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Life on the Fringe: Shelach


The Inverse Meraglim Story Today

There is a somewhat surprising pattern in Jewish history. When external forces try to diminish us, something in us grows. The "October 8th Jews" — diaspora Jews who woke up the morning after and discovered a Jewish pride they had never felt. Noam Bettan on the Eurovision stage in Vienna, singing louder than the boos and finishing with Am Yisrael Chai. The hostages who returned emaciated and broken from the tunnels and said, almost in unison, now I know why I am a Jew. I call this the inverse meraglim. The ten spies looked at giants and saw themselves as grasshoppers. Here, the gaze that wants to reduce us to grasshoppers makes us grow into giants. What is the secret of this inversion?

The parsha is bookended by two narratives. At the beginning, twelve men are sent to tour the land. At the end, a command to put tzitzit on the corners of our garments. What connects them is the verb latur — to tour, to scout — which appears twelve times in the spies' story and once more in the tzitzit passage: v'lo taturu acharei levavchem ve'acharei eineichem — "do not tour after your hearts and your eyes." Rashi makes the link explicit. The heart and eyes, he says, are the spies of the body.

The parsha invites us to ruminate on a deeply human question. What does it mean to see? And how is the way we see connected to life on the fringe?

The book of Vayikra asks where holiness lives and answers that it inhabits the space between boundaries. The tzitzit are the literal edge: threads commanded al kanfei bigdeihem, on the corners of the garment, where the inner self meets the cloth — the self presented to the world. Not, as we might expect, a sign of identity on the chest. On the fringe. The place that brushes against everything outside you.

The Renaissance of Tzitzit

Something fascinating is happening here in Israel right now. A whole generation of young people, many not religious in any formal sense, have started wearing tzitzit. White threads everywhere: in the army, at the beach, at the checkpoint. I do not think this is, on the whole, a renaissance of mitzvah consciousness. Sometimes I think it is closer to the opposite — a folk amulet, a thread of protection against a world that has become very frightening, closer to superstition than to covenant. The Torah commands tzitzit precisely so that we will not follow our eyes and hearts into magical thinking. And yet the phenomenon is telling. Something in the soil of this country, in this moment, is reaching for the edge of the garment. Reaching for a reminder. They are responding to the intuition the parsha names: at the fringe, we need something to remind us of the why.

It is this why that explains the failure of the spies.

Look at how they describe themselves: "We were in our own eyes as grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes." Rabbi Sacks reads tzitzit, tefillin and mezuzah as a single psychological technology. Their purpose, he writes, is "to assemble reminders, on our clothes, our homes, our arms and head, that certain things are wrong, and that even if no other human being sees us, God sees us and will call us to account. As a result of recent research, we now have the empirical evidence that reminders make a significant difference to the way we act." The command of tzitzit is a direct antidote to the spies calling themselves grasshoppers. We are children of God and can rise above our impulses, our fears.

But the grasshopper line is the symptom of a deeper theological failure, one that echoes in the opening word of the parsha. Shelach lecha. Send for yourself. The phrase is impossible not to hear against lech lecha — go for yourself — God's first words to Abraham. Lech lecha was a call to become. Abraham smashed the idols of his father's house as a protest against a certain theological outlook. An idol is a god who is. Fixed. Finished. The God Abraham was called to apprehend introduces Himself differently: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I will be what I will be. A God of becoming. Shelach lecha echoes that call — travel into yourselves, become. And the spies refused. They came back with an inventory of fixed quantities: the people are giants, the walls are tall, Amalek resides in the land, we are small. A finality in their language. A self-perception that made no space for growth.

Rabbi Sacks, citing Abraham Maslow, calls this the Jonah complex — the fear of one's own greatness, the refusal to become what one is called to be, named after the prophet who fled his mission. The spies are the collective Jonah of the Torah. Sent to a land, they ran from a self.

This is what low self-esteem actually is, psychologically. Not humility. Humility is the posture of someone who knows they are becoming. It is a fixed mindset whose conviction is that you are a finished object, and the object is inadequate. It is idolatry turned inward. A small graven image of the self.

Two of the twelve did not make this mistake. And the difference is visible in a single grammatical move. The ten said: chazak hu mimenu — "they are stronger than us." The Talmud reads the phrase as a double meaning: stronger than us, but also stronger than Him. They were measuring God against the giants and finding God smaller. Both the self and God reduced to quantities. Both, in the end, too small. Calev answered with a different grammar. Aloh na'aleh ve'yarashnu otah, ki yachol nuchal lah — "We will surely go up and possess it, for we are surely able." The doubled verbs are not claims about fixed strength. They are predicated on a growth mindset. They are verbs in motion. Going-going. Able-able. He is not saying we are strong enough right now. He is saying we will become whatever this requires.

And here is the deepest thing in the parsha. When Yehoshua and Calev see themselves that way, the land changes shape. "The land is very, very good," they say afterwards — tova ha'aretz me'od me'od. The same land. The same fruit. The same giants. What has shifted is the grammar of seeing. Ure'item oto uzechartem — you will see, and you will remember — and what you remember will change what you see.

Life on the Fringe

This is why the calling lives on the fringe. Transformation does not happen at the centre, where everything is stable and fixed. It happens at the edge, where disequilibrium can either destroy or build. The edge is where certainty ends and faith begins. It is the place where we discover, at the same moment, that not everything depends on us and that God is calling us to greatness. We stand there between confidence and humility — and we need both. Confidence that we can. Humility that we cannot do it alone.

This is what Rabbi Sacks meant when he distinguished optimism from hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope — tikva — is the belief that together we can make them better, because we can change, and because we can change the world. Optimism is passive. Hope is the posture of someone standing at the edge with their hands open. The spies had neither. Yehoshua and Calev had hope, and that is why they saw a different land.

So perhaps the boys at the beach and the soldiers at the checkpoint are reaching for something true, even if they cannot say what. The same instinct that made October 8th Jews of so many of us. The same instinct that kept Bettan singing. Look down. Notice the edge. The thread is blue because the sky is blue and the sea is blue and you are not a grasshopper. You are a child of a God who calls Himself I will be and creates us in His image. The mission was never to tour the land. The mission was to tour the self. The spies forgot. The tzitzit are there so that we will not.

 


 
 
 

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