A.
Our parasha deals with the painful episode of the mëraggëlim, the spies whom Moshe sent forth, as he thought, on the eve of the invasion of the Holy Land, and who brought back a report so disastrously bad, which so undermined the morale of the bënei Yisra’él, that G-d postponed the invasion until virtually the entire generation had died out in the desert, thirty-nine years later.
Our parasha opens: וידבר ד' אל משה לאמר: שלח לך אנשים ויתרו את ארץ כנען וגו' (“And Ha-Shem spoke to Moshe to say: Send for yourself [Shëlah lëcha] men, and they will tour the land of Canaan....”). The Talmud examines that initial phrase, and concludes that it means מדעתך, וכי אדם זה נורר חלק רע לעצמו?! והיינו דכתיב "וייטב בעיני הדבר", אמר ריש לקיש, בעיני ולא בעיניו של מקום (“From your knowledge; does a person choose a bad portion for himself?! This is what is written: ‘And the matter seemed good in my eyes’ [Deuteronomy I, 22]; said Réysh Laqish, ‘in my eyes’, and not in the eyes of G-d”; סוטה ל"ד:).
Rashi expands upon and paraphrases this passage as follows: לדעתך אני איני מצוה לך אם תרצה שלח לפי שבאו ישראל ואמרו נשלחה אמשים לפנינו כו' ומשה נמלך בשכינה אמר אני אמרתי להם שהיא טובה וכו' חייהם שאני נותן להם מקום לטעות בדברי המרגלים למען לא יירשוה (“For your knowledge, I am not commanding you; if you wish, send, as Israel had come and said, 'Let us send men before us [Deuteronomy, ibid.]...' And Moshe consulted the Divine Presence [nimlach ba-Shëchina], '[Who] said, I told them that [the Land] is good....' By their lives that I am giving them room to err through the words of the mëraggëlim so that they will not inherit it”). Rashi’s rendition of the passage suggests an even stronger warning to Moshe that the mëraggëlim would come to no good. Whether we prefer Réysh Laqish’s “from your knowledge” or Rashi’s “for your knowledge,” the Divine reservations about the enterprise seem pretty clear.
Furthermore, the midrash asks the following: מה ראה לומר אחר מעשה מרים "שלח לך אנשים"? אלא שהי' צפוי לפני הקב"ה שיאמרו לשון הרע על הארץ אמר הקב"ה שלא יהיו אומרים לא היינו יודעין עונש לשון הרע לפיכך סמך הקב"ה זה לזה שדברה מרים באחי' ולקתה בצרעת כדי שידעו הכל עונשו של לשון הרע וגו' (“What did [G-d] see to say after the affair of Miriam [cf. chapter XI, in which she said lashon ha-ra‘ about Moshe and was punished] ‘send out men’? But it was foreseen before the Holy One, Blessed is He that they would say lashon ha-ra‘ about the [Holy] Land; said the Holy One, Blessed is He, 'That they not be saying we did not know the penalty for lashon ha-ra‘.' Therefore, the Holy One, Blessed is He, juxtaposed one to the other, that Miriam spoke against her brother and was stricken with tzora‘ath in order that everyone should know the penalty for lashon ha-ra‘....”; במדבר רבה פט"ז סי' ה').
Here the advance Divine disapproval seems even more palpable. Why did Moshe do it?
B.
Our question is one of several which bother Ramban about Rashi’s version of events. His objections may be summarised as follows:
1) If Moshe indeed “nimlach ba-Shëchina” concerning whether or not to send out the mëraggëlim, how was he any less a sinner than the rest of the people? After all, Moshe, too, had heard G-d’s testimony that the Holy Land was good’ why did he not believe it?
2) Moshe admits in the verse quoted above from Deuteronomy וייטב בעיני, “and it seemed good in my eyes”; why did such a course of action seem good to Moshe?
3) What, exactly, was the sin of the mëraggëlim? They had been sent out to report on the conditions which they found, and they reported on them: באנו אל הארץ אשר שלחתנו וגם זבת חלב ודבש הוא וזה פרי': אפס כי עז העם הישב בארץ והערים בצרות גדלת מאד וגם ילידי הענק ראינו שם: (“...We came to the land whither you sent us and it is also flowing with milk and honey and this is its fruit. But the people who dwell in the land are strong and the cities are fortified, very large, and we also saw descendants of giants there”; XIII, 27-28). What, then, did they do wrong? Moshe had sent them to find out what the country was like, and by all accounts they reported honestly on what they had found, bringing typical, if gigantic, examples of the local produce.
4) Moshe himself subsequently admitted the great difficulty of the task of conquest before them: להוריש גוים גדלים ועצמים ממך להביאך לתת לך את ארצם וגו' (“To disinherit nations greater and mightier than you, to bring you and give you their land....”; Deuteronomy IV, 38), making him again, it would seem, no less culpable than the mëraggëlim.
5) Finally, what could Moshe have been thinking when he sent out the mëraggëlim to see החזק הוא הרפה (“was it strong or weak”; XIII, 18), if he was convinced that the news that it was strong would cause the people’s hearts to quail and send them running back to Egypt (as is evident from Exodus XIII, 17: ולא נחם אל'ים דרך ארץ פלשתים כו' פן ינחם העם בראתם מלחמה ושבו מצרימה: (“...and G-d did not let them [go] by way of the land of the Pëlishtim... lest the people reconsider when they see warfare and return to Egypt”)?
If we revisit Deuteronomy I, 22 and read the entire verse, the people’s request, of which Moshe approved, seems eminently reasonable: נשלחה אנשים לפנינו ויחפרו לנו את הארץ וישבו אתנו דבר את הדרך אשר נעלה בה ואת הערים אשר נבא אליהן (“Let us send men before us, and they uncover for us the land and bring us back word on the way on which we shall ascend and the cities to which we shall come”). Any regular military expedition in which the attacking force is unfamiliar with the terrain and the roads along which the approach can be made, begins with sending out scouts. Yehoshua‘ did precisely this, after all, as he was approaching Yëricho, with complete Divine approval (cf. Joshua II, 1ff.). Ramban himself famously remarks that one is not allowed to depend upon miracles, but must do everything within human capability first, in his comments on the inadequacy of the dimensions of Noah’s teiva to hold all of the animals required.
So what else should Moshe have done? Why was it wrong to send out the mëraggëlim?
C.
The problem lay not in the wording of their request, but in the intentions behind it.
The Maharal mi-Prag spells out the issue in his Gur Aryeh. Moshe took the request for reconnaissance mission as the reasonable request it was והי' נמלך בהקדוש ברוך הוא שאין לעשות בלא עצה, והקדוש ברוך הוא ראה מה שבתוך לבם הרע שלא הי' זה בלבבם רק תואנה, וכוונתם שלא היו מאמינים שהארץ טובה ושמא חזקים הם ולא יוכלו לכבוש אותם והיו יראים מהם אלא שלא רצו לדבר מזה דבר ותלו את הדבר שישלחו מרגלים לתור להם הדרך אשר יעלו בה וגו' (“and consulted with the Holy One, Blessed is He, for one should not act without advice, and the Holy One, Blessed is He saw what was in their evil hearts, that there was nothing in their hearts save rebellion, and their intent was that they did not believe that the land was good, and perhaps [its inhabitants] were strong and they would be unable to conquer them and were afraid of them; but they did not wish to say anything about this, and made it dependent on sending out spies to tour the way on which they would ascend....”).
So G-d saw what Moshe could not, the underlying motive behind the reasonable request. Why, then, did He not tell Moshe not to send out the mëraggëlim? Why leave it as a discretionary matter?
Rashi tells us that it was to provide “room to err with the words of the mëraggëlim,” or, as Hazal tell us elsewhere, הבא לטמא פותחין לו (“Someone who comes [with the intent] to defile, a way is opened for him”; שבת ק"ד.). As human beings, imagines Dei, we have moral autonomy. Herein, apparently, lies the meaning of the idiomatic construction involving the imperative form of the verb and the word lëcha. Avraham was told by G-d, לך לך מארצך כו' ואעשך לגוי גדול וגו' (“Go for yourself from your country... And I shall make you into a great nation....”; Genesis XII, 1-2). This is construed as a command, not as a request, but Avraham could have declined to follow it, with the consequence that he and his progeny would have faded into history, and G-d’s covenant would have been with someone else.
With this thought in mind, consider what the Maharal says about why Moshe persisted in sending the spies: ולפיכך אמר להם משה שישלחו המרגלים כו' אולי יחזרו בהם ולא ישלחו כשיראו שאני מצוה להם לשלוח ולראות אלמלא לא הי' טובה לא הייתי אומר להם לראות על כל דבר ודבר וגו' (“and therefore Moshe told them that they should send the spies... perhaps they will reconsider and not send [them] when they see that I am ordering them to send and to see; were [the Land] not good, I wouldn’t tell them to see about each and every thing....”). Moshe had to give the yotz’ei Mitzrayim scope for moral autonomy, the “room to err” of which Rashi writes. Sadly, they exercised it.
D.
And finally, what, exactly, did the mëraggëlim themselves do wrong? A clue is available to us in another observation which Hazal make concerning their report. Commenting on verse 27, we learn: כל לשון הרע שאין בו דבר אמת בתחלתו אין מתקיים בסופו (“Any instance of lashon ha-ra‘ which does not have at its beginning a word of truth does not endure at its end”; סוטה ל"ה.).
This suggests that we turn to the next verse for our answer, and we see that it begins with the word efes, here translated “but” or “however.” Efes is the negation or diminution of what has gone before it (whence its use to denote “zero” in modern Hebrew), and it gives away the show.
Had the mëraggëlim simply reported: “The land is flowing with milk and honey; here is its fruit. The inhabitants are strong, their cities well fortified,” or words to that effect, they would simply have been discharging their mission. By prefacing the second verse with efes, they were expressing their opinion that the inhabitants were too strong, their cities too well fortified, to make the rich and fruitful land obtainable.
In such small subtleties does the difference between lashon ha-ra‘ and a simple, accurate report rest.
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