How Greta Gerwig explains this week's parshah

Of Male Spies and Lady Birds

Hi and welcome back to another fine episode of Torah Goes Hollywood. I hope you've made it through the week unscathed as we all continue to pray for safety and peace in Israel and beyond.

Given world events we won't bore you with preamble, just get to the main event of Sh'lach and its spies. And tell you that for a previous year's look at how the spies mishandled their mission via an Elia Kazan classic, go here, and for how "Homeland" and the Oscar-winning "Spotlight" make sense of the people's punishment, on this way. Archive down this hall.

Let's get to the Sh'lachin'.

--

Not since Austin Powers spilled his secrets to Felicity Shagwell has a spy mission gone so poorly.

Twelve chieftains head into the Holy Land to scope out the place at the start of this week parshah of Sh’lach. They return, tell the people and Moses what they saw and (two of them excepted) how difficult it is, the nation panics, and suddenly God decrees that no one but the two exceptions will enter the land. The rest will wander for 40 years and die out over that time.

Commentators since the dawn of cave-drawings have been trying to figure out what either party did wrong. The spies were just following directions: "See the land, what it is, and if the people dwelling on it are strong or weak, few or many...and if the cities they sit in are campsites or fortified." (13:18-19). And they come back and tell of giants and Amalekites and powerful nations, how their own ranks must have seemed like grasshoppers in the nation's eyes. Caleb, one of the two exceptions, dissents, and the other spies push back.

Seems pretty clear the spies were just carrying out their mission. Sure, they had an intel disagreement. But no one seems to be acting in bad faith here.

As for the people, they cried and worried how they'd get in given all these behemoths. Isn't that a natural reaction? They were told they faced a potentially deadly threat ahead of them so they worried. As you would. As anyone would.

So why all the punishing?

The most common understandings from Mrs. Katz's seventh-grade class center on two explanations:

1. The slandering of the land (that was the spies' sin)

2. The lack of faith that God could deliver (that was the people's sin but also the spies' sin).

Both of which seem kind of weak in light of the above pretty basic textual reading. The spies were actually asked to assess the land and the difficulty of its conquest. And the people, well, they were just human, hearing their leaders (who presumably were God-fearing themselves) say this would be pretty tough.

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Katz is wrong. Or at least, the situation is a lot more complicated than she had it. To get at the mistakes I want to use as a jumping-off point the interpretation of the Israeli-American Bible scholar Menachem Leibtag, who drills into the topic at length in a well-known essay from the 1990's. But I also want to deviate from it in meaningful ways.

Let's start with the spies. As it turns out, they said nothing about God in noting the difficulty of the mission. A sign of a lack of faith, you say? Well, look closely at the text: Caleb didn't say anything about God either! In fact, the entire interchange between them over whether they can conquer the land involves not a single mention of God, which you'd think, if that was the sin, would be sort of the main issue Caleb would parry back with. But check out their exchange.

After Verse 28's famous "Ephes ki az ha'am ha'yoshev ba'aretz," "But the nation that dwells in the land is powerful," and its delineations, we have:

"Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said ' Let's go up and claim it because surely we can manage it'" (he actually uses two of the verbs twice, to show just how certain he is).

Then: "And the [spies] who were with him said we can't go up to this nation because it's stronger than us. And they spread bad word of the land they toured to the Israelites saying 'the land we passed through to tour is a land that eats its inhabitants." (30-32)

What's striking when you read the exchange as a plain-English debate is how it's not really an assessment of the land or even of faith — it's an assessment of the people's abilities. "Yachol nuchal la," Caleb says, "We certainly can manage it." To which the other spies, clearly mirroring his language, say "Lo nuchal la'alot," "We cannot manage it and go up."

This seems to me the crux of the issue. As while the spies’ instructions were very clearly to assess the land, it was not to evaluate the PEOPLE and their ability to conquer said land. Had the spies simply stopped at how giant and daunting the occupants were, all would have been fine and dandy — they were supposed to evaluate that. But they then made an assessment of the people's ability to match those giants, and it was negative. While Caleb's was positive.

This is the real sin. Or really, failure. As these are leaders (remember, they're chieftains). And they flunked the main test of leadership, which is to believe and give confidence to the people you're leading.

To drive this home — to offer a model for how a leader or mentor should be inspiring a fledgling entity and not doing the opposite — I wanted to turn to the acclaimed coming-of-age dramedy "Lady Bird."

The 2017 Greta Gerwig gem centers on Saoirse Ronan as Christine/Lady Bird, a Sacramento high-school senior with all kinds of dreams and ambitions that her mother, played by Laurie Metcalfe, does not want to nurture.

In one of the movie's many landmark scenes, Lady Bird is telling her mother about her post high-school plans, and her mom is reacting with, well, something less than inspiration.

LB: "I want to go where culture is, like New York."

Mom: "The way that you work or the way that you don't work you're not even worth state tuition Christine...you should just go to City College with your work ethic. And then to jail and then back to City College."

And then Lady Bird opens the door and rolls out of the car.

The scene is brilliant on many levels, subtly exaggerating a headstrong daughter and hard-driving mother in a way that seems just caricatured enough that we smile without realizing it's us. Also a car-roll during a family fight is a pretty boss move.

What the scene also does, so beautifully and relevantly, is highlight the spies' sin. The people want to go to their own New York-college promised-land. And sure, they might have some deficiencies that need to be overcome. But instead of encouraging them to do that overcoming, as all good leaders and mentors do, the spies say, nope, you're right, you won't make it. The way that you don't work you're not even worth state tuition. Lo yuchal la'alot.

Watching the movie it's shiningly clear what Metcalfe is doing wrong. And through that lens its shiningly clear how the spies are screwing up too. These chieftains, these tribal mothers, are taking their charges and instead of building them up are tearing them down.

(Leibtag here agrees that the spies didn't believe in the people but says specifically they didn't believe the people could fulfill the word of God, given their shortfalls in that regard with the Golden Calf et al. A nice reading, but then he still has to explain why, if that was the issue, Caleb doesn't rebut their claim by saying they can fulfill the word of God. It seems a more general lack of confidence/inspiration.)

From the beginning of Exodus this idea of building up has been a leadership motif — God giving confidence to Moses that he was up to the task, Moses giving confidence to the people they could find their way out of Egypt and across the sea, Miriam then showing the people they had in them the ability to sing. Every example of leadership to this point has been about building up — about uplift. And here the spies are doing the opposite. They're pulling a Metcalfe. She's not a great mother and these are not good leaders. And these not good leaders should not be taking the people into the Promised Land, God says.

That brings us to the people. They do their own version of the car-roll — they just can't take what the spies are telling them, they're overwhelmed, they panic, and they jump. They cry through the night and wonder how they can overcome what their mentor is telling them.

But here's where they're not like Lady Bird. Yes, she rolls out of the car in a panic. But she goes on throughout the film to take initiative, to try to suppress those self-doubts and push forward, to try to get out of Sacramento. And when she has what her mother says are selfish moments, as when she gets kicked out of a school assembly, Lady Bird digs deep and realizes that while it wasn't the most mature reaction, the ejection was for a good reason: she was expressing her political beliefs.

Lady Bird, for all her self-doubt, still summons the confidence needed to succeed as one comes into their own. As this excellent (college-minded) review of the film notes, "Lady Bird consistently asserts her independence and individuality despite the fact that she is frequently unsure about what she is doing or what she truly wants."

That can seem like its own form of immaturity. But I think what our portion is telling us is that this is exactly what's required in the face of a monster challenge. And it's exactly what the people weren't summoning when confronted with the admittedly daunting task of facing the giants in the Land of Israel: a Lady Bird-like confidence. The Israelites are not believing in themselves — "We will die in battle and our wives and children will be taken hostage," they say, unconfidently, upon hearing the spies' report (14:3). "We should die in the desert," they wail (14:2). "We should simply stay here in Sacramento instead of struggling to get to New York."

And they are not believing in themselves, God says, even when I have given them all the tools to do so — even when I have given them every opportunity to see how they can succeed through impossible odds. "All the people saw My Glory and my Signs...and they didn't internalize it," God says in response to their reaction (14:22).

The failing of the people in our portion is a lack of faith in God but it's equally a lack of faith in themselves — an un Lady Bird-like response to an obstacle that seems tbh hard to fathom after all the challenges they, with the help of God, have overcome to this point.

(Leibtag takes it in a slightly different direction, saying that it wa thes Israelites not wanting to do the work that was the issue more than not believing they could succeed — a sin of laziness, not self-confidence. "Had the Land of Israel been offered to them on a silver platter, Bnei Yisrael most likely would have been delighted to accept it," he says. I think that's plausible. But the emphasis in the verses is really on ability and belief — an unwillingness to think their work would bear fruit, not a reluctance to put in effort.)

Our movie heroine had succeeded (she in the end makes it to her NYC Promised Land) despite a mother who didn't believe in her or help her. While the Israelites are giving up despite a Father who does believe in them and help them.

Such a people — who have no confidence in their abilities — are not worthy of entering Israel. More than not worthy of entering, God says — not capable of entering. Because you won't be able to overcome a difficult challenge like thriving in the Land of Israel if you lack the confidence that you can do it. "If you'd come into the land that I helped you reach, only Caleb and Joshua will," God says in a cryptic verse 30. I think it can be read with an implied brackets between the clauses "If you'd come into the land that I helped you reach [you will not succeed], only Caleb and Joshua will.” The desert generation wailing and then being told they won’t enter the land is a sin and a punishment, the Torah makes that clear. But it's also a failing and a consequence. Because if you don't believe you're capable of surviving in a Promised Land, you almost certainly won't.

The past week has been filled with moments of similar larger-than-life intimidations for the leaders and people of Israel — for the modern Israelites. Giants across a desert also now threaten with towering strength and impossible weapons, confronting the Israelites with a major challenge to dwelling in their homeland.

In such an instance, we might expect the sins of the Sh’lachian generation to be repeated — we might expect the Torah to be a foreshadower and the actions of the fathers a symbol to the children, as the aphorism has it. And yet what do we have in our present moment? The exact opposite. A lesson learned from the Sh'lachian narrative. Lady Bird.

We have leaders, first off, who despite all their many and important differences, are coming together to say they believe in the mission, they believe in the people's ability to carry out that mission. Who are not doing what the Ten Spies did. Who are acting like Caleb. Yachol Nuchal La.

And then perhaps even more important, we have people who believe they can do it. Who, despite the incredible complexity of the challenge and trauma of the situation, remain almost eye-poppingly undaunted. Throughout the week I, like many of you, have been greeted with countless Israel-based stories of bravery, of stoicism, of belief, from the women giving birth in Sha'are Tzedek as the missiles fly overhead to the community leaders getting people without shelters into schools, storage units and other makeshift space spaces to of course all the stories of military heroism to even Israelites on this side of the pond stepping up to help the damaged Soroka Medical Center, as at least one major New York hospital is doing.

Faced with air-raid sirens and bunker stays, with images of destruction and thoughts of cataclysm, it would be so easy to do what the Israelites in Sh'lach did, to wail and say we cannot rise up. It would be so easy to do the things they did and be unworthy of dwelling in the land. Ah, but this generation is worthy of dwelling in the land — that's why they're here and that's why they will continue to be here.

Thriving in Israel has never been easy — if it is, would it be so worthwhile? Impossible Takes Longer, as the award-winning Daniel Gordis book has it. Our portion showcases the first national realization of this fact and the incorrect response to it. Many generations since have learned from their mistake, have learned to Lady Bird when the inner Jackie Metcalfe says "stay in the wilderness." And today's generation seems to have internalized and actualized the message better than anyone. Across shuls in Israel this weekend, congregation members will read the story of the generation that didn't believe it could survive in Israel. And then they'll turn to each other and silently know that they can.

Thank you, as ever, for reading, and have a good, peaceful and confident weekend.