Sidrah
Parashah of the week: Shelach Lecha
“We saw the Nephilim there – the Anakites are part of the Nephilim – and we looked like mere grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” Numbers 13:33
June 19, 2025 10:00
“We saw the Nephilim there – the Anakites are part of the Nephilim – and we looked like mere grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” Numbers 13:33
June 19, 2025 10:00Twelve scouts, one from each tribe, return from their 40-day whistle-stop tour to check out the Promised Land and appear before Moses, Aaron and the rest of the community with their report.
Joshua bin Nun and Caleb ben Jephunneh are fairly upbeat, but the other ten are more pessimistic: a “moaning minyan”. “All the people we saw were enormous,” they say, “and we looked like mere grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
It all hinges on just those last few words. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, or the Kotzker Rebbe as he was known, was a famous Chasidic Polish rabbi in the first half of the 19th century. He said that it’s alright to say you feel like a grasshopper in your own eyes – a bit of self-awareness or humility perhaps – but when you start guessing what you look like to someone else, you’ve given them permission to define you.
The Torah text does tell us that the inhabitants of Canaan were giants or Nephilim, so these Israelite scouts may well have felt themselves to be like grasshoppers, and Menachem Mendel of Kotzk has no problem with that; but it’s those last few words, “and so too we looked to them” that change everything.
In the Torah, that moment – a moment of lack of faith in God or themselves – is pivotal for a whole generation. For not believing that they would be able to enter the Promised Land, their punishment is exactly that: none of the adults, bar Joshua bin Nun and Caleb ben Jephuneh, will live to enter the Promised Land. Not so much a self-fulfilling prophecy as a self-fulfilling lack of self-belief.
It’s more than seventy years since Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, one of the original 20th-century self-help book classics. It is said that, having received nothing but a stack of rejection slips, he threw the manuscript into the wastebasket (not a great example of positive thinking) and forbade his wife to remove it. She took him at his word and next day presented the manuscript, still inside the wastebasket, to the eventual publisher.
It sold 20 million copies in 42 different languages, but you and I know that Joshua bin Nun and Caleb ben Jephunneh, by refusing to be caught up in what they thought the Nephilim might be thinking of them, just these two positive-thinking biblical scouts, really got there first.
Image: Monkey grasshoppers (Sharp Photography/Wikimedia Commons)