Grasshopper Men (Parashat Sh’lach) |
Our ancestors are standing at the edge of possibility. They have been freed from Egypt. They have received Torah at Sinai. They have been shaped, however imperfectly, into a people. Now, in parashat Sh’lach, they are close enough to the Promised Land to imagine actually entering it. Moses sends twelve scouts, one from each tribe, to see the land, its people, its cities, and its fruit. All of this makes perfect sense. Before this group of people enters a new future, they need to know what they are walking into.
The scouts eventually return with evidence. The land does flow with milk and honey. Its fruit is enormous with grapes the size of a human head! Its cities are fortified. Its inhabitants are strong. None of that is false. The problem is not that they see danger, and danger becomes the only thing they can see.
While reporting what they saw the scouts offer a revealing observation: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (Numbers 13:33).
That line is a disaster of self-image. The first half is honest: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves.” That is how fear feels: small, vulnerable and outmatched. Every man knows some version of this. We size each other up constantly, sometimes openly and sometimes in ways so subtle we barely........