Body of Spies: Just what exactly is happening with these Shlach-ian special agents?
Nothing going on in the country today, is there. We’ll get straight to it.
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Intelligence officers disagreeing over the best response to a threat is as much a staple of modern movies as popcorn and that guy behind you who won't keep quiet. In particular that's true of movies from these last two post-9/11 decades, with their muddled truths, their sources who blur the line between the credible and the compromised.
In "Zero Dark Thirty," Kathryn Bigelow's cracker of a bin Laden-hunt movie from 2012, Jessica Chastain's CIA officer can't keep from getting into it with her Islamabad bureau chief (Kyle Chandler) over whether bin Laden is a target worth focusing on.
The juicy disagreement in Ridley Scott's "Body of Lies" a few years earlier over a possibly valuable/possibly deceitful asset named Nizar — with Leo DiCaprio's CIA field officer asserting his importance and Russell Crowe's office suit believing he isn’t worth the risk — fits the bill too.
And let’s not even get started on the competing Weltanschauung of Austin Powers and Dr. Evil. (Yes, from before 9/11. Such is its prescience.)
When it comes to spycraft, the news tells us what the movies already know — there are as many approaches to processing intelligence data as there are Bond sequels.
All of which is a Hollywood-y way to wind up the question of what exactly the spies — the meraglim, as the Talmud calls them — in our portion of Shlach did wrong. As you likely recall, these 12 tribal representatives were sent by God via Moses to scope out the land of Canaan. “V’et ha’am ha’yoshev ale’ha, he’chazak hu harafeh, ha’m’at hu im rav” – “and the nation that sits on it, are they strong or weak, many or few” — as the military part of their assignment in Numbers 13:18 has it.
And the answer that comes from them about ten verses later after they’ve completed their mission is as run-of-the-mill le Carre as it gets. After saying how bountiful the land is, the group notes "ephes ki az a'ham hayoshev ba'aretz — "But the nation that dwells there is strong."
Caleb, clearly interpreting the data differently, jumps in circa verse 30 with an “alo na’aleh v’yarashnu otah, ki achol nuchal lah.” — “we will go up and inherit it, because we can manage the task.”
And the majority counters in the next verse with their own field report. "Lo nuchal la’alot el ha’am ki chazak hu mimenu — “we won’t be able to overcome the nation because it’s stronger than us.”
They even use some of the same language from their assignment, like "am" and "chazak" — as though to highlight how they’re simply doing their job, fulfilling their mission, serving as Ethan Hunt to Moses' Kittridge.
This is basic intelligence mission stuff. Two officers go out in the field. One side assesses a threat as manageable; the other is less convinced. Crowe-Leo. Chastain-Chandler.
And yet somehow this is a cardinal error, with the majority group of the spies dying in a plague shortly after.
Though they never (presumably) had the pleasure of shaking-not-stirring a martini, the classic commentators are a little perplexed too. What made the spies’ report so egregious as to lead to their instant death and an entire nation wandering for 40 years?
Nachmanides finds sin in the word "ephes," the "but" — a kind of pessimistic editorializing he sees as going beyond the scope of the mission. Rashi steps out even further and finds in it a problem of devotion. The "chazak hu m’imenu,” he says, citing the Talmud, is not a stronger than * us * but stronger than * God,* which renders the pessimism not just unfortunate but faithless.
Still, something nags. Sure, there are linguistic nuances at play. But in the end isn’t this just a pretty standard way an intelligence officer delivers their findings — is tasked with delivering their findings? Especially in the face of someone who disagrees. Shouldn’t Moses have said good job, given these 007s an M-like nod, thrown in a sardonic quip and sent them on their Aston Martin way?
The spies are accused in the next chapter of being "motzeeai debat ha’aretz ra’ah,” of taking out a negative report. But intelligence agents — informed by wisdom, dappled by experience — might indeed not see everything rosily. Check out Chandler in the above clip for some…strongly negative language. The movie is clearly setting him up as wrong, sure. But no one, even Chastain, thinks he should die because of it.
To solve this thorny problem without, alas, Jason Bourne to help, I think it could help to focus on an element that tends to get underplayed in interpretations of this saga: the idea of nationhood.
Um, nationwha? As it turns out the theme creeps up a lot in this story. We're told that when the spies came back with their findings they appeared before "kol adat b'nei yisrael" — the whole corpus of the Israelites. After their report is given Caleb is said to "va'yahas et ha'am" — to quiet the nation. And then of course "vayivku ha'am" — the nation cried — the night after the report was given.
That sure is a lot of mention of "am" for a mission twelve men were presumably conducting clandestinely. In fact the text even uses the odd singular word choice of the "am" for the peoples in Canaan the spies were scouting — even as the text makes clear there were obviously many nations.
It all seems designed to cue us in to something: that the meraglim's sin had something to do with the broad public, national nature of their act. That is, less with the substance of their findings than who they decided to share them with.
Put another way: It wasn't about the quality of the reporting. It was about the nature of the reportees.
And wouldn't that make sense? The public indeed reacted with a kind of mass panic, wailing through the night and lamenting to Moses that they were ever taken out of Egypt (and prompting God to punish their malcontentitude with 40 years of wandering). As leaders of twelve tribes, the meraglim should have foreseen this reaction, the texts suggests — they should have anticipated a possible hysteria from this very nation that had already begun doing that, complaining about water and meat and everything else under the Sinai sun. And when the meraglim realized that, they should have couched the message, as Caleb did. But they didn't, and he did, and that is why they paid the price.
Sure, the meraglim were simply doing their jobs in giving a pessimistic report about military odds — can't fault them there. But they had a choice in who to convey this pessimism too. Being a spy, the text is subtly indicating, isn't just about assessing threats — it's what you do after you make the assessment. It's foreseeing the consequence of that information, and releasing or withholding it as necessary. Because after all, if you want to lead a people, you need to know a people. If you can't do that, you've failed miserably, even fatally, in your job.
(The Israeli-American Bible scholar Menachem Leibtag also sees leadership as the central issue in this episode. He takes it in a different direction. But he, too, makes a clear distinction between what the meraglim said and who they said it to.)
As I thought about this audience-knowledge issue as the real problem, I realized that the framework of the spy movie through which I'd been thinking about this was actually incorrect (no matter all the great Bond references it affords). A spy's job is by definition to keep something secret. It would never occur to a spook to spill the tea to a wide audience — it contradicts the whole job description. Jason Bourne and Evelyn Salt and Ethan Hunt face many job hazards, but blabbing on the nightly news is not one of them.
No, the better frame is a different cinematic genre — movies in which people in leadership positions learn damaging information and need to decide how much of a lid to keep on it. The people, really, who must decide between balancing the benefits of public knowledge with the dangers of public panic.
As it turns out there's a whole swath of movies like this too. See, for instance, how the military commander played by Dustin Hoffman decided to leak a truth-telling photo about a burgeoning virus in 1995's "Outbreak" over the suppressive efforts of his bosses. At the other end of the spectrum were dramatic steps taken by Richard Widmark’s public-health officer Clinton Reed to prevent word of a medical disaster from getting out in in Elia Kazan's 1950 noir "Panic in the Streets" so he could prevent, well, that.
But the model that works best for me —- and I think is argued for by our portion with that valorizing Caleb's approach — is a different, more recent film. It's the 2015 Oscar Best Picture winner "Spotlight," Tom McCarthy's fact-based story of the Boston Globe's investigation into the Catholic Church abuse scandals.
At one key point in the film reporter Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) learns about some pretty damning responsibility at some of the highest levels of the diocese. Naturally, he wants to run the story right away. But editor Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), who runs the eponymous investigative team, takes a different tack. He thinks telling people too early will have an adverse effect — it will make the case to the public less convincing and even tip off those who might still be able to cover other crimes up. Better to wait patiently until everything is ready before breaking it to the world, he argues.
It is, in a nutshell, a Caleb approach — of carefully considering the impact on the audience and making a decision with that foremost in mind. Things will work out better that way, Robinson says. And indeed they do.
Curiously, the meraglim in our portion were not punished until much later, deep in chapter 14, after the panicked reaction. Why not right when they made the pronouncement? Why would the nation's reaction matter? Well with this analysis it makes a lot of sense — because the scouts' comments were bad not so much on their own but in the context of how they landed with the nation.
As the meraglim’s punishment is finally described, the text lays out exactly what they did wrong. In 14:36 — "Va’yashuvu va’yalinu alav et kol ha'edah"— they returned and laid out their pessimism to the group. To the group, again.
And then we're told they're struck down, these "motzeeai debat ha’aretz ra’ah.” We all like to focus on the dibat ra'ah, the bad report. But I’d suggest that it is the first part that merits the emphasis — the motzeeai. Because they released the bad report. Had they simply kept that report from a raw and fragile nation for the time being, everything might've worked out a lot better.
The meraglim, in other words, were perfectly good James Bonds. They just could've used a little more Walter Robinson.
Thank you for reading.