Dvar Torah on Parshat Behaalotecha

This week we will discuss two parshas, B'ha'alotcha and Shlach.  B'ha'alotcha ends with the interesting story of Miriam and Aharon speaking badly of Moshe, specifically saying nasty things in connection with his Cushite wife. According to Rashi, they were complaining about the fact that Moshe was acting "holier than thou", and that since receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai, he had separated from his wife, and adopted a monastic existence. This, they felt, was inappropriate and arrogant, in that it indicated, falsely, that Moshe was in some way holier than everyone else, who, after all, had also heard God speak from the fire and smoke on the mountain. God harshly criticizes them for their words, defends Moshe's decision, and punishes Miriam for bad-mouthing her brother by smiting her with some sort of skin affliction.

Immediately after this story, the next parsha, Shlach, begins with the story of the spies. The Jews are, in theory, ready to enter the Land of Israel, spies are sent to check things out, and they return saying it is a Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise is unavailable - we can not conquer the land from the Canaanites. The land, they say, is one which "devours its inhabitants", the people there are giants, we can not defeat them. The Israelites are swayed by this report, balk at the idea of going forward into the Land, and demand to return to Egypt. This is seen by God, Moshe, and the rest of the leadership as a really bad thing, and the faithless Jews are condemned to wander in the desert for forty years, where they will die without ever entering the Land of Israel; it is the next generation, untainted by this sin, which will have that privilege.

Rashi, at the very beginning of Shlach, asks why these two stories come one right after the other; why does the story of the spies follow that of Miriam and Aharon slandering Moshe? He answers by saying that these creeps, the spies, had just seen Moshe's siblings condemned and punished for speaking badly about him, and yet they didn't learn the lesson they should have, and instead went right ahead and spoke badly about the Land of Israel. According to Rashi, the proximity of the two stories, one at the end of one parsha and the other at the beginning of the next, underscores the willful sinfulness of the spies, and focuses our attention on what their sin was - slander; in their case, slandering the Land of Israel.

Clearly, the severity with which the Torah sees these sins underscores the power of the spoken word. Traditionally, speech is seen as extremely powerful, and the sin of slander, or speaking badly of someone, is seen as a major and basic one. The reason for this can perhaps be explained with the well known phrase, beloved by magicians - abracadabra. One of the theories about this phrase is that it comes from the Aramaic - abra ke'dabra - I create as I speak (I know that JK Rowling has a different pshat, but that is not our concern here). The Jewish tradition has always placed speech at the very center of both divine and human creativity: God brought the world into existence by speaking. When He created man, according to some commentaries, He gave him life, and made him human, by breathing into him "the spirit of speech", which is what set him apart from the animals. Speech is what makes God a creator, and speech is what makes us human.

This being the case, these two sins - the slandering of Moshe and of the Land of Israel - are especially serious because they were acts of speech, acts which created, in each case, new, negative, realities. In the first, Moshe is re-created by his siblings' slander as not quite the person we thought he was: arrogant, cruel to his wife, holier-than-thou. In the case of the spies, it is the Land of Israel which is re-created in the minds of the Israelites - by the words of the spies - as a frightening, undesirable place, not the Promised Land, but a land to be avoided, a land to which Egypt is preferable. In both cases, the false words created new, negative, realities.

But were these words really slanderous? Were they really false? After all, Moshe did behave in a strange fashion: it is neither normative, nor nice, to abandon one's wife, and he really did abandon Zipporah. And the spies, with their negative report, may have been doing their job to the best of their ability, describing the land and its inhabitants as they really saw them. Why are these harsh but perhaps true words, spoken by Miriam, Aharon, and the spies, seen as sinful, and false?

The Ramban (Nachmanides, 1194-1270) answers the question about the sin of the spies in this way: the Jewish people had a long history with God. Going back to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov and, more recently, and pertinently, the exodus from Egypt. They knew God well, and had every reason to believe in Him. The lack of faith shown by the spies, rather than any specific falsehood about the Land per se, is the slander here: they weren't necessarily lying about the Land of Canaan, they were lying about the Jewish people's relationship with God. The Israelites, who were well aware of this relationship, should not have listened to the words of the spies, as technically true as they may have been, because they were false in their lack of faith, in their lack of trust in a God who took them out of Egypt and split the sea for them.

This thinking expands our understanding of what slander is. The spies did not have to lie, they did not have to create completely false realities about the Land of Israel, in order to be guilty of slander. Faith, trust, and loyalty are also part of the reality in which God and the Jewish people interacted, and the words of the spies destroyed that reality, that relationship of faith and trust, and created one of mistrust, doubt, and suspicion. Similarly, Miriam and Aharon had every reason in the world to have faith in and loyalty to their brother, Moshe; they had known and respected him for years. His decision to leave his wife may have been strange, and perhaps there was a legitimate way for them to question it, but the trust which Moshe had certainly earned from them over the years, as their brother and as the leader of the nation, was a reality which they should not have tried to destroy with their words of doubt and blame.

The sins of slander in these two portions were not classic lies. They were not statements which attempted to negate absolute empirical truths about the world. Rather, they were attempts to destroy something more ephemeral, yet as equally real and important as any physical object, historical occurrence, or hard fact: the network of faith, trust, and loyalty which existed between people, and between God and the Jews. To deny the trust, faith, and good will which did exist in these relationships was a lie.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix