by Scott Reiter
As we read, Moshe sends a man from each tribe to cross into C’naan to tour the land and report back. He asks them to answer several either/or questions, including: Are the people strong or weak? Are they many or few? Is the soil rich or poor? Are the towns open or fortified?
The initial report of the scouts is purely factual and appears to be the consensus of all twelve. The land is flowing with milk and honey and is fruitful. They showed Moshe and Aharon and all the people the giant cluster of grapes that they brought back. And, they noted, in response to Moshe’s specific questions, that the people who live there are powerful and that their cities are large and well fortified.
Then comes a difference of opinion. Calev, and Yehoshua, say, let’s go. We can take possession of the land. We can do it.
The other ten said no, we can’t. There are people in the land who are giants.
By the way, their report may actually have been factual. There is a reference in an ancient Egyptian text to very tall people in C’naan in this period (six and a half to eight feet tall, at a time when the average Egyptian male was five feet to five and half feet tall). And, even centuries later, of course, there is Goliath.
But back to our story: The ten finish their negative report. Then comes the kicker, pun intended:
וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם׃
“We became grasshoppers in our eyes, and so we were in their eyes.” (Numbers 13:33)
And so we were in their eyes?! Did they know what people of the land thought of them? Or even that they paid much attention to them? Just another bunch of tourists! That’s essentially what the text says, by the way. The word “spies” is not used here at all.
In A Women’s Torah Commentary, Cantor Josee Wolff suggests that Moses is not without blame in this story. She writes: “Moses’ instructions divide the world into either/or categories that ignore the nuances within a complex reality.... What if he had said to them, “When you return, tell us what you see. How did you experience this new place? What was the land like? How were the people?” Perhaps these kinds of open ended questions would have led the scouts to bring back a different ... description of what they saw.”
If others are many and strong, then you feel small and powerless. And then other people might see you as small and powerless. When people treat you as small and powerless, then you feel small and powerless. A vicious circle.
The ten scouts and the people who adopt their pessimism are punished for their lack of
faith in God. But how can you have faith in God if you don’t have faith in yourself?
How do we break out of these vicious circles?
We know there is a spark of divinity in each of us. When that spark is oppressed by outside forces and is compressed within us, eventually it bursts forth. Think about the Kabbalistic view of Creation, when God’s contraction – tzimtzum – to make room in the universe for the material world led to a big bang of light.
The reason we are celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month now is because a bursting forth happened 51 years ago at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City. LGBTQ people at that time faced an anti-gay legal system and widespread societal disapproval. The Stonewall Inn was owned by the Genovese crime family. The customers were poorly treated and were served watered-down, overpriced drinks. They were mostly from the most marginalized subgroups: butch lesbians, effeminate young men, drag queens, male prostitutes, transgender people, and homeless youth. As for the wealthier customers who had jobs in the financial district, the bar owners would blackmail them. The owners were making more money from this extortion than from liquor sales. The bar had no liquor license, so the owners paid off the police, who staged raids from time to time just to harass the customers. Why did people go to such a place, you might wonder. There was simply nowhere else to meet others like you, to just relax and be yourself for a little while.
On the night of June 28, 1969, the police decided to close the place down for good because they were not getting kickbacks from the extortion money. The raid did not go as usual. Customers didn’t scatter but stayed outside and a large crowd gathered from the neighborhood. When the police got violent, the people fought back. The rebellion went on for several more days.
There was no organization, no plan. David Carter, in his 2004 book Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, quotes Michael Fader, who was there:
“We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place ... Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us.... All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. ... We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around ... that's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue ... The bottom line was, we weren't going to go away. And we didn't.”
Maybe the scouts felt like grasshoppers because they had been treated like grasshoppers. As slaves in Egypt. Maybe even by the people of the land. Maybe the giants looked down from their city walls and mocked them. Made fun of their size, the way the walked, their clothes. Called them “Dirty shepherds!”, like the Egyptians had. Or maybe there were just afraid that they would.
That grasshopper feeling. Internalized oppression. Dr. Lynne Westfield, a professor at Drew University, explains:
“When one group of persons is the object or target of systemic oppression over long periods of time, the mis-education, mis-information, subjugation, and lies begin to be normal, routine, customary, and acceptable to members of the group who are discriminated against. ...
“The persons who are the target of the hatred often believe the lie that they are inferior, that they are the problem, that they are less worthy. ... When oppressed persons believe the lies that the oppressors tell them about their status as inferior – they have internalized the oppression.”
Laverne Cox, the trans actress and activist who starred in the groundbreaking series Orange Is the New Black, put it this way in an interview this week:
“I have to do work every single day as a black person, as a trans woman, to unlearn, to decolonize my mind.”
What a phrase! “To decolonize my mind.”
Talking about the country at large at the moment of history we are in, Ms. Cox said:
“And this is the work that everyone must do ... to be interrogating your implicit biases ... so that we can come together in the struggle for justice for everyone.”
The arc bends slowly. In Exodus it says that God purposely lead the people on a circuitous route, not directly to the promised land. This is beautifully recounted in a reading by Dan Bellm – Geulah.
We are living again in a time of bursting forth. God willing, it will be a time of increasing light. A time for cheshbon ha-nefesh. A time to decolonize our minds. Interrogate our internal biases. And a time to see grasshoppers just as really cool-looking insects on the lawn.
Shabbat shalom.
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