Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

In this week’s Torah portion, the Israelites are a little over two years removed from the Exodus from Egypt. They are encamped at Kadesh, in the Wilderness of Paran, about 50 miles south of present day Ber-Sheva. Moses sends spies to reconnoiter the Promised Land in preparation for a military invasion. But the spies return with a report that undermines the Israelites’ confidence in conquering the land.

They begin by praising the land as a “land of milk and honey”. But their report quickly turns darker. “All the people that we saw there are of astonishingly great size… and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” (Numbers 13:33)

The Kotzker Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Morgenstern (d. 1859), saw this declaration as one of the spies’ greatest sins. If they felt like grasshoppers compared to the Canaanites, he reasoned, that is understandable; it reflects their own subjective experience. But when they added, “and so we must have looked to them,” he objected. How could they know how the Canaanites saw them? More importantly, why should their sense of themselves depend on how they imagined others perceived them?