidence was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. The truth, of course, appears to be that the weapons were not there.

But is there another truth served as well? Is it a truth that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein running Iraq? It turns out the intelligence on which the war in Iraq was based was not accurate. But does that mean it wasn’t true?

Sometimes we have information that is VERY accurate—yet it can still miss the truth. DNA testing labs claim they can prove with 100% accuracy that someone is NOT the parent of a particular child, and with results from 99.9% to 99.998% that someone IS the parent of a particular child. DNA testing is now uniformly accepted as accurate and has been used to send any number of people to jail and to confirm or deny paternity. DNA testing has been used to overturn death penalty convictions that were based on earlier, less accurate kinds of evidence. However, the Discovery channel recently had a fascinating program on two women whose DNA didn't match the children they'd given birth to! One of these women risked losing custody of her children, because she couldn't prove where she got them. She was pregnant, and they had a lab tech in the room to take a DNA sample when she gave birth to another child, and remarkably again the DNA did not match. It turns out that in very rare cases a person can be a human Chimera (pronounced Kiy-mehra) -- with TWO distinct sets of DNA. In such cases, the child may have one set of DNA, and the mother's blood may show another. The DNA blood test is accurate – it maps a large sample of the 30,000 human genes with great precision—but even the DNA test is not foolproof, it can miss the truth.

There is another case in recent days where facts and interpretation ran headlong into one another, and that’s the Terri Schiavo case. Ellen Goodman had a column in the Blade earlier this week called “Science vs. opinion: Do the facts make a difference?” As was reported earlier in the week, the autopsy on Schiavo showed that her brain had shrunk to half of the normal size, she was blind, and no amount of treatment or rehabilitation could have helped her condition, without doubt. Goodman asks whether these facts make a difference. It does not appear that they make much of a difference to anyone—Schiavo’s parents have said that the autopsy only proved that their daughter “was not terminal.” People’s opinions in the case were based on pre-existing concepts—pre-existing “truths.” The detailed facts almost became irrelevant for many people on both sides.

It is human nature to try and fit the facts to our pre-existing beliefs. Rabbis are also not immune to this: in rabbinical school we had many discussions about whether we engage in exegesis or eisegesis: whether we read the Torah and Talmud to find the answer to a question, or whether we read the Torah and Talmud to find justification for what we’ve already decided. Even if we honestly are trying to hear what is the message in the Torah, it can be hard to get our pre-conceived notions out of the way.

The Kotzker rebbe says that the bad spies’ sin was that they didn’t want to dig deeper and verify what God told them, the way Joshua and Calev did. They were satisfied with a superficial look at the facts. God, through Moses, had told them the answer beforehand: they should have kept digging until they could justify what they were told.

In the Goodman column, she quotes James Wagoner of Advocates for Youth as describing the trend in scientific opinion shopping this way: “If science doesn’t fit your ideology, you shop and find your own science.” In other words, if you already know the answer—and it doesn’t matter whether the question is global warming, weapons of mass destruction, or benefits of subsidized lunches at public schools—you just go looking for the scientists who will support your opinion.

It’s possible to have totally accurate facts, and yet miss the truth. It’s also possible to have the truth, and have no facts to back it up. The ideal, of course, is to have the truth verified by the facts. We don’t always achieve that ideal state.

It’s one thing when God directly tells us what the Truth is. We can take that on faith, regardless of what we can see.

But should we do the same thing when people tell us what the capital-T Truth is?

Psalm 146 cautions us:

Do not put your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goes forth, he returns to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God.

In other words, like it said on the sign behind the cash register in a New York candy store when I was a kid:

“In God we Trust: All Others Pay Cash”

Shabbat Shalom