Grasshoppers and Giants: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Hello, and welcome to Contact Chai. Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on Saturday, June 21st, when Rabbi Lizzi delivered a drash on that famous scene in which the spies come back with a less than rosy report on what they were up against in Canaan:

"If we’re snagging that land, it might cost us our lives. Those guys are huge!" 

Values like preserving our land or our lives may be useful, but they can limit our perspective on what is truly possible. As war rages on in our day, how can we balance ideals of land and safety with those of peace, justice, and compromise?

Pride Shabbat is nearly here! We hope you will join us next Friday, June 27th, in Northcenter Town Square at 6:30 pm for a glitzy, glamorous service complete with a temporary tattoo and glitter station to get into the Pride spirit, and followed by ice cream and snacks catered by Schmaltz & Vinegar. Will we see you there?

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/friday-night-shabbat-062725/

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This week’s Torah portion really is incredible — has so much in it that demands so much deep analysis. I ADORE that among the many juicy episodes described — the spies going out to study the land of Israel, the spies coming back from their reconnaissance mission, the spies freaking out about it and spreading that fear among all their fellow Israelites, God’s response, which is to prevent this generation from going into the land… the episode with the guy gathering wood on Shabbat who is put to death by the community, and finally, the very last few sentences, God giving the mitzvah of Jews wearing tzit tzit, fringes on our four cornered garments… I LOVE Ron, that you chose to do your deep dive on tzit tzit.

Another explanation of the mitzvah of tzit tzit — not so much much the mitzvah itself but its specific wording and its placement in the parasha at the very end — is that it’s a direct response to what happens at the beginning. At the beginning of the Torah portion the text says “The Lord spoke to Moses saying, Send spies to scout out the land,” in Hebrew - Shelakh lekha anashim v’yaturu et ha’aretz”... to look around, to assess, study, scout… It seems like an innocuous enough word that simply describes using your faculties of vision, touch, hearing, tasting and even smelling — to relate to your surroundings. 

And of course what happens? The spies come back with a report that greatly exaggerates what they saw, that not only describes but also interprets what they saw, and ultimately their report causes them so much anxiety and fear (OMG the people are huge, the grapes are huge! We’re so small! We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, so for sure that’s how we must look to them! We’ll never survive!), and this fear ends up being a contagion that spreads to everyone else in the camp… Moses and Aaron are devastated, and God is so disappointed, in fact, that God (or, the character of God in the Torah, as I like to say) condemns this generation to die in the wilderness. It won’t be them who enter the land, it will be their children. You’ve left Egypt but whatever mentality that ruled you there — a mentality of powerlessness and smallness that made sense there, was actually an important layer of emotional self protection, — does not make sense here, yet still colors the way they see the world, with devastating consequences. God says in the midrash, “What do you mean you looked like grasshoppers to yourselves and therefore you must look that way to others? What do you know about others?” All you know is what you saw, and God says to them, your senses clearly can’t be trusted. Your analysis of what you say you saw, can’t be trusted. Here I am, God says, I’ve been with you this whole way and you still don’t believe I’ll take care of you — well then, God seems to be saying, your prophecy is confirmed. If you live by fear, God says, you’ll die by it, too. 

Relevantly there are 2 people spared this fate of dying in the desert — Joshua and Caleb, and they’re spared this fate because they saw the exact same thing — same big land, same big people who live there, same big grapes– and they drew a different conclusion than their fellow spies… they say, we CAN do it! Let’s go up! Let’s embrace our future with open arms. Yes it’s seems daunting but we’ve got this! Their faith and optimism is rewarded by being the guys that lead the charge in 40 years.

What does this have to do with tzit tzit? In the verses Ron read so beautifully maybe you heard the same word as we heard above, but in a very different context, “V’lo taturu acharei eineichem v’ahararei levavchem…” and you will wear these tzit tzit, you’ll see them and remember God’s commandments and do them, and therefore you’ll not stray after what your eyes see and what your heart lusts after.” The verb laTur here has lost its quality of non-judgemental observation and assessment, it means to see and be tempted, to lust after, to see and desire, importantly — in ways that could hurt you, and at the very least distract you from the important moral and spiritual growth that this tradition of ours is trying to help us attain. And these tzit tzit represent that tradition, and are supposed to be a kind of inoculation against the many temptations to look elsewhere for fulfillment and satisfaction. Now, the original spies were lured by their eyes into a kind of self-obsessed fear of the unknown and their lack of control in a big bad world… The next generation, with the mitzvah of these tzit tzit, are being told: don’t believe everything you see, and more importantly, don’t believe everything you feel! You have a partial view and so do your fellow travelers, and together, you’ll have a bigger, more complex more complete picture. Even if we think we’re being objective observers, laTur, spies scouting out the land so to speak, a lot of what we “see” is preconditioned by our life experience, our insecurities, our fears, and amounts to a story which may or may not be true, and is necessarily partial, reflecting only our limited experience. As the same goes, we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are. Therefore, be careful, Lo taturu acharei levavchem v’acharey eneichem — don’t be secluded or deceived by your eyes. 

How often when having conversations about thorny topics, politics domestic and when we’re talking about Israel — do we think to ourselves, if only THEY saw and knew what I see, they’d see it differently! The social philosopher, Jonathan Haidt’s, seminal book, the Righteous Mind, explores exactly this. Given the same evidence in front of them,  how is it that good people come to such different conclusions about the state of our country and the direction it’s headed ? Is it because half of the country is stupid, backward thinking sheeple who just don’t know any better than to think the stupid, wrong thoughts that they think, and if they just had better information they’d agree with my positions… Well, if each half thinks that about the other, then we’re either all stupid sheeple, or perhaps all of us could do with a little more perspective and humility. For anyone with both liberals and conservatives and Trump supporters in the family — and for that matter, for anyone with self-identified Zionists and antiZionists in the family, or even folks on the JStreet list and folks for whom AIPAC feels more like home — we know well that we can look at the same evidence and actually see it differently. How does this happen? Aren’t we looking at the same thing? Well, maybe there’s more than meets the eye.

Jonathan Haidt begins by reminding us that as rational as we think we are, we’re primarily emotional creatures. We imagine that our brain is like an elephant driver that can point the elephant of our consciousness in whatever direction we want it to go. Our brain is smart, rational, bases our opinions on the evidence and argues our case like a scientist, dispassionately. That’s how we imagine that we operate. 

But the truth is, our heart, our emotions, our fears, trauma, insecurity, loves, previous life experience, religious commitments, family of origin… all of that is the elephant. What the rider does when talking about any thorny subject, is basically hold on for dear life and construct the story that makes our knee-jerk instinctual reactions make sense. Haidt says rather than imagining our mind as a logic processor, think of it as a story processor. We create the stories that undergird the conclusions we’ve already drawn on an emotional level. If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t give them new evidence, talk to their elephant. More to the point, listen to their elephant.

I was supposed to spend the summer in Jerusalem at the Shalom Hartman institute as part of the Rabbinic Learning Initiative. It’s a program that gets me out of my familiar surroundings here and places me in one of the most beautiful, holy and fractured cities on the planet, to do 5 weeks of learning for three years. I’ve spent the past 2 summers having deep conversations in dialogue with Jewish texts, rabbinic colleagues and scholars across the spectrum of denominations, political commitments and backgrounds, and I’m sorry to say that this summer’s session was just cancelled because of the new reality in Israel. I don’t doubt that it would be a real learning experience for us to have to experience what daily life in Israel is like right now, running to bomb shelters multiple times a day (recognizing, even as I say this, that many Israelis many of whom are Arabs and Palestinians, don’t even have bomb shelters to run to) — in any case, the airlines aren’t flying and the program is cancelled. But I thought I’d share one insight from their iEngage program, a program they designed to help communities discuss Israel — one of those topics that you tend to hear people say things like “If they only knew, if they only had the evidence, they’d understand, they’d see it more like I see it.”

Talking about this topic, especially with family where there's deep disagreement, and maybe also if you do this for a living professionally… it really brings out people’s best. So that’s what this curriculum was designed to address. Based off Jonathan Haidt’s work in the Righteous Mind — where he identified 6 values that liberals and conservatives both tend to hold, but weigh differently, which tends to explain the differences in political opinion.  At Hartman they observed that when in dialogue, at least in the Jewish community, when it comes to Israel, we’re probably not debating the evidence on the surface, the things we can see, even tho that’s what it might sound like. So our riders are talking words at each other, but in truth our elephants are jockeying for the spotlight in the conversation.What we’re actually debating is how we prioritize authentic, deeply personal values, all of which have basis in Jewish tradition. 

Anyone want to take a stab at the values they identified that tend to drive us in this conversation?

They identified the following 6 values: 

• Land
• Self-Preservation
• Peace 
• Justice
• Jewish exceptionalism
• Compromise

Any questions or observations… does that reflect your experience? Anything missing?

Importantly, all of those values do not have specific or necessary policy outcomes. If you hold peace as the value above all else, you may believe in a two state solution promising two peoples freedom and self-determination, or perhaps a one equal state solution promising everyone freedom and self-determination. You may hold self-preservation as a top value and that may lead you to the conclusion that military means are always the best way to ensure self protection, and it may lead you to the precisely the opposite conclusion. Jewish exceptionalism is an interesting one — it can refer to how throughout history Jews tend to be blamed and persecuted eventually, no matter where we go, which justifies having an independent state, especially for those of us who grew up with Jewish story of oppression and displacement and exile as the backdrop to our childhoods, whether we have grandparents who are Holocaust survivors or refugees or your family fled the Former Soviet Union, or any number of ways that Jews have been relocated around the world, usually not by our own choosing– Israel can represent a great homecoming and promise of self-determination, not being tossed by the whims of dictators and illiberal governments that tend to blame us when things aren’t going well. And yet, Jewish exceptionalism may also feel like no matter what Jews do we’re under unfair added scrutiny and so we should not have something so public and so fraught with political turmoil as a state which has to do such mundane things like conscript soldiers, fight wars, protect borders and deal with PR in the age of social media, let a lone have the legal and civic responsibility of caring not just for our own people, but non-Jews as well, and in particular the people who were living in the land at the time the state was created, and whose descendants did not then and still do not live with equal rights, whether in that country or the territory it controls. Justice can look like a lot of things. Compromise could look like a lot of things. For the folks who privilege the value of land above all else, we are reading the same Torah but drawing dramatically different conclusions about what Jews are entitled to do in the name of Jewish tradition in order to pursue land.

That’s a lot of elephants. This week my pastoral, rabbinic, social media professional word was dominated by elephants — legitimate concerns stemming from Jewish tradition that leads my friends, congregants and colleagues to prioritize these values differently, and arrive at different actions as a result: 

Here in Chicago there are 6 healthy young Jews that are so distressed over the ongoing hunger in Gaza that they are on a hunger strike — today is day 6, and they intend to continue their strike until more visibility is brought to the cause of starving Gazan civilians and something in our collective heart breaks for the situation and we do something differently. For them the Jewish value of feeding people, caring for people, trumps everything else. Of course my friends and colleagues continue to wear the dog tags and yellow ribbons, bringing visibility to the hostages still languishing in Gaza — whether that visibility is an indictment on Hamas, or the Israeli government, or the USA or all of it… doesn’t matter, that’s their priority, and you’ll wear them til something in our collective heart breaks for the situation and we do something differently. For some the view finder has expanded to Iran and that’s where the conversation has moved and must be had. For some the view finder is right here in the States as incidents of anti-semitism are rising. And for quite a lot of you, us… these priorities are too far from home. The Supreme Court just determined that in half the States in America trans kids and teen agers cannot live dignified lives getting the health care they and their doctors decide they need to be happy and healthy. Here in this country we’re on the verge of passing a national budget that will lock us into generations of national debt and increase the wealth gap by trillions of dollars, at the expense of the most vulnerable and voiceless in our society, including the environment. If you want to talk about crimes against unborn children, I want to talk about what ignoring climate change is going to do to the lives of my children’s unborn children. 

I’m not here to say any one of these priorities is more or less important than another. All of them matter, all of them are important. Rather, for each of us, the elephant of our subconscious and the rider of our rational mind, can only see and internalize so much, and that which we do see and interpret, is necessarily partial. The Israelites of our parasha could not see that, and the result was they could not move forward into their future. Their story ended at the place where they could not put their experience into dialogue with the possibility that there were other ways to look at the evidence. They suffered not just insecurity, but paradoxically, a severe lack of humility too. 

Lo Taturu acharei levavkhem v’acharei eineikhem — Don’t just believe whatever your eyes and heart tell you is true. Look down at the fringes of your tzit tzit and remember the many different ways of seeing the same thing. But! Lest one think that the result of that awareness is just abject relativism… look at what comes next, “I am the Lord your God who led you out of Egypt to Be Your God.” At the core essence of the Jewish people’s experience is the story of going from oppression and degradation, to liberation not just for ourselves but all whose story intersected with ours. So no matter which elephant we’re riding, we need our riders in a conversation about how to point them not just toward collective liberation, towards peace, and toward a shared sense of humility under our the loving watch of our creator, who led us out of Egypt to be our God… not the character of God, but y-h-v-h, the ineffable, unifying lifeforce breathing us all into life, in whose image we’re made, who cries every time that image is extinguished. It was only once the Israelites could embrace not only their smallness but their greatness, not only their fear but their faith, not only their limited perspective but the possibility of other perspectives and ways to see the world, that they could move with confidence and compassion toward their future. Alternative is holding onto our specific and singular way of seeing things, feeling so righteous and correct, never making it to the promised land. Believe we can learn from this generation‘s mistakes and do better — we must.

May we learn that same lesson.