"We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves," the spies report, "and so we appeared to them" (Numbers 13:33). It may be the most honest verse in the Torah, and one of the saddest. Notice the order: first we shrank in our own eyes - and only then in theirs.
For Jews in America, the connection to Israel is being challenged on every front. The spies were not liars: the cities really were fortified, the giants were there, allegedly. The way Israel is spoken about today must be unsettling - and for some it is tempting to do exactly what so many did when they heard the spies' report, and quietly step away.
But look at what the ten spies actually did. Their sin was not noticing the difficulty. It was concluding from the difficulty that the story was over - that the inheritance was too large for people their size. They dressed a failure of nerve as realism, and let the obstacles become an exit. "Let us appoint a chief," they say, "and return to Egypt." Back to the narrow place.
Caleb and Joshua saw exactly the same land and filed a minority report - not because they were naïve about the giants, but because they refused to be grasshoppers in their own eyes. Hope, here, is not optimism. It is discipline: the decision not to write yourself out of a story that is yours.
Let me confess the Israeli version of the sin, since it is mine to answer for. For reasons too tangled to unfold in a short meditation, more and more Israelis came to see their state as a normal country, meant simply to serve its own citizens. The felt, conscious bond to Klal Yisrael, or Jewish Peoplehood, loosened, and Israel's standing as the nation-state of the whole Jewish people grew hollow. That was our forgetting. And I am working, with others, to undo it: to remember that Israel was built to be the heart of the entire Jewish people, you included.
So this is my hope for whoever reads this: that you will not do to your inheritance what the spies did to theirs — will not despair of a story you are still inside, one carried, however imperfectly, in the existence of the State of Israel. The land was good then. It is good still. Do not shrink yourselves out of it.
This essay was written by Eran Shayshon, founder of Atchalta/Astarta, a non-partisan Zionist organization that combines thought, action and innovation established with the goal of strengthening national resilience and security, as well as social cohesion in Israel and the Jewish world.
